Year: 2006

Remember Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax where the Once-ler invented the Thneed? “A Thneed’s a Fine-Something-That-All-People-Need!” he told the Lorax. And the Once-ler was lucky enough to be right (at the cost of the Truffula trees).

Unfortunately, we all don’t sell products that All-People-Need. B2B marketers especially are marketing vertically. Vertical marketing refers to targeting a specific industry or application with a specific solution. (Comparable to niche marketing in B2C.)

The Basic 101 lesson from Smart Marketing Blog: A great example of vertical marketing:
“Companies are now beginning to understand that when you vertically market to a population segment you improve the focus of your efforts and messaging. For example, I have seen the Segway transporters for a while now, and always wondered why I would need one.”

The 600 level discussion:
We all thought the Segway was cool when it came out, but who would use it? They did target postal carriers initially, which was vertical, but maybe a bit misplaced. Targeting golfers is a great second try, as it reaches for a demographic that is fussy about their game and is willing to spend money on it. (In a B2B sense, the Segways would be sold to golf courses, who then rent them out.)

Vertical doesn’t always make sense in every case, but it is an important strategic decision. Sometimes its smarter to start vertical and then expand. Yesterday’s local paper featured the Speed Stacker cup-stacking game that the inventor started by selling to phys-ed teachers. This fall, Wal-mart will be carrying his cups.

…do it well, for pete’s sake!

The accused: National Instruments.
The evidence: An ad with a crossword puzzle in Lab Equipment Magazine and on LE’s website.
The accolade: Great idea to draw in readers with a puzzle with technical questions.
The crime: Making the questions center too closely about NI.

The argument: Okay, it’s their ad, they have a right to talk about the products and brands. Out of 19 crossword questions, roughly half relate to their products or brand. Two are actually hot-linked to answers about their products. But what bugs me are clues like these:

7. National Instruments CEO nickname
9. Inventor of LabVIEW

I was familiar enough with their company to answer the question about what city they are headquartered in, but these two especially smack of ‘inside baseball’. I understand that they were trying to mix-up the clues so they weren’t all technical or promotional, but how about some fun questions?

Besides, they are marketing to the Dilberts of the world. And you know how much Dilbert cares about CEOs. (Perhaps there was some suck-up going on?)

The sentence: Eat your investment in this issue. Study what GlobalSpec had to say about marketing with games to engineers. Then re-run the crossword (looks like it will be a series anyway), but think harder about the puzzle clues. The devil is in the details.

Last month I pointed to a column by Scott Dalgleish on the vagueness of quality claims. In this Month’s Quality Magazine, he brings a basic product/marketing question of quality.

Probing the Limits: Taking the Quality High Ground – Column – Quality:

“I’m currently designing a line of product for my business and I’m facing some fundamental quality questions. Do I develop a high-quality product or a cheaper low-quality product? This isn’t an easy question.

My inclination as a quality professional is to develop a high-quality product without even thinking about it, but that could be a foolish approach. As I drive past discount stores with packed parking lots, I quickly realize how much consumers love low prices.”

The basic 101 lesson:
Reading this article reminded me my MBA economics classes, which I really enjoyed because of the order it creates with such complex questions. It all is based on the supply and demand curves that intersect. Here is a good review of supply and demand with interactive curves. Scott also realizes that price, cost, and quality are not also always dependent on each other.

The 600 level case study:
Right now most of us are dealing with existing products, or new products similar to others, so that we can make some assessments of the market, at least in an educated gut/Blink-style. Scott’s problem is that there is no existing supply or demand curve for his new product. While he decides that market testing will help him decide, he also acknowledges that his final decision will be the one he can live with.

The column sums up with this subhead: “Feeling good about making a high-quality product can be just as important as being profitable.” Agree or disagree?

I had a request for an update on the GTD-PHP web server application that I installed last month. First off, it has been updated and the SourceForge page has come alive. The update has not impacted the root database yet, which makes for an easy upgrade (but means no major feature changes). See the current demo to see it in action.

Overall the application is working fine. It falls short in a couple details, but I like its usability. If you read some of the feature-requests on the SourceForge site, you can get an idea of some of the issues. For example, I’ve added a letter prefix to each of my projects so they sort out as Home, Work, Personal, Church. I also added projects titled: “Someday/Maybe” and “Home Tasks” for holding ideas and misc. small project/NA. The one thing I’d really like to do is be able to flip an item from next-action to waiting-for and back. They have added a new page with the steps for doing a weekly review, which I must start using.

I’ve also finished reading the Getting Things Done book, so I have a better appreciation of the way the GTD-PHP application is set up. I don’t use the tool for every next-action, but it is a comfortable way to maintain an actual list of things to do, available whenever I need it. I feel organized and in control! My biggest personal concern is the trap David Allen warns about, which is listing ‘tasks’ and not ‘next-actions’.

I think we marketing bloggers can get caught-up in the marketing buzz of the day. While we need to be interested in taking it to the next level, we also need to stay strong on the basics, albeit at the 600 level. So I’m going to put up a few posts this week to get us thinking about the basics and how to apply them strategically.

Here is good article to get us started, pointed at by Wired Head, about product tiering:

Tier Today, Gone Tomorrow: Navigating the aftermath of the customer revolution

The basic 101 lesson:

“Traditionally consumers’ tastes and behavior were somewhat layered, tiered. Those with disposable income spent it on products that matched their buying power and budgets Â?almost always.”

The strategic 600 lesson:

“Indeed those tiering mechanisms alone are no longer sufficient to influence the purchasing decision. If customers care, they are willing to pay; if not, they will choose the cheapest available product, bragging about the bargain they hunted at, say, eBay, or on the internet in general. Sales decisions have become extremely bi-polar as well: very emotional, impulsive or very rational.”

The article goes on to talk about tiering and the other marketing and product-development issues that connect to it. The article is really the lesson here, not my commentary, although I will tell you a story I was told early in my career:

Tiering turned upside-down:
A direct-marketing company came out with a line of high quality (and expensive) pots and pans. Their plan was to target the high-income tier that would align with quality/expensive goods, but they failed. Turns out that the most receptive prospects were working-poor immigrant families. Doesn’t make sense does it?

The rich didn’t care much about cooking and found pots weredisposableble item that counted more as a fashion accessory. The immigrants, however, cooked every day and saw the value in quality cookware.

To sum up, product tiering is a smart strategy, if you are smart about how the customer is tiering your type of products.

When I solidified my job as Marketing Manager last year, I was given the luxury of writing my own job description. In my mind, I see some clear boundaries for what are my responsibilities, as well as areas where I’ll be admittedly ‘picking up the slack’, such as product management.

But it is interesting, especially after my trip to Japan, how others in the organization perceive my title to mean. I actually started a list of people and what they saw my job as.

• Conduit to sales and customers
• Sales data analysis
• Sales support
• Advertising
• Vision
• Brand
• Product/market expert

Maybe I need to be all these things, but its hard to do all of them to the full expectation of others. At the very least, I’ve now prepared myself when dealing with certain people regarding their agenda for me. It will make me a better listener, and a better manager.

If you’ve been watching the Winter Olympics, you’ve no doubt been awed and gossiped about the feats of the athletes, good and bad. Here are some lessons learned by Julia at Sales & Marketing Management Magazine:

“Salespeople always like to compare themselves to athletes when describing their profession, and nowhere does the analogy apply more than in the Winter Olympics. Here’s a few business—and life—lessons I’ve taken from watching the Olympic games thus far:”
Examples: Jacobellis, Hughes, Zhang (hmm, all women, too)

Read more: S&MM SoundOff: The Thrill of Victory, the Agony of Defeat:

I’m flying home today, although I’d like to stay longer. I wrote a rambling post about my stay last night, but Blogger thankfully lost it. Being in a foreign country is certainly a feast for the senses (including the head on my 6’3″ body, three times-ow!). I also met some old friends and made some new ones.

Favorites of Osaka:

• The Imperial Hotel (best I’ve ever stayed in)
• “Realize Shop” 100 yen store (cheap, stylish housewares like tea cups)
• Covered shopping street (Tenjinbashi Shotengai) said to be five miles long, full of small shops.
• Also Hankyu shopping mall with Sanrio store (Hello Kitty)
• The women (they all dress with style and have such pretty eyes)
• Seeing bicycles as a popular form of transportation
• Tradition of giving chocolate to men on Valentine’s Day (incl. waitress at dinner)
• Japanese chili powder in my udon soup (loved all the food, actually)

I also had some great, and eye-opening, meetings with my new ‘marketing friends’. It is great to feel that I am on a team now, where before a lot of what I did has been in a vacuum. As I sort through my notes, I’ll try to find some worthwhile things to share while protecting my company’s strategies.

I’ve just arrived in my Osaka, Japan hotel. I’m here to meet with my parent company about our ‘global’ brand. We are a worldwide company, but only manufacture in USA, Japan, and China. As the economy becomes more global, we have to be much more conscious about being consistent with the same brand (and all other parts of our business). We’ve worked as independent Americans for the most part, and we’ve been successful serving our market.

It will be interesting to discuss all the details of what makes our brand different around the world and how we can bring things together. And on a practical point, where this does not make sense, and things should be different.

How would you rate your products’ quality? Did you say ‘high quality’? Everyone says that, of course. So you start to think everything manufactured is made in Lake Wobegon, where all the kids are above average, too.

So, what does ‘high quality’ mean and is it worth saying? The short answer is we don’t know and it’s pointless to talk about. Here is the longer discussion of what is wrong:

What got me started thinking about this was Scott Dalgleish’s excellent column in Quality Magazine titled Probing the Limits: The Claim to Good Quality is Free:

“Do you know of any company that does not claim to have good quality? I can’t think of a single company that ever said, “Our quality is fair to poor.” My experience has been that very few companies deliver the good quality that they claim.

My read on this situation—to adapt a phrase from Philip Crosby—is that the claim to good quality is free—and that’s a big problem. “

The situation as he sees it:

• Claims of quality are not supported
• Management doesn’t especially care
• Consumers are cynical and care about price

First and foremost he blames his audience, quality professionals, for taking the teeth out of the ISO-9000 process. Remember when getting an ISO certificate was a bragging point about your company’s quality? Today, a quick look around my industry’s websites finds very little mention of certification. Scott says that ISO has become a consulting money-grab—one that documents the process, not the quality. So the quality profession has squandered their best hope for standardized quality measurement.

At a deeper level, the teethless claims of quality have dulled the buyer’s senses and instead, price becomes the deciding factor. Management only follows the consumer’s interest in price, think Wal-Mart Effect or Dilbert cartoon (see the one here for a better explanation).

Scott suggests that educating consumers and investors about the value of product quality will drive management to care. That’s an okay idea if it is done well so consumers will listen, but how much will they learn? The new Gillette razor has how many blades? We’ve been given that concrete information in a Super Bowl commercial. But the first question everyone asks is: does this really make it better? Without any worthwhile, concrete, and verifiable information on quality, buyers rely on inference and word-of-mouth, both of which are unreliable. (Hence the growth in WOM marketing, I think.)

As a marketer, we are prone to being called liars because we don’t back up claims of quality, but what I am saying here (along with Scott) is that it isn’t our fault alone. Management doesn’t’ care, the consumer is cynical, and quality pros are off on a tangent. In today’s online world where marketing-speak is not tolerated, the marketer may just avoid the subject of quality and let the buyer assume that your quality meets whatever minimum standard he or she has.

Scotts point, and mine too, is that this is a systemic problem that has taken quality out of the purchasing decision in many cases. We need some of those above-average kids from Lake Wobegon to come help us fix this mess!

This is one of the rare times when I’ll ask this question and expect some answers: Your thoughts?