Effective Product Thinking
Effectivus is focussed on helping you to bring the best possible products to market in the most effective way. We combine strong commercial, technical thinking with innovation to deliver concrete results which will help you deliver better products. We focus on technical products, especially software, delivered into business markets. We have over 20 years experience with products for the creative industries.
Magic Marketing
How to entertain your trade show stand visitors and completely fail to deliver your message.
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.
How the iPad could change the world
Is there an industry the iPad could wipe out at a (touch sensitive) stroke?
The gushing praise for the iPad is now turning into concrete numbers as this last week analysts have been clambering over each other to predict that Apple will ship.
Piper Jaffray & Co. analyst Gene Munster originally expected iPad sales of 2.8 million in 2010. Then Morgan Stanley upped the ante to 6 million, before their analysts Katy Huberty and Mathew Schneider reported that iPad suppliers are forecasting 8 million to 10 million iPad shipments in calendar year 2010, double the previous estimate of 5 million.
I know nothing of this. As a consumer I have felt the need for some years for a handy internet browser that would always be on and could be used anywhere in the house. There is the Ocado order to be completed in the kitchen, whilst checking the contents of the fridge. Then there is follow up research to settle arguments over dinner and digging into schedules and program details the few times we actually sit down and watch the television.
Is the iPad the device to do this? I don’t know, but I do know that $699 seems a bit steep for the whatever additional benefit it might have over my $300 netbook, which by the way, supports Flash.
But I can see one way in which the iPad could change the world.
Posted in product definition 3 Comments
Steamed FUD
A product marketing guide to Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt
Like so many things invented elsewhere[i], the high-tech industry has grabbed the marketing ploy of spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) through disinformation and made it all their own.
The idea is simple. Put just enough doubt into the minds of your customers that there is something dodgy about a competitor, or their product, so as to instil enough FUD to stall or reverse a buying decision.
A classic was a SEGA marketing campaign with the slogan “Genesis does what Nintendon’t”.
Let’s face it; FUD is the last defence of the desperate. You just know that the corporate marketing barrel is empty when a high-tech firm turns to FUD. It implies that you can’t differentiate your product, you are haemorrhaging customers and your stock has hit the floor.
If that’s the case then your CEO will be purple in the face and with steam coming out of his ears (despite the fact that it’s probably his fault that you’re in the situation in the first place). Who is he going to call? We’re going to reach for anything we can use, aren’t we? So let’s look at the different ways you can use FUD.
The Early Adopter Gullibility Curve
What does the mythical kill switch tell us about consumer adoption?
We are used to thinking of product adoption in terms of the adoption curve and spend lots of time worrying about our Early Adopters versus our Early Majority, but what are we to make of the conspiracy theorists?
I mention it because every few years there is a rash of articles in the technology press about users who have become convinced that manufacturers have designed their products to spontaneously die after some specific amount of time. Earlier this year the Daily Telegraph reported on “The myth of the Sony ‘kill switch’” which has apparently been going on for 20 years. The Sony laptop battery fiasco last year won’t have helped, but that wasn’t what lit the fire in Japan recently. Apparently, “a bug in selected E-Series Bravia TVs meant they’d only last 1,200 hours, before refusing to power on or off. This conveniently adds up to about 3 hours watching per day for one year, the exact period of the television’s warranty. Sony issued a software patch to fix the problem.”
What is perhaps more revealing are some of the comments posted on The Telegraph’s website from users claiming to have suffered from a “kill switch”
Don’t touch me there!
The user interface gets very personal
Great story in New Scientist on Skinput (the product of Microsoft Research) which can project an image of buttons onto the skin, and then recognise which button you have pressed using body acoustics.
I’m struggling to imagine the type of muli-user interaction that this could lead to…
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