On Marketing

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.

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In an earlier post, I discussed the progressive stages of communication that are required to bring a prospect to a buying decision.

The first stage was concerned with establishing one or more fundamental premises — that is, concepts or assertions that are critical to a customer seeing value in your offering. For example, a prospect will not be interested in a hybrid car until they believe that hybrid technology can save them money while still providing convenient transportation.

Communicating a fundamental premise is not about competition. In fact, competitors will often join together in this phase of the establishment of a new segment. Experienced marketing folks understand that it is pointless to move ahead to competitive messages before the necessary fundamental premises have been accepted by the marketplace. (more…)

Question: Which is harder to market successfully: An innovative product that has no direct competition, or a me-too product that joins the ranks of many similar products?

Answer: You might think it’s the me-too product, but you would be mistaken.

One of the most important tasks of marketing is to get the prospective customer to understand the value proposition for your product. That is, you need to explain why your customer is better off with your product than without it. And the amount of marketing effort you need to invest depends on the conceptual distance between the old world your customer is familiar with and the new world they need to explore to understand and appreciate your product. (more…)

A colleague (whose identity is unfortunately lost in the fog of my memory) had a concise way of explaining what marketing was. He compared the relationship between selling and marketing to the relationship between manufacturing and engineering.

If you spent any time in engineering you probably learned through bitter experience that there is a long road between that first working prototype and nice pretty product rolling off the assembly line. One of the principal tasks along that road is engineering for manufacturability. That means designing (or more likely redesigning) the product so that it can be built. The most innovative product in the world will not be a commercial success if it cannot be manufactured via a reliable and economical procedure. (more…)

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…)