Archive for category Product Marketing
When sentimentality keeps you from making a good product great
Posted by Sam Kale in Marketing & Branding, Product Marketing on July 28, 2010
The next iPhone killer
Over the past few days the gadget blogs have been all a-twitter over the new Blackberry Bold 9800. An update to the recently released Bold 9700, the new 9800 features a touchscreen/keypad combo, better resolution, and an all new incarnation of the Blackberry operating system.
Along with the specs, the device comes with the requisite “iPhone killer” rhetoric. Will the new Blackberry be RIM’s salvation? Will it put Apple out of business? Will it be the new standard against which we compare every smartphone to come to market?
I’m not sure, but I’d be willing to bet that it won’t. The reason? Because RIM is just too sentimental.
Consistency at all costs
Blackberry, in an effort to provide consistency for their users, has elected to keep many of the OS’s historical design elements. Elements that in 2002 (when the first BB smartphone was released) were new and charming but now, only 8 short years later, seem quaint and just a bit dated. As one blog put it, it might be a bit like trying to “… put lipstick on a pig.”
The thing that Apple did well with the iPhone (antenna notwithstanding) is not so much sacrificing the sacred cow as it is ensuring that there are no sacred cows to begin with. Whether it be eliminating the floppy drive on the original iMac, replacing serial and parallel ports with USB, or even eliminating their favorite Firewire ports, Apple has shown again and again that sentimentality for “what was” only gets in the way of good design.
Sacred cows
All too often product design gets mired in the mundane, the list of things that “… we have to have because our existing customer base demands them.” The trick, of course, is to accurately and dispassionately separate the things that the customers want from the things that we want the customers to want, either because they’re things we ourselves want or because there’s a pet project someone doesn’t want to give up. There’s a sacred cow in the room that no one can put out to pasture.
Thar be growth
And as we plan for growth, either through market expansion, adjacencies, or white spaces, we have to continually ask and challenge ourselves on the things that we hold sacred. Its hard to give up on the thing that we created, the thing that we championed, the thing that we’ve come to think of as iconic. The problem is when another product comes along and turns your icon into an anachronism.
Multiplied by
Posted by Sam Kale in Product Marketing on July 26, 2010
I am continuously intrigued by the idea of cutting across the silos we find in our lives, both online and off. A while back Merlin Mann had a twitter feed called @MultipledBy, a place to put random little thoughts and ideas of how to make the things in our lives better. Although he hasn’t updated in quite some time, its still an interesting list of concepts that could potentially earn someone a lot of money if they could figure out a way to implement them in an easy and useful way.
In the past, people who made and/or sold stuff had a tendency to work towards vertical integration, towards trying to control every aspect of Michael Porter’s Value Chain, or at least every aspect that had the potential to make money. Consequently, the desire to maintain competitive advantage led to the inclusion of things that could be controlled and exclusion of those things that couldn’t. Sure, strategic alignments and partnerships provided some amount of cross-service compatibility, but for the most part it was a "my way or the highway" mentality that prevailed.
Now, with the abundance of ready competitors, the lowering of entry barriers to near-triviality, and the desire of the customer to have things their way rather than another’s, its seems like the real value added services are those that figure out how to combine things across seemingly disparate services. In science we call this "Systems Biology." Simply put, Systems Biology looks across different systems and pathways and looks for the obvious and non-obvious linkages between them.
A while back I opined that one thing Facebook really needs is a quick and easy way to turn off all the “app detrius” that comes our way – the notifications, the updates, and the stories about Mobs and Farms and Sheep in our timelines. What I really wanted was *one button* that simply said “Stop.” I then began wondering about my own list of #MultipliedBy. I don’t have any entries on that list just yet, but I’m going to start paying attention to those little things and will report back soon.
What’s your list of things that should work effortlessly together but don’t?
The trusted advisor
Posted by Sam Kale in Product Marketing, Random Musings, service marketing on July 25, 2010
As a brand new father, I’ve been surprised by a great many thing recently. And one of those thing is the sheer number of advertisement that portray themselves as “Trusted Advisors,” trying to convince me that I need to act now to make my baby happier, make her life better, keep her safer. On and on and on, until I couldn’t tell one from the other.
And so it made me start thinking about the idea of a Trusted Advisor. As we think about word of mouth marketing and social media, the idea is to assume the role of the best friend, of the parent or elder statesman, the all-knowing one that we rely on to steer the ship through the dark and lonely night.
All of these tactics share one thing: all try to get me to buy something. Now, I’m not saying that outbound marketing with a purchasing call to action is bad. Many of us spend quite a bit of time trying to perfect that skill.
But when’s the last time a Trusted Advisor told you *not* to buy something?
To be clear, I’m not talking about telling someone to buy Your Thing instead of Someone Else’s Thing. I’m talking about not buying The Thing at all. I’m talking about telling you that buying The Thing, whether it be from them or from someone else, is not the best use of your resources right now. Perhaps somewhere down the road buying The Thing will be the right thing to do, but for the moment you are better off focusing your time on getting ready for The Thing.
Because in the end, isn’t being the Trusted Advisor about building credibility? Can you be credible when you *only* recommend things that directly benefit you?
Some further thoughts on Thought Leadership
Posted by Sam Kale in Marketing & Branding, Product Marketing on July 22, 2010
As my involvement on this blog stems directly from my continuous commenting on this blog, the straw that broke the camel’s back, as it were, was Kris’ recent post on Thought Leadership and the Freemium Concept. And although the last thing I want this blog to be is Point/Counterpoint, I would like to build on a few points Kris made.
I’m pretty sure Kris and I are saying the same thing here … that at some point content isn’t the thing that you’re selling; at some point, content is the thing you give away to build the credibility it takes to sell the thing that makes you money (the "solution" in the "B2B solution organization" he mentioned).
Should iTunes be free? To that I’d say 2 things: first, iTunes is the "How," not the "What." Second, the music (the "What") is essentially free these days. Even a few short years ago we had to pay $12-$15 for the CD if you wanted 1-2 songs from an artist. Now we pay $1/track. The revenue from that content is shrinking at an alarming rate. The smart artists have figured out that the songs are the tools they use to lure people to concerts, to get them to buy DVDs, to get them licensing deals in movies and on TV shows. Moby, Sting, Dave Matthews … all of these are artists that understand the value of diversifying away from the canonical content. iTunes/Apple, for its part, essentially gives away the content for free (they take 30% of the tx, spending most of that on infrastructure and delivery costs), with the goal being to sell more iDevices.
Whether Netflix should be free is a slightly trickier question, mainly because they’re not the content producer, they are the content delivery mechanism. I’d go so far as to say that Netflix *has* made the content free; for one flat rate I get as many movies as I can watch (remember that Netflix streaming is no incremental payment and unlimited streams per month). While the major studios have clung to the idea of monitizing the actual movie (ticket sales, DVD sales), Netflix has essentially given away the content in an effort to make money on the delivery mechanism and the idea of "entertainment whenever wherever."
Contrast both those situations with the UK Times, where they are still stuck in the mindset that the content is the thing that’s going to make them money. Sure, the stated goal might be "readership," but there’s not much chance that ad revenue is going to make them any sort of real money. And now compare that to Bloomberg and WSJ, neither of which sell the content so much as up-to-the-minute access to the content. Subtle difference, but both the WSJ and BB are actually making money.
In his book "Free," Chris Anderson goes through exactly this sort of debate. As a matter of fact, when the book first came out, he gave it away, looking instead to make money on the lecture circuit. Jeff Jarvis discusses many of the same concepts in "What Would Google Do?" although he directs most of his analyses towards the Google products (another example of a company that gives away the content in favor of generating revenue through other means).
So I guess my point is that I completely agree with Kris’ closing paragraph and would add that, regardless of whether its B2B or B2C, The Change is already happening. Those that can recognize and admit that the change is happening can adjust and thrive; those that cling to old and outmoded business models will not fare as well.
-
You are currently browsing the archives for the Product Marketing category.
Kris
Sam
Recent Comments