Latest Articles
Latest Articles
The Problem’s with RIM’s Playbook
The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg reviewed Research In Motion's new Playbook tablet device today. Interesting device, new operating system, nice screen, and this shocker: On a Blackberry tablet, there is no email app. There is no calendar. There is no notes app....
Simplify Relentlessly
This week's thinking launch point: My most successful clients excel at simplifying their marketing, messaging and PR. As an industry, we have trouble with this kind of simplification. Consumer electronics products are complex and the engineers who make them are...
Creative Aggressiveness
Netflix recently announced that it has won the rights to a new drama, called House of Cards, starring Kevin Spacey. The little DVD rental company outbid cable giants HBO and AMC for 26 episodes. Of course, little Netflix now enjoys 20 million subscribers, while HBO...
Good Marketing Is Common Sense
The more I work organizations on focusing their marketing around the lifestyles of their customers, the more these two things become crystal clear: Common sense is a rare commodity inside large, complex companies. The best answers are often common sense. But you get...
Apple Said Yes
So long as we're on the topic of staying special, consider this recent short piece about Apple, from MacRumors: [Apple's] focus this week has been to troubleshoot all the iPad 2s that customers are returning to the stores. One iPad came back with a post it note on it...
How to Stay Special
You don't have to purchase a behemoth competitor for tens of millions of dollars to stay special in the minds of consumers. In fact, there's a lot you can do that costs very little: Provide terrific customer service. I called Apple's customer support line with a...
Staying Special: Why AT&T Acquired T-Mobile
I was doing an interview this morning with Smart Money magazine about AT&T's purchase of T-Mobile, and wanted to elaborate a bit on my take here. I believe that this acquisition has a lot to do with AT&T losing exclusivity on the iPhone. For five years,...
Change Your Early Adopters
I've often said that technology makers should avoid early adopters, because the switch to mainstream consumers is nearly impossible. Geoffrey Moore called the distance between early adopter customers and the mainstream a chasm. But I think these two groups are on...
Death by Differentiation
I have three clients in the consumer electronics space right now that are differentiating themselves to death. These companies have focused their marketing on smaller, peripheral features which differentiate them from the competition. So that instead of focusing their...
Monday Marketing Minute — 5 Questions to Ask Customers
As if by rule, consumer electronics companies don't talk to their customers. Not really talk. When I say talk, I don't mean focus groups or surveys or anything else that's done with multiple consumers at once. I mean detailed, qualitative conversations. One-on-one,...