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Start With The Customer Product Marketing Podcast #8 – Getting Ready for 2012

November 16, 2011 By

start with the customer marketing podcast on product marketing and product managementIn this episode of the Start with the Customer Podcast, I am honored to be joined by Paul Young, Pragmatic Marketing Instructor and founder of Austin  ProductCamp and Scott Sehlhorst, of Tyner Blain consulting.

We started the discussion on the topic of Product Camps. During the last year, Paul had the opportunity to attend several camps across the country and shared some of his observations on what makes ProductCamp special and how it is evolving. Next, we talked about getting ready for 2012. Scott shared his agile approach to self improvement and Paul discussed using 2012 as a milestone to improve your product manager skills – especially soft skills like leadership and storytelling.

As a final note, Paul shared that Pragmatic Marketing is now conducting its 2012 Annual Product Management and Marketing survey. You can take the current survey here and see the results of the past 11 years of data on the Pragmatic site. A very cool resource for product managers and marketers!

I hope you enjoy the show and would love to hear your feedback!

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes or from TalkShoe.

Show Notes:

Runtime:  45 minutes

  • What is a product camp?
  • The benefits of attending
  • The competitiveness of product camp sessions
  • What’s next for product camps?
  • How do they need to evolve – 101 content and what’s next?
  • Getting ready for 2012
  • Agile self improvement and prioritizing
  • Working to make your strengths stronger
  • Tactical goals – a book a week?
Filed Under: Podcast Marketing Podcast, Product Camp

If you Want an Audience Start a Fight

November 2, 2011 By

product marketing lesson from Netflix vs. Vudu

I recently caught this messaging from online video provider, VUDU. From it, I think there are several lessons right out of Trout and Reis’s 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing. The main one that jumps out is the Law of Opposites (Law #9), “If you are aiming for second place, your strategy is determined by the leader.”

VUDU needs to differentiate itself from the online movie market leader, Netflix, if it hopes to carve out a niche. Netflix currently has the most eyeballs and awareness when it comes to online videos. Without having a differentiated strategy, VUDU is just another online video site without much of a reason for consumers to notice.

Kudos to the team for highlighting the 2555 day advantage they have with new releases over Netflix. That’s a message that will get people to pay attention.

Now, the next question is, do they have the Resources (Law #22) to change Perceptions (Law #4) when it comes to them being the site with the “newest” releases for watching movies online? An even more important question, is this a sustainable position?

What do you think?

Filed Under: Product Marketing, Product Messaging Tagged With: , , ,

16 Reasons Why You Should Read the End of Business as Usual

October 19, 2011 By

Everything is changing and this is having a major impact on how businesses need to operate in the era of the connected consumer.

If you are trying to figure out what’s going on and how you can best adapt, Brian Solis’s new book, The End of Business as Usual, is a great place to start.

Thanks to Brian’s early release on Twitter, I was able to purchase an advance copy and spent the weekend reading it. There is a lot of great advice in the book of how to take advantage of this changing landscape and several outstanding case studies of companies that are leading the way. The major point being that you will either learn to adapt or be left behind by those that do (to accentuate this point, make sure to check out Brian’s End of Business as Usual teaser video).

I put together a few of my favorite quotes from the book in a presentation to share. Enjoy the presentation and grab a copy of the book!

The End of Business as Usual

View more presentations from josh duncan

 

Filed Under: Product Strategy, Worth the Read Tagged With: , , , ,

Getting Your Customers to Stop Thinking of You

October 14, 2011 By

Dr. Art Markman talking about making your company a habit

This week I had the privilege of attending Forrester’s Tech Marketing Roundtable here in Austin, TX. As usual, Forrester put together a great discussion with fellow product marketers and shared some fascinating insights.

Forrester also invited a guest presenter for the discussion, Dr. Art Markman from the University of Texas. Dr. Markman’s topic of discussion was on how to make your company a habit (Side note -keep an eye out for Dr. Markman’s upcoming book,Thinking Smart. Sounds like a great read for Product Marketers.)

Your first question may be, why should you care about your customer’s habits?  Here’s one good reason from Dr. Markman:

In the end, the importance of habits inverts a common wisdom about successful businesses. You may think that you want your customers to think about you often. In fact, you often want your customers to act without thinking.

Customers have habits that involve routines and these routines don’t change easily. This can be a tremendous advantage if you can become part of their natural activities. This also means that if you are trying to replace a competitor’s product or service, you can’t assume that just because you have better features that  a customer will naturally switch.

I can’t think of a better example to this point than Microsoft’s attempt to get people to stop searching on Google and give Bing a try. Microsoft has done an admirable job trying to differentiate their product through design and around certain features (e.g. an innovative travel search) and has launched a multi-million dollar advertising campaign to drive awareness.

The cost of trying to replace a user’s default search? Right now, it  is estimated that Microsoft is losing over $1 billion dollars a quarter with Bing and has only reduced Google’s market share by two-tenths of a percentage point from the 65% it held when Bing debuted.

So, how do you make your company or product a habit?  Here are a few starting points from Dr. Markman:

  • Find your customer’s habits and insert yourself – once you know what they are actually doing you can design for their behavior.
  • Find a way to disrupt existing consumer behavior so they will consider something new – sometimes you need to disrupt their habits in order to get them to consider a new choice.
  • Don’t surprise people when it comes to change, let them know the site changes are coming –  as opposed to Facebook always surprising users with new features.
  • Look for the little things you can do to make your product become a habit – we often point out the big features but it can be the small things that make your product ‘automatic’ in your customer’s minds.
It is worth noting that finding existing habits is not a trivial task. Asking customers what they do will lead you down a different path than what they really are doing. The best advice, “Don’t just do something, stand there and watch” what they are actually doing to gather insights into their product habits.

In the end, finding out what your customers are doing without thinking can help make your product a better experience and make it even harder for competitors to replace you.

Filed Under: Product Strategy Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Start With The Customer Product Marketing Podcast #7 – Introduction to Buyer Personas

October 11, 2011 By

start with the customer marketing podcast on product marketing and product managementIn this episode of the Start with the Customer Podcast, I am honored to be joined by Jennifer Doctor, product expert and founder of Minnesota ProductCamp and Scott Sehlhorst, of Tyner Blain consulting.

The plan for this call was to discuss marketing personas. During our pre-recording prep call, we quickly realized that not only did we have a mountain of material to cover but we also all had opinions and stories to share. So, we decided that we could either talk for a couple of hours or split the topic into multiple conversations.

As much as we know how everyone loves personas, we decided to break-up the conversation so it is easier to digest. For this part, we focused on introducing buyer personas and will continue the conversation on the next podcast.

I hope you enjoy the show and would love to hear your feedback!

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes.

Show Notes:

Runtime:  32 minutes

  • What our personas and why should I care?
  • Why should you use them?
  • Other personas types – user personas (post from Scott on how to create user personas)
  • Let’s talk real world examples
  • Marketing segments vs. personas (post from Jennifer on the difference between VoC and Voice of the Market)
  • How many people do you need to interview to produce personas?
  • When can you tell a personas needs to be refreshed? (post from Jennifer on the importance of listening)
A few more resources on Personas:
Filed Under: Podcast Marketing Podcast, Product Management, Product Marketing Tagged With: , , ,

How Not to Start Your Story Courtesy of Buick

October 3, 2011 By

When it comes to introducing your product to a potential customer, you have one shot to start things off on the right foot. This is your chance to start your story, create awareness and generate some excitement. However, the last thing you want to do is set the stage with a giant question mark.

I caught a Buick commercial over the weekend (video below) that I think highlights exactly what you don’t want to do. Before the ad gets going, the audio begins with these three words,

“With AVAILABLE features….“.

When I hear this, I assume that whatever comes next is an upsell offering and I immediately start to wonder what’s wrong with the base? If they have to start with the upsell just to get my attention, then the base product must not be very interesting or must have something wrong with it, right?

Or could it be that they hoped I missed this subtlety and that I will assume that you get all these great features for their low entry price hence making the product seem more attractive?

No matter what they were hoping to have happen, the result is that they have begun their story on a sour note that may result in a lack of future consideration.

First impressions count. Don’t blow it by sending a mixed message out of the gate.

Filed Under: Product Marketing Tagged With: , , , ,

13 Tweetable Insights from WikiBrands

September 26, 2011 By

Over the last month, I have been doing a lot of research on brand development, customer engagement, and community building. After going through half a dozen of the latest books on the subject, one has really stood out – Wikibrands by Sean Moffitt and Mike Dover.

I like how the book covers strategies and tactics along with plenty of example of businesses that are succeeding by co-creating branding efforts with their most engaged customers. If you are looking to build a brand community or for ways to improve your social business, this book has a lot to offer.

The following are some quick insights from the book that I wanted to share (format inspired by Dharmesh Shah’s review of the Lean Startup):

  • The litmus test for a thriving business in this marketplace is, “Does your brand deliver genuine participation?”
  • How businesses create value through brands will be transformed by the relationships and experiences these businesses have with their customers.
  • In today’s economy, building brand value has become more a function of what you actually do rather than what you say you do.
  • Wikibranding is about something larger than social media or new marketing, it’s really about “social business” – a business imperative.
  • Your CEO really wants to lead a wikibrand; he or she just doesnt know it yet.
  • Wikibranding requires a shift in company focus from top-down consumer communication to consumer collaboration.
  • The companies and brands that lead in customer collaborative spaces tend to have a driving ethos that makes their people and fans go the extra mile.
  • Good wikikbrand efforts represent a mixture of an organization’s perspective and a mosaic of customer views.
  • Language and content are the special ingredients that grease the wikibrand conveyor belt.
  • Big companies are like the high school prom queen - the don’t flirt with anybody because they don’t think they have to.
  • Once you have attracted from the world out there, the influence meter starts over.
  • The best customer communities are neither brand dictatorships nor radical experiments in open source development.
  • Wikibranding cannot be a siloed functional exercise.

Would love to hear if any of these points resonate with you or any others to add?

 

Image Credit: ausnahmezustand

Filed Under: Product Marketing, Product Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question

September 21, 2011 By

Having a system in place to capture customer feedback is essential to understanding how your customers feel about your product offering. I am a fan of the Net Promoter feedback approach and would recommended the book on the topic, the Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld and Rob Markey.

That’s why I was excited to hear that they are releasing a new version of the book and were recently on the HBR IdeaCast podcast to talk about the update. While the basis of their framework, “Would you recommend us to a friend?“, hasn’t changed,  it has been over five years since the first edition of the book. The 2.0 version not only addresses the amplification of feedback through social channels, but also incorporates the evolution of the framework by companies that have deployed it as part of their feedback efforts.

The podcast is a great introduction to the Net Promoter methodology and well worth the twenty-minute listen. However, there was one really great point that I wanted to highlight from the discussion.

Here’s what Rob Markey said in response to the question on how companies turn their customers into promoters,

..by instilling in their employees not only the goal of creating more promoters and less detractors, but also putting in their hands the tools to do that.

That’s such an outstanding point. It is one thing to capture the input. It is another to track it as a trend over time. And it is a completely different thing to empower your team to make the changes necessary to improve.

You often hear marketers give advice such as,”always listen to your customers”, but that’s only part of the equation. The real trick is having the ability to act on the feedback before it is too late.

So, are you listening or are you listening and acting?

Image Credit:  sean dreilinger

Filed Under: Customer Insight Tagged With: , , ,

Start With The Customer Marketing Podcast #6 – Drinking Your Own Champaign

September 18, 2011 By

After a summer hiatus, the Start with the Customer Podcast is back! In this episode I am honored to be joined by Larry McKeogh, product management expert and founder of Rocky Mountain ProductCamp and Scott Sehlhorst, of Tyner Blain consulting.

We started off the call catching up on the lastest news from ProductCamp Utah, followed by a discussion on the different ProductCamp approaches. We spent some time talking about Larry’s presentation from PCamp Utah and the skills necessary for being a successful product manager. From there we continued on the topic of “The Power of the Customer” and where crowdsourcing can play a part in product development. We concluded the call with some parting shots on the latest news from Yahoo and the challenges of managing a turnaround without a clear strategy.

I hope you enjoy the show and would love to hear your feedback!

You can listen here:

or download from iTunes.

Show Notes:

Runtime:  46 minutes

Filed Under: Podcast Marketing Podcast Tagged With: , , , , ,

7 Reasons Why All Product Marketers Should Write

September 14, 2011 By

Jason Baptiste recently wrote a wonderful post on the OnStartUps blog titled, Why Every Entrepreneur Should Write and 9 Tips To Get Started. While the post was aimed at the startup/entrepreneurial world, I think it can be easily extended to all product marketers. Being an effective communicator is a core marketing skill and an even more important one for product marketers.

Being able to develop a story and then translate it across all the various channels – media, web, blogs, social – is what in my mind sets apart a good product marketer from and a great one.

Following Jason’s 7 entrepreneurial reasons for writing, here’s my take on why all product marketers should write:

  • You Will Meet Other Smart People – this one is pretty straight forward but may be a surprise for some. Writing and publishing online gives you a chance to interact with people and build relationships beyond your standard network. Bottom line, having a diverse network of smart marketers is always a good thing.
  • Your Experiences Will Provide Insightful Knowledge – the most successful marketers I know have had two things in common. They never stopped learning and they were always generous with advice. We all have successes and failures that others can learn from and sharing helps the overall marketing community.
  • You Will Establish Domain Expertise - no question about it this is an important one. Whether you on the executive path or just getting started, there is now an expectation that you will have a “digital ready” skill set. Case in point, Hubspot’s recent article, How to crush the competition with inbound marketing, calls out the need for hiring digital ready marketers. 
  • It Helps Build Dedication - Unfortunately, writing is hard. By dedicating the time necessary to write, rewrite, and publish, you are building a habit. This is a step towards becoming a life long learner and a better product marketer.
  • Your Communication Skills Will Get Exponentially Better – how can you not want to be a better communicator? Whether it is trying to draft powerful product messaging or to communicate with your sales team or customers, the better the writing the better the results. In a recent HBR article, Eight Ways to Communicate Your Strategy More Effectively, Georgia Everse points out that not all not all messages are created equal and that you must choose different approaches based on your purpose. Wether you are trying to inspire, educate, or enforce, your message must be “simple, but deep in meaning.” The only way to get better at writing these types of messages is to practice. I can’t think of a better way to sum it up than with this thought on communications from Simon Sinek, 

  • You Will Build An Audience That Will Give You Candid Feedback – have a new idea or a concept you would like help developing?As you start to build a following, you will more opportunity to bounce ideas off your audience and ask for help.
  • It is A Rapid Accelerator Of Serendipity – you never know when that random comment or feedback could turn into a something more – maybe a new friend, maybe a speaking gig, maybe a new career opportunity. All I know is that if you don’t get out there and do the work, the odds of something happening are greatly reduced. 

Last, it is worth pointing out that by writing and publishing, you continually get a chance for others to get to know you and see what a good communicator you are. You might really be a good writer, but without something to point, you are asking people to take your word for instead of being able to see your words on their own.

Image credit:  aless&ro
Filed Under: feature, Product Marketing, Product Strategy Tagged With: , , , , ,
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