Monthly Archives: April 2012

The HP (Hard) Way

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The only organization better than HP at losing customers was Heaven’s Gate. I have fond memories of Bill and Dave’s HP, which in no way resembles the current Palo Alto pack. When I wrangled HP manufactured big iron mumble-mumble-mumble years ago, they were reasonably good about customer support though their byzantine processes for achieving such was an exotic form of auto-masochism. Even eating lunch at the HP cafeteria was a rough slog. It has gone down hill since. Let’s keep in mind that service is a product, and like all products must meet the criteria of the customer. This includes price, quality and — most important — availability. The on-site service agreement for my laptop recently expired, and I went to HP’s web site to renew it. This was my first mistake since HP’s various business divisions and poorly integrated web sites are slightly more complex than the federal tax … Continue reading →

Romancing the Market

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There is a reason that blind dates were never very popular. Marketing and dating are both incremental dances with well understood steps in forming a relationship. Amazingly many companies, and most technology companies, lack even a fundamental notion of incremental intimacy, which many also explain why many techie founders remain bachelors. Anyone who suffered the dating process understands the phases of location, attraction, value and risk assessment. Yet your average technology web site avoids all these steps. First off is findability. In dating this may involve joining activity groups or hanging out in the right bar on a Saturday night. In marketing it has always been about advertising, and in the modern extension of that, search optimization. Being found is a requirement to being desired. Failure to promote or to be locatable on the web makes the odds of obtaining prospects nil. But just today I ran across a web … Continue reading →

Break Down

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I spent last Friday coaching a well funded start-up on the fundamentals of market segmentation. Yes, in Silicon Valley you can still romance venture capitalists without a complete go-to-market strategy. Segmentation is the second most fundamental marketing strategy activity, and one that founders rarely contemplate while running headlong into a market. Granted, between technology vision and early adopter myopia, there is little reason to segment market in the earliest phases of corporate life. But go beyond the early days and quick sales to innovators and early adopters and you will see a company flounder as sales slow and individuals attempt selling to anyone. Since new products don’t fill anybody’s whole product definition, selling to everyone means selling to almost no one. Next comes an entry in the dead pool. Founders tend not to segment for several reasons, none of which are rational: Ignorance: Some founders don’t know what market segmentation … Continue reading →

Emotion Promotion

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Even heartless people have emotions. Well, perhaps not politicians, but people to who you sell products do. Even battle-hardened CTOs have emotions that can be leveraged to market your wares. Identifying and correctly touching those emotions is a tricky process and one that can backfire fatally if you choose wrong. It is the difference between smiling at the pretty girl at the end of the bar and stalking her … two different emotional responses producing either romance or incarceration. Silicon Strategies Marketing’s most popular white paper is “Selling Empathy – the power of positioning and branding.” In it we discuss how emotions work in marketing technology products to IT people, and how emotional drivers should become part of your brand. Every human brain, aside from those in drug addicts and congressmen, has left and right hemispheres that process all we know about the world around us. Emotions swirling in the … Continue reading →