Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us is a good book, short, quick read with some interesting ideas.
There’s a lot on leadership, naturally, and on how leadership does not need to come from, or lead to, the top of the org chart. Leadership is a choice you make not a title you are promoted into.
From a product marketing perspective however the big idea in the book is that tribe dynamics in the internet age is changing the way we all consume. Seth proposes that we are no longer purchasing average products from companies that don’t care.
He proposes that we now purchase in two distinct ways: Read the rest of this entry »
Denial – it was a very crappy audio stream from the PR event, I probably missed the good stuff
Anger – it’s a f@#king ipod with no pen, no new gesture magic, no camera and a shitty single thread OS! It’s not even a good replacement for the 5 year old G4 powerbook I use to surf the web when watching TV!
Bargaining – but it’s only $499, perhaps it’s a good trade off, I don’t do serious work as I watch the TV, some facebook, some reading, some email.. and if I want to watch a youtube video I can always open my old powerbook.. SHIT!
Depression – I was finally going to get a tablet computer; powerful, capable, new input paradigms, how could the Apple product marketing gods screw this up so bad?
Acceptance – oh well; it’s the prettiest netbook in the world and will be a massive hit. I’ll just squeeze another year of life out of the powerbook. I hear version 2 will have a camera, hand writing recognition and change the way we use computers!
If you look at the leading technology companies in almost any industry you will notice that they are (or were) end users of their technology. They don’t require empathy to understand the customer, they are the customer.
Its a powerful competitive advantage.
The NxN team was not a game development team. It was primarily a group of database and application programmers. We prided ourselves on being specialists and being very customer driven. We spent almost all our time adding the features customers asked for.
Task and project management was a good example; many customers asked for it so we added some rudimentary functionality and asked for feedback. The problem was that the implementation was shallow, enough functionality to say we had task management but not robust enough to be “used in anger”. Read the rest of this entry »
In Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync? Seth Godin argues against of the “social media will save you” attitude that is so much the flavor of the day.
If your business model is not keeping pace with your ever changing market a blog or Facebook page won’t change that.
The title of the book encapsulates the message; adding the whipped cream (blog) cherry (Facebook page) and sprinkles (tweets) to an old business model (meatballs) you end up with something worse than good old-fashioned meatballs.
If your business’s performance is trending down, not a dip, a trend; then you need to take a hard look at your complete go-to-market strategy and perhaps question a lot of the “how it’s done” in your company and industry.
If that sounds like where you are, take the time to read this book. Like all Seth’s books it’s a quick and entertaining read that will get you thinking about where you need to start.
Or you could just fire the sales team and hire a new bunch.. that always works.
Over the last few weeks (with a crunch in the last three days thus no posts) I have been working on revitalizing the go-to-market strategy for an old product.
Regular readers will know I am a big believer in brands and products that embrace what truly makes them special. Products that focus on pleasing some of the people all of the time, not all of the people some of the time.
As always, it’s been a fun exercise and one every product owners should be going through as they look to grasp the opportunities every downturn creates.
So having finished the first iteration I thought I would outline my five simple steps to revitalizing a go-to-market strategy. Read the rest of this entry »
I occasionally review books if there worth sharing. In 2009 I found myself reading blogs more than books so I thought, why not write a few blog reviews.
Eric (@neologyconcepts) is a prolific copywriter, a published fiction writer, a good friend and in 2009 he started blogging. I like to think I bullied him into it but that’s probably not true.
Going to a Show? Got a Message?
This one is close to my hart. Trade shows are critical to B2B relationships even in todays social media world but so many companies just “wing it” without putting together a strategy. Whats your take home message for message fatigued attendees and why will they actually take it home? Read the rest of this entry »
He stands at the front of the room as artists and programmers enter; greets them and hands out business cards. Laptop, projector, PowerPoint, product, ready.
Five slides about the company, its history and why his team are passionate about what they do. What he is selling is trust; he needs to demonstrate his company is worthy.
The audience is board Read the rest of this entry »
