Sometimes talking about your own product, in terms that your customers understand, can be the hardest thing to do.
We can see your product as outsiders see it. We can talk to your customers and understand how they see it and you, and what they value about your product.
We can then put together marketing collateral which will resonate with your customers and knock their socks off.
Giving a good demo is more than taking the audience through the features
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!
Why corporate culture and individual employee behaviour has to be compatible with understanding and empathising with your customers.
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.
How tradeshow messaging gets lost in the hullabaloo.
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.
…or how a lesson from viral marketing could improve all our collateral.
The old sales adage of “you are not selling drills, you are selling holes” is good to remember, sadly few of us do
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