A quick note to Silicon Strategies customers and fans of Marketing Memos. We have nearly completed our relocation away from San Francisco, landing squarely in San Jose – the eastern anchor of Silicon Valley. I personally look forward to seeing fellow Valley tech company execs at the various regional functions in the near future.
Continue reading →A rather Glassy lady said “I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.” She should have been in marketing. Marketers and brand managers are in the expectation business. Part of their job entails defining and setting the expectations of their customers or their market. Since expectations are the state of anticipating something, we marketing mavens create the customer’s state anticipation. When reality doesn’t match what is anticipated, odd and dangerous things occur. If you don’t understand this, just think back to your first blind date. When defining the expectations you want customers to have, you can aim too low, too high, just right or aim for something entirely different. Only the last two work and the latter is the trickiest, though often most profitable. Generally speaking, setting customer expectations a little low is a good strategy. Pleasantly surprised people become repeat customers. If their expectations are consistently exceeded, even by … Continue reading →
Businesses should not resemble circular firing squads. While presenting to the Silicon Valley Forum’s Marketing SIG last night, one audience member noted her company’s marketing, product development and sales staffs were unaligned. Well, “unaligned” might be poor wording. They appear to be as completely disjointed as drawn and quartered traitors. This is not uncommon in tech companies where the three groups have come onboard at different phases of corporate growth, believe they own the customer and move ahead despite what other teams are doing. Circular firing squads are more efficient and less violent. In early phases, techies are product managers and interface with customers directly. They believe they listen to prospects though this is often self-delusion. Techies (and particularly techie founders) only listen to customer input that agrees with the original product vision. This form of founderitus is so prevalent in Silicon Valley that my audience was not surprised when … Continue reading →
You have to admire AMD. They know when and how to be agile, mainly when decks are stacked against them. AMD recently announced they are teaming with a different chip designer – ARM, the current darling of mobile and energy efficient processors – to make ARM’s products 64-bit. Those with good memories will recall that AMD practically invented the modern 64-bit processor industry when they released their Opteron chip and caught Intel sitting on their laurels (which must have been uncomfortable). This eventually forced Intel to license AMD’s 64-bit instruction set (which must have been uncomfortable). I was leading SuSE Linux’s North American strategy at the time and saw Intel staff faces wince when SuSE and Microsoft took the stage at the Opteron release event (which was obviously uncomfortable). AMD didn’t keep their momentum and have had a number of setbacks. With desktops dwindling in numbers as consumers buy slabs … Continue reading →
I’ll be speaking at two different Silicon Valley events in November, covering some of the details in my new book the Start-up CEO’s Marketing Manual. The first event is this Saturday, November 3rd. It is an “un-conference” called Marketing Camp. The chat will be in room 8 at the civilized hour of 10AM. This show will be highly interactive and great gobs of free advice will be made available. Later in the month, November 12 to be exact, I’ll present the full-length version of my diatribe at the SV Forum marketing SIG. It has been a decade since I last spoke to the SIG, back when the organization itself was called “SD Forum” (SD stood for “software developer”, which gives you an idea of how the organization has matured and expanded over time). All Silicon Valley founders, co-founders, CEOs and victims of epic failures should roll out to both events. Well, at … Continue reading →
