Last week I received an email from a manufacturer of car racks. (I had purchased one of their products last year.) The email invited me to participate in a customer survey. I figured, “Hey, why not?” So I clicked on the link and started the survey. What an embarrassment! Read the rest of this entry »
I happened to hear a radio ad the other day for a local Boston area car dealership. The tag line at the end of the ad grabbed my attention (as tag lines are supposed to do):
“We don’t sell cars. We help people buy them.”
There must be a zillion businesses that use some variation of this consultative-selling message. But there’s a lot about the message to like, especially in the Internet age. Read the rest of this entry »
Chris Anderson, writing in Wired Magazine, reminds us that King Gillette achieved business success in the early 1900s by giving away razors so he could sell razor blades. He finds many more examples of the “give it away free” marketing approach in today’s electronic marketplace. Chris says:
“It’s now clear that practically everything Web technology touches starts down the path to gratis, at least as far as we consumers are concerned.”
But I don’t think that’s the lesson we should learn from Mr. Gillette. Or (for that matter) the lesson we should learn from the marketing of cell phones, ink jet printers, or iPods. Read the rest of this entry »
You’re building a marketing plan for a new product. You are familiar with the product’s capabilities and features. You have identified several key applications with attractive value propositions. You have selected the most promising industry segments and narrowed these targets to specific classes of customers within those segments. You have decided upon a channel strategy and enlisted a few initial channel partners. All you have left to do is commission some brochures, data sheets and other marcom collateral and you’re ready to go. Right?
Nope. Wrong. You forgot something crucially important. Read the rest of this entry »
Patent reform got a lot of attention in 2008. Depending on your point of view, the United States patent system is either badly flawed or just fine, thank you. Court decisions have forced inventors and their counsel to reconsider the way patent claims are drawn and even whether certain kinds of inventions - such as business methods and computer software - are patentable at all.
What does this have to do with marketing? Well, before you start to market a product or service you had better figure out your unique position in the marketplace. This may have nothing to do with technology; your unique market position may be more related to something like channel presence or pricing. But if you are marketing a first-of-its-kind product, one element of your uniqueness will likely be technical novelty. And one way to protect that unique position is through the patent system. Read the rest of this entry »