Improvement and Change

I learned something from my last few posts: The people who read this blog like to respond by e-mail. OK, maybe I’m generalizing based on just a few events (e-mails in response to posts), but I do get e-mail, and I don’t get many comments.
I didn’t intend to experiment to find out how my “market” [...]

October 10, 2008

It’s a new year, and that probably means that you’ve made a bunch of resolutions and now you’re thinking about how you’re going to make all of those resolutions happen. There’s no shortage of resolutions to be made, and I’ve made more than a few of my own (breaking a long tradition of refusing to [...]

Circle of Conversation

This image was not created to represent a market. But it does. And it shows a dimension of a market that’s often overlooked.

I found this on FaceBook, it’s an application called FriendWheel. You are at the center of the circle (this is a sample by the author of the application) with all of your friends [...]

The Visible Experience

Experience counts. I don’t mean work experience, or the kind of wisdom that gives you insight, but the experience your customer (or prospective customer) has interacting with your company. Your customer’s Experience is the heart of your brand, and the heart of your customer’s decision to stay your customer.
Last week, I had two experiences which [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Being Disruptive

This is a simple idea: if you want to be disruptive - to create the kind of disruption that will allow you to re-define your market - you have to want to be disruptive.
Do you really want to change your market?
SuccessFactors (blog) has as part of their founding principles:
Increase worldwide productivity by 50%.
They want to [...]

Blocking and Tackling

There’s just no excuse for fumbling the message.
I’m going to go slightly off-topic today with a little rant about what I think is an absolutely embarrassing ad campaign - one that makes me think the creators have simply forgotten some of the basic principles of marketing, and holds a reminder for me (and I think [...]

Staring at your navel

David Armano, author of Logic+Emotion, gives some highlights of a Bain & Co. study.
Executive anxieties about losing touch with their customers is driving higher and higher usage of customer tools such as CRM and segmentation. These tools have moved from below average use to second and third place, respectively, in the 10 years since Bain [...]

Engaging Conversation

From the Business Week article It’s the Conversation Economy, Stupid
Marketers are finding themselves in an increasingly frantic race to get people talking about their brands. The desire to produce something “viral” is nearly ubiquitous in the marketing world. But it’s unclear who exactly “consumers” are these days. We don’t even know what that word means [...]

Leaders and Followers

Here’s the assumption: Leaders, generically, are the people who are out in front, who are in some way taking charge, and setting tone, trend and direction. In terms of following trends, they are the people most of us tend to follow. We listen to what they think is cool and interesting, and then go look [...]

Tracking Twitter

Twitter is the most popular topic on Twitter. Not much of a surprise for now. But as a marketer, I’d like to know how popular my brand is - or isn’t. Or at least when people start Twittering about it. I think the folks at Twitterverse are on to something.

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