Category Archives: Promotions

Promoting technology – what works and what does not

Evil Email

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The worst thing you can do to a good bar is to make it popular. Once everyone goes there, it isn’t worth going there anymore. Email advertising and online surveys used to be good bars. When email first commercialized, it was a great and inexpensive tool for lead generation, prospect follow-up and brand reinforcement. But as emails popularity exploded, so did the number of marketers who abused the process. Today people dread reading their morning email – it has become a disappointment filled chore. Email open rates have been dropping. This has caused some marketers to get smarter and create better and more targeted emails. Lousy marketers just find bigger lists and thus annoy more people, which will continue to drive down open rates. Something related is occurring to surveys. Once online survey tools became cheap and easy to use, every man, woman and hermaphrodite with an email account started … Continue reading →

Wanting Needs

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No marketing person has ever created a “need.” It is an enduring myth that marketing creates needs, which in a moment you will see is simply impossible. Many marketers have found other careers after beating their heads against the wall that separates “need” from “want”, and marketing products in exactly the wrong way. This flat forehead syndrome exists because of myth alone, and it is time to slay it. Needs are preexisting conditions. As Maslow so painfully noted, there is a stacked list of needs. Yet Maslow was mistaken about the definition of “need” himself, for as you ascend his pyramid, his “needs” become aspirations. Maslow may have maladjusted marketers by creating a false sense of what a need is. Food, water, shelter are personal needs. Accounting and inventory are corporate needs. “Wants” are a different subject. When new products are created, they are never “needs” at first and thus … Continue reading →

Push, Pull, Prospects, Paycheck

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I once had HP, IBM, CA and a few other companies pimping my software. This was long, long ago when my hairline was not retreating faster than a Baptist in a gay bar. I worked for a tiny five million dollar outfit and was brought on to implement their first real marketing department. After studying the market for a bit, it was obvious to me that our plug-in product survived only through partner-side adoption. Hence we carefully selected our partners (who collectively had more than 66% of each target segment) and promoted through them as well as directly to buyers. We pulled prospects through direct marketing and pushed through partners. We bumped top-line revenues over 25% in the first year (well, the first nine months actually). One of the reasons this worked is believability. B2B software buyers are a cynical and skeptical lot because those are survival traits. Blindly buying … Continue reading →

Promotional Propaganda

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Perception is reality, until reality overrides perception. Marketers are branded as liars in no small part because many of them are. So pervasive is the trait that certain smart people have made good money writing on the subject. Marketers are charged with promoting products, which entails setting public perception about the product. In modern use of the word, this often devolves into propaganda instead of persuasion. Effective in the short term, setting unrealistic public perception about a product will eventually backfire. This happens to politicians all the time. Since perception is reality, at least in the short term, you need to have a clear notion of the reality you create for the market. Like the elastic in a fat fellow’s waistband, it can only be stretched so far before it fails. Since product disappointment is the essence of negative buzz, the greater the degree of potential disappointment you create, the … Continue reading →

Triple Targeted

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Say goodbye to television (I tossed all mine in the recycling bin several years ago … quite a liberating experience). Broadcast TV’s days are numbered, though when it will fade into distant technology memories is uncertain. Market forces can never be denied, and we are witnessing new and highly profitable ways of wasting people’s time (seriously, have you ever seen an episode of The View?). Broadcast TV’s demise will come both from consumer preference and the profit motives of providers and advertisers. Is there any way we can speed-up the process? Please! Broadcasting has always been a limited medium. Necessary in pre-digital and bandwidth poor eras, broadcasting was expensive and required people to be couch-bound at specific days and times lest they miss their favorite mental gruel. The high cost of entry isolated many creative people and separated viewers from buckets of new and potentially tastier gruel. Even starting a … Continue reading →

Media Mutters

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Media ain’t what it used to be … thank God. The internet has made everyone a publisher, and as such has completely rearranged from where information and power emit. Dead is the quaint era when all info rained like fetid manna from centralized sources. Today you, the marketing ground workers, have seemingly endless avenues for promoting your products, your brand and your profits. Which is why some of you have been driven to drink (though for a few it was just a short stroll). The reason self-medication is becoming popular in marketing circles has nothing to do with Mad Men or three martini lunches. It derives from needing to orchestrate outreach through all these media channels. Wherever such seeming chaos ensures, it is best to take a deep breath, a shot of something, and distill your options into a manageable set. In media, there are three basic categories through which … Continue reading →

Basic Bodhi

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“I wasn’t aware you existed.” Sounds like something my congressman would say to me. Brand awareness is the minimal quantum of connection with customers, and the foundation for every other marketing maneuver. If they don’t know you exist, then there is no hope they will adopt your product. You must achieve brand awareness before customers can even approach brand knowledge, acceptance, preference, loyalty, advocacy and religion (and if you need some religious indoctrination on all things branding, flip to chapter six of the Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual). However, “awareness” has proven to be a tenebrous term. In branding, “awareness” constitutes being aware that a product exists, what value it provides and a notion of why the customer should give a durn. For example, I’m aware that Lady Gaga exists, but even after multiple brand exposures, I still cannot identify her value or why I shouldn’t change the channel. Granted, middle aged marketing gurus are … Continue reading →