The Accidental Product Manager

It’s Labor Day – Take The Week Off!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 04:01:00 +0000

If There's A Parade, Then It Must Be Labor Day!

In the U.S. it’s the week of the Labor Day holiday (on Monday). Since a lot of you will be making the most of this last gasp of summer, I’m going to join you and take the week off.

Enjoy your holiday and we’ll pick our discussions up again next week, same place, same time!

- Dr. Jim Anderson

Merry Christmas – Take The Week Off! Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming Christmas...
Happy Thanksgiving — Take The Week Off! Loyal readers & subscribers, here’s hoping that this upcoming week...
Happy New Year! (I’m Still On Vacation…) It’s still the holiday season and I’m still on vacation!...

Product Manager: Don’t Step On Your Long Tail…!

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 04:01:48 +0000

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Just Because You Have A Big Tail Doesn't Mean You Know How To Use It…

If you want to sell a lot of your product, where is the best place to try to sell it? Would it be better to go to a crowed market where there are lots of people but also lots of other product managers with similar products? Or would it be better to go into a dark alley where there are fewer people, but also fewer competing product managers? If you can answer this question, than you’ve got that “long tail” thing down cold…

The Way That Things Used To Be…

Back in the day (whenever that used to be), product managers used to only have to worry about having one product and then trying to get everyone to buy it. Sorta like Henry Ford and his “You can have your car in any color, as long as it’s black” type of thinking.

Then things started to change. Instead of only being able to buy blue jeans, now customers could get boot cut, stone washed, acid washed, vintage, etc. What’s interesting about this development is that not everyone wants boot cut jeans. However, the folks who do want them are willing to pay more for them…

Enter The Long Tail

A guy by the name of Chris Anderson (no relation) wrote a book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More in which he put forth a bold idea: maybe product managers could be more successful if they sold fewer products at higher prices…? At the time it sounded radical, but now it seems like everyone is trying to do it.

However, there are some problems with this approach. Specifically, it turns out that when you allow the market for your product to shrink this much, things can get very expensive very quickly. Additionally, the long tail approach to marketing your product doesn’t work for every product (a commodity really is a commodity).

The Long Tail’s Best Friend: The Internet

If you do have a product that is a good fit for long tail marketing, then you’re going to need a way to get the word out about it. Say hello to your new best friend: Mr. Internet.

Your ultimate goal here is to be able to define a unique spot in the market for your product. You want to make sure that your potential customers view your product as being unique and unavailable from any other vendor.

This is where the Internet comes in. The way that your customers are going to learn about your product is generally by the time-honored method that works the best: word of mouth. This is how they are going to get over the general nervousness about buying your non-mass marketed product.

As long as they can find out about your product online they’ll come to you. If you do a good job of making sure that you have testimonials and that they can find reviews of your product by other people who have bought it, then they will feel confidant in buying it themselves.

What All Of This Means For You

Long tail marketing is here to stay – it’s got a cool name and so of course we’ll be keeping it around. What you need to do as a product manager is to determine if it is the right marketing solution for your product.

If it is, then you’re going to have to find ways to leverage the Internet in order to help your potential customers not only find out about your product, but also become comfortable purchasing it. Since you’ll now be dealing with a much smaller market, word of mouth will become very important to your product’s success.

The long tail can be scary for a product manager – I mean who wants to create a smaller market for their product? However, if you do it correctly, then you’ll discover that your customers are willing to pay top dollar for your product and that’s enough to make any product manager happy…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What types of products do you thing are well situated for long tail marketing?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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1,000 Product Management Links You Need To Know

Dr. Jim Anderson — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 04:01:37 +0000

1,000 Links To Internet Resources For Product Managers

Ok, so first off that’s a complete lie — we’re not really talking about 1,000 links. Although, in my own defense I think that the list will eventually get to contain 1,000 links eventually. A title of “Almost 1,000 links” just didn’t seem to have enough zing…

At any rate, I do have a ton of links to free (or almost free) Internet resources that every product manager should know about. In my monthly “The Accidental Product Manager” newsletter there are always a set of the latest links that every product manager needs to know about in order to make their job easier.

I’ve collected all of the links from all of the past issues of the newsletter and put them in one place for you: on this page over at Blue Elephant Consulting.

I’ll keep adding more links to this page so you might want to bookmark it and come back often.

An even better idea would be to subscribe to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter so that you’d get new links delivered to your inbox…

Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

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How Product Managers Can Raise Their Product’s Price & Sell More

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 04:01:03 +0000

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You Can Only Lower Your Product's Price So Far Before You're Out Of Business

What do most product managers do whenever their product sales start to decline? No matter if it’s because customers have lost interest or if it’s because a new competitor has just shown up, we all tend to do the same thing: slash our prices. In the new competitive global marketplace this doesn’t work any more. It’s time for some new thinking on how product managers deal with prices.

Why Not Slash And Burn?

Isn’t lowering your product’s price one of those classic techniques that they teach everyone in those expensive MBA programs? I mean, if you can lower your product’s price for long enough you can probably drive your competition out of business and then you’ll have the whole market to yourself. Ta-da!

This may sound like a plan (a bad plan, but a plan nonetheless), but it turns out that there are very few companies (except perhaps WalMart) that can actually pull this kind of “everyday low prices” thing off. The rest of us generally just end up hurting ourselves when we cut our product’s price in reaction to some market forces.

What’s A Better Way To Compete?

It turns out that some very smart people, Dr. Frank Cespedes being one of them, have been studying this very problem. What they’ve found is that for the rest of the world (that means you), a much better way to compete just might be to raise your product’s price.

Your customers are looking for solutions to their problems. If your product is the one that delivers the best solution, then they will be willing to pay a higher price for it. This is what is called “competing on performance”.

How Can A Product Manager Compete On Performance?

In order for a product manager to user the concept of competing on performance in order to allow his / her product to command a higher price in the market, what Dr. Cespedes says that we need to do is to change the type of battle that we are willing to enter into. Instead of trying to compete on price, he says that we need to shift and instead change things so that our product is competing based on what our company does better than anyone else.

Its these strengths, our unique benefits, that lie at the heart of our product’s long term success. This isn’t going to be easy for you product manager. Instead of trying to figure out just how low you can drop your prices, what you really need to be doing is spending your time finding ways to reshape your product so that it better meets your customer’s individual needs.

Keep in mind that this doesn’t mean that your product’s price is not important. It still is. As the product manager you are responsible for keeping your costs under control as well as making sure that the price that you are charging is a reasonable price.

What All Of This Means For You

Trying to compete and dominate a market based solely on a product’s price is a fool’s quest. Yes, there are some firms that are able to do this; however, they have built their entire business around keeping prices low. If your firm doesn’t have this engrained mind-set, then you need to find a different way for your product to be successful.

The key to your product’s long term success is to walk away from the very notion of trying to compete on price. Instead, take the time to understand how your customers view your company. What is it that you do differently than everyone else? How can you leverage this characteristic into a part of your product offering that will make it unique and allow you to command a higher price?

This approach to product pricing requires product managers to do your homework. Sure the old way seemed easier, just keep dropping your price until you get enough customers, but since that will no longer work you need a new tactic. Competing based on performance just might be your ticket to long term product success…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What kind of company characteristics do you think that customers would value and would allow you to charge a higher price for your product?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Product Lust: Could Desire Really Be A Bad Thing?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 04:01:32 +0000

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Could Product Shortages Make Your Customers Not Like Your Hot Product?

Way back when you were just a green product manager and you were still learning the marketing ropes, I’m going to bet that someone once upon a time sat you down and told you that sometimes when there is not enough of your hot product to meet customer’s demand, this can be a good thing. Well, it turns out that they were wrong and I’m going to tell you why…

I Love You / I Hate You

We seem to hate what we most desire. Uzma Khan teaches marketing at Stanford and she’s been doing some very interesting research into how our customers behave when they can’t have what they want. The results just might surprise you.

In some very carefully controlled experiments, the researchers set up some situations where people desired a product but couldn’t get it because it was unavailable. Later on they were finally able to get it. What the researchers found out was that there’s a big difference between wanting and liking something.

What’s Wrong With Not Being Available

It turns out that although our customers may be filled with both desire for our hot product and they may think that they like it, these two emotions are completely separate. However, the researchers have found out that they are related: the more that we really want something, the greater the probability that once we get it, we’re not going to like it.

One of the reasons for this is that our very desire for the thing has been artificially pumped up. Simply because we couldn’t get our hands on it, we wanted it more and more. However, the downside to this desire is that the more that we wanted it, then once we had it the less we liked it.

The (Reverse) Power Of A Strategic Shortage

So now we swing back around to the world of product management. I must confess that on more than one occasion I’ve been in a position where I could cause a “strategic shortage” to occur for one of my products and I’ve been tempted to do it. Customer complaints that they really want my product but can’t find it anywhere are like music to a product manager’s ears.

Based on the research that Dr. Khan’s team has done, it’s not pretty clear that this strategic shortage scheme is a dangerous tool. It can quickly and easily backfire on you in the form of increased returns and a drop off in repeat purchases. Are you willing to sacrifice your product’s future for a bit of a sales bump up right now?

What All Of This Means For You

So what’s a product manager to do when you really do have a hot product shortage? You can almost feel your future customer’s product lust increasing and yet even though you know how dangerous this is, there’s nothing that you can do about it.

Good product managers realize the danger of a situation like this for their products and they take action. They set up clear channels of communication to their future customers in order to make sure that they know when the product is going to be available to them. At the same time they look for ways to boost their customer’s satisfaction with the product once they get it. This can include such things as including a free give-away, or even boosting your company’s ability to deliver world-class customer support to new customers.

No matter how you go about doing it, a product manager needs to carefully manage the availability of their product. It’s great to be wanted by your future customers, but you are looking for a long-term relationship, not a one-night stand…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What do you think the first thing that you should do if a shortage of your hot product develops?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Lessons From Starbucks’ Product Managers: How To Protect Your Product’s Rear

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 04:01:22 +0000

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Does The World Need Another Brand Of Coffee?

So there you are product manager, sitting on the top of the world in charge of the #1 selling brand of coffee and you’re pulling in something like $4 a cup. Then all of a sudden: blam! The global economy falls off a cliff and suddenly there are a whole bunch of competitors who start to poach your customers by offering premium coffee at a much lower price. What’s a product manager to do?

Starbucks’ Low-End Problem

Everyone knows about Starbucks coffee – it seems like there is a Starbucks store on every corner right now and new ones seem to be popping up all the time. Well, according to the Starbucks product managers, that’s not enough.

Lately McDonald’s, Dunkin Doughnuts, and just about every other fast food chain out there have started to offer espresso-based coffee products. Oh, and they’ve been doing it at prices that are lower than Starbucks. The Starbucks product managers have seen this happening, but they have been constrained from doing anything because by necessity Starbucks has a limited menu (in order to keep things moving quickly) and the majority of their business is done in the morning.

While all of this has been going on, the number of Americans who drink premium coffee has increased. In fact, in just the last three years alone the number doing so has jumped from 29% to 35%. Great, so what’s a coffee product manager to do?

Is It Time For A New Brand?

Seven years ago Starbucks bought one of their competitors: Seattle’s Best Coffee. They haven’t done that much with them since then, but thanks to the Starbucks product managers that will soon be changing.

Starbucks plans on rolling out a second coffee brand, you guessed it, Seattle’s Best Coffee. This is the brand that they are going to use in order to compete with the lower-priced fast food coffee offerings that have been nipping at their heels.

This is where the real product management innovation will occur: this new brand is going to be sold everywhere. That means that you’re going to start to see it in about 30,000 different locations ranging from fast-food outlets, supermarkets, bookstores, and even vending machines.

Can We Talk About Risk?

I can almost hear some of you starting to mumble concerns about this approach. You’ve got a good point. Since Starbucks is going to be selling most of the Seattle’s Best Coffee through franchisees they are going to have a significant quality control issue. Additionally, the coffee that is sold though vending machines is generally the worst coffee out there – what is Starbucks thinking?

The product managers at Starbucks point out that they really don’t have all that much to risk. Right now Starbucks has less than 4% of the U.S. market for brewed coffee. There’s no place to go but up. Additionally, the engineers at Seattle’s Best have created a new type of vending machine that they believe can actually deliver a good cup of coffee.

What All Of This Means For You

Starbucks finds itself in a difficult spot: it’s got the #1 selling coffee product; however, the competition is coming on strong. The product managers at Starbucks realize that if the competition is successful at taking away the lower end of their customer base, then there will be nothing to stop them from moving up and capturing more and more customers over time.

Starbucks is taking the novel approach of launching another brand: Seattle’s Best Coffee. They hope that by distributing this product everywhere they will be able to take some of the wind out of the sails of their competition (and money out of their pockets).

For product managers everywhere we have been given a front row seat to a major product strategy move. If you keep your eyes open and see what Starbucks does and how their competition reacts, then you’ll be able to find out how this story turns out…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that Starbucks should have just lowered their prices to keep more customers?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Is It Time To Rebrand Your Product?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 04:01:29 +0000

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Rebranding Can Be Painful, But It May Be Necessary For Your Product

So what does your product stand for? When your potential customers see your product, what do you want to have flash in their minds? Do you think that this is happening today or has your brand become old and tired? Maybe it’s time for a bit of rebranding…!

But What Will The Customers Think?

Let’s talk frankly here for a minute: having to go through the effort of rebranding your product is a real pain. I mean think about it: you’ve got all of that time and energy invested in getting your product’s brand to where it is today, and now you want to go and throw it all away?

Well guess what, if what you have isn’t doing it for you, then yes – rebranding is what you need to do. One of the most important things that you’ve got to realize from the outset is that any sort of rebranding effort is going to result in some confusion among both your customers as well as employees of your firm.

There is no such thing as a magical rebranding: you know, you unveil your product’s new “look” and then all of a sudden everyone just instantly “gets” it. Nope, it doesn’t work that way in real life.

You’re going to have a great deal of training to do both inside and outside of the company. However, it will be all worth it if you can get everyone to understand what your product now stands for.

The Problem With Multiple Products

One of the main reasons that product managers have to go through a rebranding exercise is because their product line has grown. The brand that used to work so well when you just had one product to manage no longer does the job. Instead, you’ve got a bunch of products and spin-offs that all need to be clearly branded.

If this is the situation that you find yourself in, then you’ve got a fundamental question that you’ve got to answer: are you going to go with a branded house or a house of brands?

A branded house is the right decision for your products when you already have a strong brand and you want to leverage this strength with a collection of products that are related, but different from the original.

A house of brands is when you create a unique brand for each of your products. This is often the best way to go when your products have very little to do with each other.

About That Logo…

More than any other aspect of a product’s current branding, its logo is often the hardest thing for a product manager to change. The reasons for this are generally more emotional than practical.

Why change your product’s logo in the first place? A couple of suggestions include taking a hard look at it and determining if it holds up in all of the various sizes that it gets reproduced in.

Another point to investigate is to determine if over time your logo has started to look like someone else’s logo just a bit too much. Are your potential customers becoming confused? If they are, then it’s time for a change.

What All Of This Means For You

The last thing that any product manager really wants to do is to have to go back and rebrand their product. It feels like they are throwing away all that they have worked so hard to achieve. However, sometimes it’s the right thing to do.

Rebranding can be a powerful solution to a lot of common problems that product managers run into. These problems can include issues such as an explosion of multiple products as well as a logo that no longer does the job.

Biting the bullet and deciding to launch a rebranding program is one of the toughest decisions that a product manager will every have to make. However, once it’s done and you start to see just how much more clearly your product is able to communicate its value to your potential customers, it will have all been worth it…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: When in a product’s lifecycle do you think that a rebranding program would not be worth it?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Product Manager Choices: The Right Way Or The Wrong Way?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 04:01:32 +0000

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Which Way Will You Pick To Go?

Into every product manager’s life will arrive opportunities to make decisions, really, really important decisions. When this time comes, will you chose to take your product the right way or the wrong way? Perhaps more importantly, will you allow your customer to make the wrong decision with your product?

A Tale Of Two Airlines

If you were running an airline today, there would be a few applications that in this 21st Century you just couldn’t do without. One would be the program that schedules what flights you’ll fly and when you’ll fly them. Another would be the one that schedules which crew members will be working which flight. Oh yeah, then there’s that one that handles all of your reservations – you know, the one that makes all of your money.

Since Mr. Murphy (of Murphy’s law fame) is alive and well and doing just fine thanks for asking, you’d want to tamper with your reservation program as little as possible – the possibility of making bad things happening would be just too great.

However, Susan Cary reports that tamper is just exactly what two airlines, WestJet and JetBlue (where do they get these names?) decided to do when they both realized that they had outgrown their original homebrew systems. They decided to switch to the reservation system that everyone else in the industry uses: the one from Sabre Holdings.

How NOT To Change Over To A New Product

The folks at WestJet were the first to make the change to the new Sabre reservation system. As with all such big projects, they did a lot of the right things: they waited until they were on their winter schedule so that they were flying fewer plans and carrying fewer customers.

The biggest challenge to doing the big switch is that WestJet had to transition 840,000 customer transaction files from their old system to the new system overnight. Surprise, surprise – this didn’t go very well. The way that the files had to be converted was slow and required a number of complex steps.

In the end WestJet ended up having to apologize to their customers and even provide some free trips because of the delays and confusion that the upgrade caused. WestJet estimates that it took them anywhere from 3-6 months to recover from the hit that their customer loyalty took from the upgrade.

How TO Change Over To A New Product

Meanwhile the folks over at JetBlue were watching and learning. Learning from what they saw happen, they chose to make their big switch on a Friday night because traditionally their Saturday traffic is the lowest of the week. They then went one step further and reduced the number of flights that they would be flying that day to minimize their exposure even more.

Web sites always seem to go down when you do this type of big change so Jet Blue created a backup web site that they ended up using two times for a total of a couple of hours during the switchover process.

The big difference between the two airlines was that JetBlue brought in 500 temporary call center workers to handle reservation calls while their 900,000 transaction files were moved over to the new system. JetBlue’s core reservation workers were then freed up to work to resolve just the sticky issues. JetBlue ended up keeping the additional 500 agents onboard for two months just to give them time to get things running smoothly.

What All Of This Means For You

So why did I take the time to share this story with you – I mean, you’re a product manager, not a project manager, right? The point might have been hidden, but observant Product Managers will realize that the Product Managers at Sabre need to change the way they are offering their product.

A new airline probably doesn’t switch to the Sabre system everyday, but when it happens you’d hope that the Sabre Product Managers would have done their homework and make sure that that the switchover went smoothly. In this case not only was JetBlue watching what happened at WestJet, but other airlines that might have been considering a switch were also watching. Even if your product is dominant, you can still lose deals if customers decide to not make any changes.

As product managers our job is not just to make great products. We also have to make products that are so ridiculously easy to use that our customers won’t have to think twice about saying “yes, let’s do it..”

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Just exactly what do you think Sabre should do to make the switchover to their product easy to do?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

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Can Product Managers Know Too Much About Their Customers?

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 04:01:13 +0000

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There Have Got To Be Some Limits On How Much We Know About Customers

It’s sorta the Holy Grail of product management – to become so intimate with our customers that we can almost read their minds. Now while that may sound like a great idea, have any of us taken the time to consider what our customers might be thinking about us doing this?

Information Blending: Good Thing Or Bad Thing?

This whole question about having lots and lots of information on our customers has only really started to surface in the past few years as computers have gotten faster and the Internet has made sharing information almost ridiculously easy. However, just because something is easy to do, doesn’t necessarily mean that we should be doing it.
Emily Steel reports that a company called EXelate Media is in the process of creating an alliance with a company that we all know: Nielsen – you know, the company that keeps track of who watches what on TV. The reason that this announcement is generating so much interest among product managers is because really for the first time, EXelate’s captured information on 150 million web surfers will be able to be combined with Nielson’s captured behavior information on 115 million American households.
What this means for your customers is that when they go online, now there is the possibility that they may be seeing very, very targeted ads. Just think about for a moment: if you know a web surfer’s age, race, gender, profession, and marital status and you knew where they had been surfing in the last month or even year, what would your product’s ad look like?
The way that EXelate has collected their information on your customer’s web surfing habits is not really rocket science. What they’ve done is to strike deals with lots and lots of web sites and then they’ve scanned all of the registration data that you and I entered when we registered to use those web sites.
They next created web “cookies” that are placed on a user’s hard drive when they visit one of the sites that they’ve registered to use. This cookie allows surfers to be identified to other sites that have subscribed to EXelate’s service – when you drop by, they can look up a lot of information about you.

The Down Side To Too Much Information

As you may have already guessed, this explosion of personal data being made available to marketers is starting to cause some concerns. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has started to hold meetings to talk about this very issue.
Just because I like the color purple and I eat lots and lots of lime Jolly Ranchers doesn’t mean that I’m going to appreciate seeing ads starting to pop up on my browser for your blue widget product telling me that “4 out of 5″ purple loving, line Jolly Rancher eating people have bought your blue widget. In fact, when consumers start to realize that data is being combined from multiple sources, they may flat out rebel.
For right now, marketing firms are saying that they understand the issue and that they handle consumer’s personal data very carefully. They say that no individual can be identified by the data that they have because they’ve stripped out any identifying info.

What All Of This Means For You

Yes, knowing more about your potential customers is always a good thing for product managers to do. However, in this modern age it may be possible to know too much about them.
The arrival of firms that track consumer’s online surfing habits and their alliances with traditional consumer behavior tracking firms has created a super tracker hybrid firm. All of a sudden, a great deal of information may be known about any customer that visits a web site.
If consumers believe that you know too much about them, they will push back. Product manager realize that as with all powerful tools, they are going to have to go slow and make sure that they don’t spook their customers by knowing too much…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help™

Question For You: If you had the opportunity to know what your customer’s web surfing habits were, would you use that info to reach them?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

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4 Marketing Trends That Well Dressed Products Need To Know

Dr. Jim Anderson — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 04:01:19 +0000

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What Will Your Product Marketing Be Wearing This Season?

Every year the global fashion industry rolls out new lines of fashions from famous designers. The world gathers at trendy fashion shows to gasp in amazement as they discover which designers have outdone themselves this year and which ones have gone off into the weeds.

Maybe it’s time for you to take a look at how you are telling the world about your product – are you keeping up with the latest trends or is your product looking like last year’s fashion failures?

Four Trends In Marketing

Just like everything else in this mad, mad world, marketing never stands still. Every company is facing the same set of challenges: everything seems to cost more to do this year, the environment and the role that our product plays in it (for good or for bad) is becoming more important, etc.

The key thing that any time-strapped product manager needs to be able to do is to find the hot areas of marketing that will help their products both grow in sales and be viewed by potential customers as being an innovative product. Here are four marketing areas that both you and your product are going to have to be on top of:

Targeting

All customers are not created equal and so product managers need to stop treating them that way. It turns out that by now we actually have a fair amount of information on our customers: we know what they do for a living, where they live, and what they’ve bought from us in the past.

Given that we know all of this about the people that we want to buy our products, then why do we still have generic product brochures? Why do we send out mass mailings (email and postal) that start out “Dear recipient”?

It’s time that we put all of this information to work. This is the year that we need to take the time to create highly personalized communication with our potential customers.

Measurement & Analysis

As product marketing budgets get tighter and tighter, every product manager is going to be under the gun to show that a marketing campaign is able to boost profits. This means that we’re going to have to start doing a better job of measuring our marketing programs.

It’s all too easy to do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and say “this is what the ROI (return on investment) will be”, but that’s not going to cut it any more. Instead product managers are going to have to take the time and figure out how much each step of your product’s marketing effort is going to cost. Then you’re going to have to come up with a way to determine which customers took action based on coming into contract with your marketing message.

Integration

Sure you use email to reach potential customers. You might even use postal mail, videos, and brochures that you hand out at meetings and trade show. But how well do these different channels work together?

With funds for marketing programs being in such short supply, it is now more critical than ever that each of the ways that you get in contact with your customer need to complement your other channels.

This goes farther than just having your company’s web address in small letters at the end of your product’s brochure. Instead, use the brochure to tell customers where they can find videos of your product in action. Use the web site to tell customers how they can order brochures. Make sure that you are telling the world one unified story about why they need your product.

Prospecting

Where will your next batch of customers be coming from? As the demographics of the people who buy our products start to change, we need to make sure that our product’s marketing messages change with them.

The baby boomers are starting to retire and their shoes will be filled by a mix of Gen-X and Gen-Y customers. Will the story that you’ve been telling about your product still resonate with them? Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and create a new story that will work for them.

What All Of This Means For You

It’s all too easy for product managers to create some form of product marketing and then move on to other more pressing things without giving it another thought. The reality is that marketing messages, like fashion, go out of style and need to be refreshed.

When you go to refresh your product’s marketing message, you need to be aware of the four marketing trends that are currently happening: targeting, measurement and analysis, integration, and prospecting.

Product managers who are able to craft a marketing campaign that leverages these four areas and does a good job of telling their product’s story will be the ones who are hailed as the most fashionable product managers out there.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question For You: What do you think the best way to measure a product’s marketing ROI is?

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