Do you know what you are selling to the user? Is it a thing (a unit, a box, a software package) or does that thing get associated with a solution, or feeling or a belief? In this day and age of globalization, it is relatively easy to get another ‘thing’ made cheaper and do more. [...]
Tag Archives | Marketing
Marketing is the way we tell our story so it’s relevant to real people in their real lives. Telling our story is more than branding and logos but how the price, the value proposition, the routes to market and all that tie together as part of a whole.
Marketing is Reality
In a recent meeting with a client, we brainstormed on what to do about an upcoming product announcement by Microsoft. The new Microsoft product will substantially increase the competitive pressure on our client, and in typical Redmond fashion the press and analysts have been briefed about it for months. Even though the product won’t ship until this summer, our client is in effect already competing with it.
Small Business Marketing: Clarity on Customer is Key
While I work with many mid to large size software firms in my day job, my other hat is being CEO of a small company. A small company with many, many competitors. Because consulting has no standard definition, anyone can ‘hang a shingle’ and call themselves a consultant, and then there are the over-sized competitors [...]
The Customer Experience: The Design Moment of Truth
Business 2.0 ran an article this month on their ’2nd annual bottom line design awards’. The article promised to “go beyond surface beauty to single out objects that look good not just in pictures, but also on their makers’ income statements.” According to them, “design aesthetic was but one of 10 metrics we used to [...]
Sales model is critical go-to-market piece
Getting caught up on reading as I nurse a cold today. An article worth highlighting. On page B10 of this (3/28/06) Tuesday’s WSJ, there was an article on marketing strategy that made loads of sense. Two audiences might want to pay attention. First, product management folks who think it’s about building a better mousetrap and [...]
How is consulting different than therapy?
A client asked me this question during what was our consultation meeting: “How is consulting different than therapy?”. Great question, isn’t it? So while I came up with some rational response at the time that seemed to be plausible, I thought “I gotta blog on this and see what others think!” These are my initial [...]
Great Product Management starts with…
One of the more common questions I hear from product management teams is based on figuring out why company A is successful and company B is not. Perhaps it’s that company A somehow does a better job of listening to their customers, is the question. Sounds intuitive. Perhaps even a little business-schoolish to imply success [...]
Why company blogging really makes sense
In these days where execs get so far removed from consumers that the only time they see them is when they are behind the glass walls of a focus group forum, I think blogging really makes sense. With it, businesses can enable consumers to talk with real people at the company, tell their own stories, [...]
Ways benchmarking makes strategies better
I do benchmarking all the time, but I never think that the application of all that data is a 1-size-fits-all model. Benchmarking can be useful to learn what other companies do well to optimize their business model. The key is using the best insights for what my client needs. Jeffrey Pfeffer just wrote an article [...]
Sweat the small stuff, sweat it all
Last week, I attended a roundtable of CEOs. And one CEO of a well-known and privately held firm provided a showcase of his upcoming rebranding effort. Interestingly, the consumer company had done focus groups and figured out what they needed to do with the rebranding focus to appeal more broadly to consumers. While the stuff [...]