Latest Articles
Latest Articles
Common Sense
Common sense isn't so common in consumer technology. The year in review: The bigget book publishers decided together to raise prices on e-books, which, ridiculously, dramatically reduces their profits on each book, angers retailers AND consumers, and has drawn...
Don’t Let Engineers Create Your Marketing
Consumer electronics marketing beings with engineers, because they’re the ones who created the products. So, they’re the ones to introduce them to the rest of the company, which includes the marketers. As such, all marketing begins as highly technical and...
Everything You Need To Know About The Publishing Industry
The Wall Street Journal reports today in a front page story about the growing prices of electronic books. Turns out, the six biggest publishers have decided to set their own consumer e-book prices, rather than letting retailers like Amazon and Barnes & Noble...
Why Not Focus Your Marketing on People’s Lives?
Why? Why do you make the product or service you make? Is it to improve people’s lives? Then why don’t you focus on that in your marketing? Why focus on the technical specifications, when people don’t care and it doesn’t help sell your product? Why not focus on how...
Marketing Feel Good Factor
The best-selling consumer products make people feel good. Think iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and about nine months ago, Netflix. Before that, it was the iPod, TiVo and Walkman. These are and were the best-selling products of all time in the technology industry. They possess...
Don’t Forget About Talking To Prospective Customers
A lot of companies survey their customers. However, most companies don’t talk to their customers. I covered this in a recent post here. Another group of people companies don’t talk to enough is the competition’s customers. For example: If I’m Netflix, I’m talking to...
A Gift of Thanks
Instead of a lesson today, I would like to thank you. For reading. For writing back. For your kind words throughout the year. And for your business. In that spirit, last week, I offered you access to the full year of my new 2012 teleconference series at a greatly...
A Gift of Thanks
Instead of a lesson today, I would like to thank you. For reading. For writing back. For your kind words throughout the year. And for your business. In that spirit, last week, I offered you access to the full year of my new 2012 teleconference series at a...
Surveys Aren’t Conversations
The best marketing language and messaging comes from your customers. This means that time spent talking to customers is a wise investment. Talking to customers, not surveying them. A survey is fine — better than no communication at all, certainly — but a conversation...
Lessons From RIM
Let’s look at the lessons from Research in Motion’s recent struggles: RIM didn’t build on its strengths. People came to RIM for smart phones, but the company basically stopped developing them In order to concentrate on developing its disastrous Playbook tablet. In...