Back in the late 1990s, when I was a Product Manager back at MCI, we implemented a Customer Council - bringing a couple hundred of our corporate customers together, breaking them into groups based on the products that they were either using or were in the process of evaluating and getting honest feedback and direction. No sales people were allowed in the building - just Product Managers (and the occasional Product Marketing person). We would talk about what we had recently implemented, what was on the roadmap and then we'd stop and listen. Really listen.
 read more »

You’re in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

You’re in a maze of twisty passages, all alike.

Have you ever felt that way at a high tech trade show? In no time flat almost every booth looks the same and almost every sales pitch sounds like the voice of Charlie Brown’s teacher in a Peanuts cartoon. What does that tell you about the state of marketing in most high tech companies? Customers shouldn’t have to work that hard to grasp a positioning message and clearly understand what makes a product different and compelling.  read more »

The last five years have witnessed fundamental shifts in customer buying patterns which have changed the marketing strategies employed by companies today. Traditional advertising in print publishing and audio / visual media like radio, newspapers, magazines and television are slowly diminishing. The emergence of satellite and internet radio is negatively affecting radio advertisements. Pay-per-click online advertising from Google, Yahoo and MSN are eroding newspaper and magazine advertisement revenue.  read more »

Most technology marketing people I know love lots of data.  Most are engineers by training, so they’ve been taught to crave it.  I’m an engineer too, but somewhere along my career journey I stepped out of bounds.  I still crave data.  I just don’t trust most of it anymore.  Especially marketing data.  read more »

Typically, when a company goes through a big acquisition, you end up with either a hybrid hyphenated name or a new name all together - or the acquired company just gets enveloped in the new parent's name:

De-Branding

• Genesys + VoiceGenie = Genesys
• Verizon + MCI = Verizon
• Intervoice + Edify = Intervoice

Hyphenated names:

• Alcatel + Lucent = Alcatel-Lucent
• St. Paul Insurance + Travelers = St. Paul Travelers Group

New Names:  read more »