Stories over Specs: Real world stories about how your product helps real people are always more effective than specs and stats. Who is using your device? How do they use it? How does it improve their lives? Answer some of these kinds of questions in your marketing effectively, and you’ll connect deeply and effectively with consumers

Don’t compete on price: Compete on VALUE. Make consumers believe they’ll get more out of your products than the competition’s, and you’ll sell more. Think this model doesn’t work? May I present Apple. And TiVo. And Blackberry (and their expensive e-mail service plans). And SLR digital cameras. I can keep going.  This business is hard enough as it is. When you compete on price, you dig yourself into a no-profit hole from square one.

Box Matters: At the electronics store, a lot of consumers are making their buying decisions based on the information on your box. Unfortunately, 80% of your boxes do nothing to help you sell your product. Tell stories. Describe value. Talk about life improvement on your box. DO NOT talk about specs and stats. Don’t blast high-tech jiberish and acronyms from your box. It’s not going to help you at the all important consumer decision moment.

Manual Labor:  Many products come without manuals (sending someone to your Web site for the manual doesn’t count as a manual). Some come with posters that are decorated with pictures and diagrams but no words. Some manuals come in 17 languages. Most manuals are terrible at helping people actually improve their lives with your product. There’s no excuse for this. A passionate consumers is a step away from being an evangelist for you. Your manual is one of the first opportunities you have to interact with your customers and help them build passion around using your product.  Why not take advantage of this?

I recently bought a Canon video camera to capture the memories of my life, and my childrens’ once-in-a-lifetime moments. The manual is in 6 langauges. And while practical, it’s very technical, and not very easy to read.

Why not describe how five different consumers use this camera? Or perhaps give me five use cases, with details on what’s being done with the camera, what settings are being changed, and how it affected the people’s lives. That’s powerful.

Talk like Your Consumers Talk: Don’t talk about your gadgets like your engineers do. DO talk about your products like your target customers do. Listen to their words. How do they describe the value they get from your product? What do they say in online reviews? If you don’t have a product on the market yet, look at how people talk about similar products, even if they’re from competing manufacturers? Find a fast-selling product you want your device to aspire to, and use the words its happy consumers are using