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Category: Marketing
Aptitude vs. Attitude: HP Knows it Takes Consistency
HP watchers have been on quite a ride over the past few years. It’s been full of thrills, change, some major bumps, and, finally, a financial performance that has shareholders applauding. How did they get to this point? There are…
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Twittering Away
Spring brings the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive, film and music festivals and conferences to Austin, Texas. This year, the events also spawned new interest in Twitter, the first microblog and originally an R&D project of Odeo. Tech celebrities at…
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Web Strategy Needs to Create an Experience, not a Transaction
For each era, there are new rules. In the web world today, marketing online has new rules. Marketing is no longer about awareness online, but about creating an experience for the consumer or customer. I propose the new marketing goal…
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Digital Slices: Atomizing the Business of Segmentation
Segmentation has always been a key part of marketing. Sorting customers into appropriate segments allows business and marketing types to filter ideas, glean intelligence, set prices, and decide what to offer and what to toss. Segmentation also allows successful companies…
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Affinity is Different From Love
Affinity is described by Merriam-Webster as 1.) an attraction to or liking for something, and 2.) likeness based on relationship or causal connection.
Customers may like many different companies, but when it comes to affinity, there are few firms that make the grade. So what is it, this word affinity, and how is it different from love?
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Consumers to Corporations: Where’s My Experience?
With a print job deadline looming, I Googled on Kinko’s, figuring I’d get their number and call before I went over. Clicking again for more information, I was faced with the FedEx landing page. Suddenly, my services and solution were…
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The Devil Dials Prada
Knowing and understanding various ways to drive growth is tied directly to knowing what market (or segment) you’re serving. If Motorola, Nokia and other firms in the communications industry view themselves as handset makers, that’s actually just the start. For…
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Has Yahoo Lost Its Mojo?
The jury is still out. There are those who believe Yahoo has lost the clarity of vision needed to complete with a juggernaut like Google, and an increasingly hungry Microsoft. They’re convinced Yahoo has lost the pulse of its community….
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Who Controls Brands Now? The Rise of 360° Marketing
At the most recent meeting of the American Marketing Association, Ad Age reports, “The speakers at the podium kept changing, but their words remained the same. One after the other, the marketing world leaders took to the stage and declared…
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Cluetrain 2007: Ten Commandments for Communicating with People Online
Seven years ago, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger posted an online document called the Cluetrain Manifesto. It laid out 95 principles for communicating with customers online. The Manifesto created big stir, was signed by a lot…
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Understanding the full impact of the web
This will probably sound crazy, but despite all the hype about Web 2.0 and web startups, the most common mistake we see tech companies making with regard to the web is underestimating its long-term impact on their businesses. I’m not…
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Want to Get Motivated?
Want to get motivated, be faster, have a leaner organization and win? This 6-part series, published recently in MarketingProfs and complete for the first time here, is a workout for business and marketing professionals who are seriously committed to winning…
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Give Me That Thing Called Love
Do your customers look at your products with the same eager anticipation as they once did? Have your customers stayed “married” to you? Would you consider them still in love—or waiting it out until someone better comes along?
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Don’t Be the Dinosaur Brought Down by Mosquitoes
We work in Silicon Valley… and there are a few hundred new acronyms and technologies introduced each year that we need to understand. Being a trusted advisor means that clients need us to be really smart, on top of the latest trends, and interpreting what really matters so we can engage with them to design new, winning business strategies.
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Ecosystems: Build a strong(er) one
In grade school, one of the key determinants of popularity on the playground was how quickly you were selected when the time came to choose up sides for basketball, baseball or soccer. In the same way, the developing business model…
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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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Blue Plate Special, a la Carte, or All You Can Eat
Do you remember a time when most meals were the sit down, full-service, dessert-included kind? Even if all you wanted was a cup of soup or a simple salad, you were offered the blue plate special with everything at one price. Then the culinary folks came up with small plates, a la carte items, tastings, pairing menus, buffets and the like. Whew! Choices—who knew!
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Stepping up to the Microphone
Can you imagine what it would be like to charge 20-200% more than your competitor and own market category dominance? This final part of the Bootcamp series focuses on ways your organization can increase its economic power.
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Out With the Old Process, In With the New - Completely
Remember Webvan? Those pretty brown trucks. We saw one all scuffed up and worn down by the side of the road today and it perfectly symbolized the promise of an Internet-based grocery company that never made it. Lots of theories on its failure have been created, but I am always amazed that most people fail to recognize one of the biggest factors that doomed Webvan. It is a lesson that too few people seem to recognize when running their own business units.
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Metrics: Getting Rid of the Voodoo in Marketing
It’s time for marketers to get out of the realm of voodoo and spin, to create a more defensible position for budget dollars and develop a more secure “seat at the table” by being the business champions they are.
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Big Changes Coming to Retail Promotions
Changes to the retail landscape continue with OfficeMax and Dell being the latest companies announcing that they are getting out of the mail-in rebate business.
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New directions, new realities are the manifestation of people’s great ideas. People like you. This month, the Rubicon team has several new ideas for you to consider. Mike Mace, one of the best thinkers on industry and competitive moves, predicts…
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You Have Less Credibility
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but you have less credibility than you once did. It’s nothing personal, mind you. There’s something bigger going on that’s impacting all high-tech companies. Because of it, you’ll want…
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Rebates, Redemptions and Breakage: Some Things you Should Know About Mail-in Rebates
It’s hard to make broad generalizations about rebate programs because most organizations refuse to share their data with researchers or peers — if they even have good data. As a result, many marketers base decisions on a set of widespread,…
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Sure, marketing’s a conversation. And a relationship. By calling marketing "a conversation,” there’s an implication of a sort of egalitarian society. It sounds good, and feels easy. I’m wondering, then, if marketing IS a conversation, who gets to choose the…
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Fighting With Four Swords
Rubicon has a defense practice, which we would love to call "Fighting With Four Swords: The Art of Competitive Play." Unfortunately, that’s too long to put on our business cards along with our other three practices (define, design, optimize). So…
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Marketing is Reality
In a recent meeting with a client, we brainstormed on what to do about an upcoming product announcement by Microsoft. The new Microsoft product will substantially increase the competitive pressure on our client, and in typical Redmond fashion the press…
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“Be always at war with your vices,” was an axiom of Benjamin Franklin’s. With it, he encouraged all of us to be better than the person we were yesterday, to rise above our history and our failings. Worthy advice. In…
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What We’re Thinking Now
Win Markets Mobile Opportunity…
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Insights & Ideas Wanted
This issue marks 6 months of Rubicon’s Insight newsletter. As I look back, I see the depth of content getting richer and more impactful, with clean graphics that support our thinking. That’s what I believe. What I want to know…
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Getting the Low Down that Matters
Do you know what your customers are thinking? Do they love you or hate you? Are they in the market considering other options right this very minute? If you’re like most tech executives, you can answer that question only vaguely….
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Is Loyalty About the “First Click,” Or Does That Happen Much Later?
That’s the question that’s been banging around our brains since reading an article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal on Microsoft and PC makers negotiating on the “first-boot sequence.” The article argues that in the first five…
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Customization Marketing Done Wrong
When Mike Mace joined Rubicon, the rest of us got a chance to see a grown man wear funky white tennis shoes to work, and well, get away with it. Mike has been wearing Jack Purcell shoes as long as…
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The Difference Between Google and Yahoo, and What It Means to You
The press sometimes depicts Google and Yahoo as head to head competitors, but if you work closely with the two companies you’ll notice substantial differences between them. These differences affect the sorts of partnerships you can create with them, and…
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Sequoia VC Evangelizes ‘AskJeeves Meets Google’ Market Trend
Mark Kvamme, one of the true blue-bloods of Silicon Valley, recently shared his take on what will fuel the next wave of technology innovations. Mark, as some of you might know is the former CEO of CKS, and is a…
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Microsoft to Use Licensing to Drive Enterprise Penetration
Microsoft just announced changes intended to reconcile new technology and old licensing models, effective December 1. Microsoft will now calculate the cost of server software products by the number of running instances of that product on any given server, rather…
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Licensing Trends: Software Vendors vs. Enterprises
While vendors are trying to move customers to term licensing (subscriptions), enterprise customers continue to sing the praises of concurrency due to its cost savings and easier management. According to research by Macrovision, subscriptions or term licensing will be offered…
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Channel Optimization: Are you paying your channel too much?
Given the constant squeeze on end-user prices, increased channel competition, and investor demands for steady—if not increasing—earnings, it is hard to believe that many high-tech companies have an untapped source of additional profits on current business. In a recent worldwide…
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Rubicon in the News
Nilofer Merchant will be speaking at SoftSummit on October 11 as part of a panel on Innovation. Learn more. Nilofer Merchant’s article on Value Innovation is a featured in the September 26 Sand Hill.com newsletter. You can read the article…
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