Category Archives: Promotions

Promoting technology – what works and what does not

Event Vitality

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Tradeshows are too stubborn to die. I pondered this situation while helping a client with some tradeshow communications.  Granted, this client is in the ever changing and event heavy mobile application market space, and received a major boost due to iPads and other digital slabs (if Moses had owned an iPad, the other five commandments might have not been lost, though he would have to tithe 30% of synagogue receipts to Steve Jobs). Yet the fact that tradeshows persist and that marketing budgets for them are not rapidly declining seemed odd in this modern Internet age … at first. Without question, the core of marketing has shifted toward online, with search optimization, banners and buzz lighting paths back to your web properties.  When well executed, the entire promotion and sales cycle can be completed without any two humans ever exchanging as much as a “good morning.”  What can be done … Continue reading →

Free Thinking

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One of my favorite stolen lines is that customers should never be allowed to engage in unsupervised thinking. Unsupervised thinking is dangerous as any deposed despot will attest. Outbound marketing is entirely about communications.  It involves guiding the thinking of different people (buyer genotypes) at different times (sales cycle, product/market lifecycle) and for different reasons (aid discovery, educate, motivate, close).  Enterprise buyers engage in thinking throughout a sales process, unlike consumers who can often be sold through pure emotions. This came to light recently while coaching a client on a thought leadership paper, and one member of their team viewed the developing collateral as a sales piece, bemoaning the lack of mention about their product features and benefits.  I explained that buyers were an ornery lot, prone to cynical (and typically correct) suspicions. Adding product details not only distracts the reader from cementing their knowledge, but also raises alarms about … Continue reading →

Infected Marketing

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B2B marketers could learn a lot from influenza. Actually, they would learn from Walgreens and their annual flu shots.  A few weeks back I received snail mail from Walgreens, the chain pharmacy which I haphazardly selected last year to get my annual influenza inoculation.  In the envelope was a colorful reminder about flu season and the fact I could get an injection, the location and hours of the closest store, a sheet detailing the hazards of catching the flu and the inoculation forms already filled out with the info I provided the previous year. This helps explain why Walgreens’ return on equity, investment and assets are higher than competing CVS and why their stock price is doing better as well. Promotions need to provide a sense of urgency, a solution and then ease the path to acquiring the product.  Walgreens did all that in one mailer.  Their literature reminded me … Continue reading →

Frictionless Clouds

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Sometimes technology is wholly too complex, a fact that HP has latched onto. In all product marketing, one pays attention to the ‘whole product‘, which is the sum of all the expected outcomes from using a product (this is a combination of features, benefits, services, price points, etc.)  Whole products are different for each market, each segment and each buyer genotype. Taken as a whole, a whole technology product can be very complex, and the complexity grows as the number of targeted segments grows. Technology isn’t for wimps. Thus, there is often a trade-off between a whole product and the product suited for new users (who can be considered a subsegment).  Often part of a whole product is offered as another whole product, but to a market or segment that is less sophisticated than buyers in the larger group.  Another common trick is to grease the skids for implementing a … Continue reading →

Cool Smarts

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Who would have thought Microsoft could be cool? Not Microsoft the company, the product line or substandard tech support. No, Microsoft marketing is cool because they engineered a reverse promotion campaign that leveraged a competitor’s positioning, used it to attack their weakness and amplify a Microsoft strength all in one sweep. That’s cool. Anyone with a pulse is familiar with the great ad campaign designed by Apple, pitting a dowdy looking actor as a generic PC, and a young hipster (Justin Long in real life) as a Mac. Justin played the Mac role as low key, friendly, effective, peaceable and, in a sub dude way, cool. Justin was also the voice of Alvin in Alvin and the Chipmunks, so we have to subtract three ‘cool points’. For a company built primarily on image and vendor lock-in, Apple did a great job. Their ads were memorable and also provided a method … Continue reading →

Prompt and Persuasive Promotions

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I’m rarely impressed by other people’s promotions, but this one I have to share. When introducing your company, products or services you must rapidly communicate what it is, what makes it different, and why the prospect should be interested. The more abstract the product or service, the more difficult this becomes. When I came upon an online intro by NearSoft, I found a case study in how to do web promotions right. NearSoft is a near-by outsourcing software development house … in Mexico (not a country one normally has on a short list of offshore opportunities). Their value propositions are that (a) they are closer than India – same time zone as Phoenix – and (b) they eliminate many of the common offshore headaches (such as the cost of flying to India to manage project details). The folks at NearSoft knew they had to communicate their unique value propositions in … Continue reading →