Effectivus Product Management » product marketing

Marketing Metaphoria

Chris — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:00:55 +0000

On vacation, I finally got around to reading Marketing metaphoria: what seven deep metaphors reveal about the minds of customers by Gerald and Lindsay Zaltman. This book is about uncovering the unconscious thoughts and feelings that influence customer behaviour around a topic or product.

The authors’ approach to this is threefold: thinking more deeply about customer behaviour, soliciting the underlying metaphors behind customer behaviour, and using a simple metaphor schema to help generate ways of connecting with those customer emotions.

“Thinking hard” is often difficult to achieve in our frenetic working lives when we are constantly interrupted. Our thinking tends to be focussed around the present and near future, it tends to be about the familiar, based on existing assumptions and focuses on surface differences rather than deeper similarities. More than anything else, employees fear punishment for thinking differently, or not appearing active. All of these factors get in the way of us thinking in a creative and structured way about our customers and offerings.

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Post tags: Book review, ideas, psychology, theory

Powerful liars

Chris — Mon, 24 May 2010 14:00:12 +0000

Product Marketing is all about presenting the benefits of the product to the intended user. We do so as positively as possible: we want the product to sell. So we emphasise those benefits, play down the negatives. Particularly when marketing new products, perhaps ones that have yet to come to market, the line between fact and fiction can become a little blurred.

Some companies undeniably step straight over that line and lie. That poses all sorts of problems for the rest of us, either as marketers in the same market or simply as consumers. How can we spot that they’ve crossed it? How can we differentiate good product marketing from big, fat, porky marketing?

Professor Dana Carney, assistant professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business conducted research into lying using two groups of people: bosses and employees. As reported in the HBR this month, they were asked (by a computer) to steal a $100 bill and told that if they could convince an interviewer that they had not taken it: keep it. Professor Carney measured speed of speech, shoulder shrugs, the level of stress hormone in their saliva, how hard they press their lips together and how much their pupils dilate.

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Post tags: customer, lying, marketing, psychology

Magic Marketing

Chris — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 22:25:14 +0000

I like to use magic, conjuring, sleight of hand, plain old fashioned tricker as a metaphor for what so many of us do in film and television production. We tell stories in such a convincing way that our audiences’ skepticism is temporarily suspended and they believe in our fantasy world.

But is magic a good way to communicate your marketing message?

effectivus is in Vegas this week (again) at the National Association of Broadcasters annual jolly; lots of fat old television engineers complaining bitterly at the spotty young geeks who’ve nipped in and taken over their industry. If you’re wondering, effectivus fits into both categories.

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Santa’s Hype Cycle

Chris — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 10:00:16 +0000

The Technology Trigger

Percy stumbled into the kitchen at Peddle and Pant Cycles. He was furious. He’d been working on the green initiative for months and the latest prototypes had been no more successful than the first. He needed a caffeine fix.

As he wrestled with the Calzoncini Espresso machine, Henry from Sales sauntered in “ahh, coffee” he said.

“Damn thing” said Percy “its ‘start clean cycle’ light keeps flashing, but when I do that it produces error 47 which, according to the manual, means ‘the machine is too furred up to start the clean cycle’. Pants!”.

“I thought you guys in R&D would be up to handling a coffee machine” chortled Henry “So how are things going? We’re desperate for something new.”

“Well,” began Percy “I have been working on this idea…”

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Post tags: fun, lifecycle, marketing

Invideate

Chris — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 09:30:56 +0000

It was a hot Saturday afternoon and my wife and I had been working all day on clearing out the garage. After ten years in the house there were piles of stuff everywhere; half used paint pots, off-cuts of timber, old lighting fixtures, strange oddly shaped pieces of metal that we had no idea what use they were and all those little bits and pieces we’d spent hours searching for over the last few years before finally buying anew.

“Hello there” called a voice from the top of the drive. Dirty and sweaty we were in no state to greet the passing local gentry, but glad of a rest we looked up.

“That looks like good work” said an elderly neighbour, “yes” we replied, “but very satisfying”.

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Post tags: fun, ideas, marketing, writing

Great demos

Chris — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:26:31 +0000

It was 1994 and I’d drawn the short straw, a really short straw.

Our new product was called “Advance”[1] and would revolutionise film and television post production and special effects. It allowed you to build up a complex tree of operations to manipulate movie footage. It ran on the latest kick ass hardware, the SGI Onyx, which sat 6ft tall and had 16 MIPS R4400 CPUs.

In our offices in London’s Soho we had gathered all the journalists that cover our industry and plied them with food and wine.

The demo started well as I went through my well practiced steps, playing back movie footage and applying filters and colour grading.

Then it stopped. Just stopped. I know that I’d pressed the correct button and knew what should be happening, but nothing was. In that heart-stopping moment I knew it had crashed and that a reboot was going to take several minutes, but nobody else had realised.

A silent scream for help!

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Post tags: boujou, demos, Illusion, marketing

“Pants 2 You” is a poor customer message

Chris — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 18:14:17 +0000

That Friday afternoon, after school, my son convinced me to give him a lift to the local toy megastore. He desperately wanted the newly released “Grand Theft Auto IV” for the weekend. It was in short supply and he had reasoned that it would be available in “a shop that nobody goes to” and had even rung to check ahead of time.

Like a military raid we dashed into the dreaded emporium, located the “take this to the checkout” ticket, and made for the tills.

Just one was open and that was unmanned as the shop assistant had gone off to answer some query. We all stood in line, watching 4 or 5 other staff (and someone who definitely looked like the manager) walk in and out of offices and to and from the “information” desk, pointedly ignoring the increasing line of increasingly frustrated customers. We clearly mattered not a jot.

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Post tags: commercial, culture, fun

Just tell me what you do…

Chris — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 13:09:09 +0000

I’m walking past mile upon mile of tradeshow booths in a zombie-like trance trying to understand what I’m seeing. Sadly this is not a drug induced nightmare, but a reality brought on by a killer combination of jetlag, too many faces, too much caffeine, too many Margaritas the night before, a nagging pain in my right foot and the overwhelming impression of otherworldliness that is Las Vegas.

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Post tags: boujou, marketing

The Secret of Good Marketing? Give Something Back!

Chris — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 06:18:41 +0000

Lying in bed on Friday morning I was struck by a momentus marketing insight. I was listening to the BBC’s Today programme. It was one of those short pieces where the ageing presenters try to show that they can be “fun”. They were reporting on the phenomenon of viral marketing (it takes the Today programme a few years to catch on to new stuff). They were interviewing Matt Golding of Rubber Republic. He observed:

“There are a lot of people out there that are failing to realise that you actually have to give something; just trying to communicate a really strong message, get a lot of points across about their brand … its about buying time with people and not abusing that”

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Post tags: fun, ideas, theory

What Does Your Product Really Do?

Chris — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 08:40:44 +0000

What does your product really do? No, I know you can tell me all its detailed specification, how it functions, the internal workings, the cost of goods, but what does it really do as far as your customers are concerned? What needs does it fulfil?

I was at a breakfast meeting for local industrialists a few months ago and bumped into a travel agent. We swapped the usual small talk about the state of business in uncertain times and he told me how his business, which was mostly focussed on selling air tickets to business travellers, was under considerable pressure.

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Post tags: markets, product