I Am Your Customer!
Last week, a friend who is new to technology marketing, commenting on key trends said: “SMB [small and mid-size business] is one of the biggest trends right now.” If you’ve been around the technology business for the last few years, you’ve seen it, also. Every company who has traditionally sold to the enterprise (the largest [...]
Adoption Happens
In his blog last week, Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann responds to Cisco’s Parvesh Sethi touting the capabilities of Cisco’s IP phones:
I’ve seen quite a few IP phones on people’s desks, and I’m sure that some people are doing innovative things with them. However, I usually see them being used as, well, phones. The phones [...]
A Step in the Right Direction
On Friday, CNN reported that Saturn dealerships will now have Toyotas and Hondas (and, oddly, Chevys) on hand for customers to test-drive side-by-side with the Saturns they hope you will buy.
While not an uncommon tactic for technology companies (where nearly every vendor produces comparison charts that, while biased of course, compare their product to chosen [...]
Disrupting Because of…
Doc Searls defines what he calls the because effect
This is what you get when your new business isn’t just about inventing and controlling technologies and standards, but about taking advantage of the new opportunities opened up by fresh new technologies and standards. For example, making money because of blogging, or RSS, or desktop Linux, or [...]
A Very Very Long Run
Disruptive Marketing is not just about creating disruption and displacing established market participants. It’s also about how established participants respond to and ultimately capitalize on (and sometimes eliminate) disruptive threats.
This story from Business Week is the story of just such a company. It started with
The world’s oldest continuously operating family business ended its impressive [...]
Recursive Differentiation
In order to understand recursion, one must first understand recursion. (Author Unknown)
The topic of competitive differentiation has been coming up in quite a few conversations lately. The context is usually a discussion on how to create “sustainable competitive advantage.” A variety of different frameworks are used to describe it, from Michael Porter’s classic to [...]
Consumer-Class
I’ve spent the last two days at Software 2007, and while enjoying the show and my fellow attendees tremendously, I noticed that there was a phrase (a very common one in the software industry, in fact) that I heard over and over: “Enterprise-Class”
Typically this is a phrase used by software companies to indicate that their [...]
Being in the conversation
The phrase I hear in the marketing world almost every day is “the conversation is happening whether or not you are part of it.” This is usually followed by an admonishment to the marketing authority to become part of the conversation in some way, usually by trying to bring it to your own site/territory.
It’s good [...]
Second Stage Boosters…Ready
Let me state this as a hypothesis:
new product <> disruption
Or in words, having a new product is neither necessary nor sufficient to create market disruption.
I recently had an interesting exchange with Judi Sohn at Web Worker Daily (a new favorite of mine) about GrandCentral, which gives you a single number that can reach you anywhere [...]
