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. (more…)
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. (more…)
I recently attended another meeting of the Boston Entrepreneur’s Network. The panel this month included Jerry Bird, vice president of the Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation. MTDC is a venture capital firm set up years ago by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and focused entirely on investments in Massachusetts firms.
The program that evening dealt with business plans: How to construct them and how to present them to the investment community. The speakers were all members of the investment community. In other words, they were the people who read business plans and decide where to invest. If you were an entrepreneur looking for funding, that panel was a great source of expert advice!
One of the ways I help clients is to figure out a concise label for their product or service. This is sometimes a challenge for a first-of-its-kind offering because you can’t refer to commonly understood categories. You can’t call your product a hybrid car until the category has been established and potential customers learn what the term means.
But I have to admit that I have failed miserably in finding a concise label for what I do!
Yes, sure — what I do is marketing. But when I say ‘marketing’, people think marketing communications. That’s writing brochures and defining advertising campaigns. My important work is done long before that. You see, with a first-of-its-kind offering, the game is usually already won or lost well before it’s time to crank up marketing communications.
You can’t just jump in and start talking to prospective customers about your product. Your communication has to go through a series of stages, each stage having a carefully defined purpose. Until the prospect has digested the message at a given stage it’s pointless to try to go further.
If your product or service is the first-of-its-kind, you will have to spend extra effort in the first few message stages. Established product categories have already paved the way for “me-too” products by communicating the early message stages, but with a one-of-a-kind offering you’re on your own and have to handle all the message stages yourself. (more…)