Kick-Ass

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Journal Archive

Select A Category BrandingBusiness StrategiesConsumer Behavior / MarketsCreating New MarketsEmerging Business ModelsEntrepreneurship & Game of BusinessGo-to-Market StrategiesHigh-Tech Case StudiesInnovationLearningMarketingRandom IdeasStrategy as a ProcessTweetsValues and All things Good

Consumer Behavior / Markets

Some good reads …

I’d like to simply point you to some good articles with little commentary that I think are worth noting. Here, a great visual of every product Apple ever made since 1976. I became a customer in 1984, worked there from…
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The guides

I met last week with this incredibly zany guy named Nick Hayes of Influencer 50. His firm understands influencer marketing at a very deep level and he’s now in the Bay Area establishing a presence here. In doing so, he’s…
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Google is your UI

Let me paint a picture of the world today as a company sees it and then again as a customer experiences it. Company View: A company, say yours, has a “home page” where they organize the user experience so users…
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3,000 marketing messages per day

Today’s consumer receives over 3,000 marketing messages per day. That’s what Maritz Dialogue Marketing group says. Start counting and see how many you come up with in 1 hour. I think it holds true. Now the question I want to…
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Mobile Users non Loyal … Explained

Is anyone surprised by this content: Loyalty To Wireless Carriers Is Hard To Come By. By Antone Gonsalves TechWeb.com Two-thirds of U.S. adult mobile phone users comparison shop for wireless carriers, with more than two out of five doing so…
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Top 10 Trends for 2007

For work this month, I wrote some “top 10 trends” for what my team and I think should matter to those high-tech firms that want to win… details of all of these are available here. Top 10 Trends for 2007…
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Power of the Influencer — Who is Yours?

When you want to buy a new bbq, who do you ask? If you want to know which smartphone to buy, what blog do you go to? And if you’re looking for a school to enroll your kid, whose advice…
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Symbiotic Relationships in Play

One of the fundamental truths about the high technology market today, is that consumers have tremendous power. Market power used to be much like a big castle surrounded by high walls and a moat to control access — Dell, Intel,…
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Web 3.0 & the Real Market Requirement

You know the really cool thing about a summit full of smart people is that it causes a dialogue in the room and online. So what’s next on the consumer market front? Check out this article and the related Carr…
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Blurred at Web 2.0 Summit

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley is the only speaker I know that can get away with delivering slide content in such a fast pace that not only can you barely follow, but you can barely connect notes. But she is…
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Go-to-market Mix in the Web 2.0 Era

It’s been 40+ years since E. Jerome McCarthy published Basic Marketing, the business book that introduced the “4 Ps” (product, price, place/distribution and promotion) to the world. While the categories still hold true, what was once considered the leading edge…
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Consumer technology matters but only to a few…

Consumer technology matters, sure. But remember that most of consumer technology stuff is something people made up and then found someone willing to buy. I profess to have done this with web authoring software, and countless other tools. Consumer marketing…
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Do you know what drives purchase?

Consumer goods like P&G have always invested in knowing how their sales and marketing activities drive purchase. See this article from July 10th, by Ellen Byron featuring James Stengel who is the Global Marketing Officer for P&G. In it, Mr….
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Give me that thing called [customer] Love

Just got published on MarketingProfs for what will be a six-part series or “Summer Bootcamp for Business”. For those of you that aren’t familiar yet with MarketingProfs.com, it’s a great source for content and real-know from people in the field….
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Solutions Drive Sales

Check out this video. It was made using a Logitech webcam, and uses visual effects that come with the camera. Supposedly, it has triggered a big run on Logitech cameras. It shows that the solution (even if it’s silly —…
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Sparked!

Last night, a little venue called Spark was held. The notion was to connect really smart people - who are down-to-earth good leaders in high-tech - to learn from our firm the latest on transforming business and marketing models,…
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Talk with, not At

An industry commentary on how marketing in high-tech is changing. I think there’s way more ahead than banner ads and search word optimization when it comes to high-tech consumer marketing. I think that we will move from non-personal ways of advertising to customer engaged ways of connecting. I have provided some examples as illustrations and then provided what I think it means.
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Video, video — oh how you’ve changed

A brainiac Rubicon teammate, Bruce LaFetra did a commentary in our last newsletter on the changing drivers of digital video capture. The premise is that the 15 second shots of video capture on digital cameras made more sense to…
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The Customer Experience: The Design Moment of Truth

Business 2.0 ran an article this month on their ‘2nd annual bottom line design awards’. The article promised to “go beyond surface beauty to single out objects that look good not just in pictures, but also on their makers’ income…
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Why company blogging really makes sense

In these days where execs get so far removed from consumers that the only time they see them is when they are behind the glass walls of a focus group forum, I think blogging really makes sense. With it,…
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Genuine vs. Canned Customer Nurturing

Ever see those banners that say ‘we love our customers’. Do you ever believe them? Customer relationships are more than good intentions. It means setting the intention to pamper good customers and investing in the technology and processes to make…
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Community is what we all seek

Just finished a book, Plainsong, that my stepdaughter lent me. It’s an interesting story of 2 brother farmers, a pregnant high-schooler, two young boys deserted by their mother, and so on. Good book and well written. The richness of the…
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B2C Marketing Has Its Nuances

Typical business sales process will involve several steps including: research, product application, and consideration. Consumers respond to simple, clear messages. Businesses are full of mavens. They are hungry for content and if a vendor produces a 20 page piece of collateral, business folks will actually search for the relevant information and plug away to understand the product. Consumers are nearly opposite; they are hungry for ease. Even the sales model is radically different. A typical sales process in business has multi-step meaning see a brochure, seek a meeting, get a demo, perform a trial and then get a proposal. Buy one and see if you need to buy more. Consumer sales process is much more about connecting to the consumer, and positioning products well to communicate the benefits; at the time the consumer is looking for that. Most electronics or technology products have a sales cycle of less than 30 days from awareness, to consideration, to purchase. So in a business marketing setting, you can afford to do multiple sets of features and solutions and take time to get the message accurately and richly across. Consumer marketing has to capture the key ideas into a simple phrase or pitch. Simple, simple, simple. Getting that pitch to be both simple and differentiated is elegance.
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