Archives for the 'Product Marketing' Category
Ankle Biters: Quarterbacking Tradeshows
We’ve talked about tradeshows on before during one of Pragmatic’s BlogFests. Tradeshows can be nasty ankle biters because of the amount of pre-work required. Depending on the size of your organization, where Product Management falls, and how technical your Marcomm and Product Marketing teams are, you’ll have varying levels of involvement with tradeshows. [...]
Interviewed!
Derek Morrison is running a neat series of interviews with other Product Management bloggers. I was his 4th interview, and as usual I wrote too much for just one post, forcing him to break it into three parts. That’s what I refer to as brute force marketing - overwhelm your audience with content until they [...]
Unintended Consequences
When developing requirements for a new product or service, it is common to create personas that define the user and buyer of your products. A “Joe” persona might define a 30-year old IT contractor who floats between multiple job locations and communicates heavily using SMS texting and needs mobile web access. The Apple iPhone might [...]
Just Demo It!
Pragmatic Marketing asked me to participate in their first BlogFest on the topic of demoing at trade shows, which Steve Johnson kicked off with his article Why Demo at Trade Shows?
What is a trade show? Breaking down the word, a trade show is the place where you show your trade. If you [...]
Filling a Niche
If you are a small company, you must be a niche player. It is impossible extremely implausible for most startups to introduce a product that can fill a need for a very wide market. This is because if a market is wide enough that one product can fill its needs, chances are good that someone [...]
Relishing the Role of the Underdog
Most don’t expect innovation from a phone company. AT&T, Verizon, Sprint are all names that carry the baggage of poor customer service, increasing “fees,” and undecipherable bills. On the rare occasions they do try to innovate, like AT&T with the iPhone, it’s the hanging on the afterglow of a hardware company like Apple. [...]
Positioning Tools
Positioning is a funny thing. Something about that word makes people roll their eyes as if to say “there go the marketing people again…” Those people are wrong - positioning is not fluffy marketing-speak. It is important, and as a product manager you are CEO of your product, so you had better [...]
Book It!
I maintain a bunch of links to other blogs on my sidebar. Someone coming here for the first time might assume that I just went out and gathered the top bloggers in the space and did reciprocal links to bump up the “authority” of my site, but that is not the case. I [...]
Solving a Latent Need: Nike+iPod
As Product Managers, we know that what makes a product really powerful is when it solves a clear problem for the customer. We discover these problems through research and living in customers shoes as much as possible. If we do it right, it’s not hard to discover new features, product line extensions, and [...]
What a Product Doesn’t Say
The next time you are watching TV, pay close attention when the commercials start to roll. Advertising is generally dependent on the viewer having their brain switched off and not thinking critically about whatever they are hawking, which makes for an interesting game. I’ll begin with the car dealership ads, because they’re the [...]
