Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category

Why You Want a Prize (Really)

February 23rd, 2011

Why is it that even after 30, 50 or 80 years we still admire feature films that have won an OSCAR? Is it because they’re really good (by whatever measures) or because they’ve won a prize, or maybe in between? When we look at all the other films from any given year, we’re not feeling the same way, are we? You’ll always find some flaw in them, and sometimes, you’ll even find the whole thing shabby, having poor image quality, bad sound design, a cheap score, what-have-you.

But in the day the film was new, it was different. And that’s what we forget when looking at whatever product, but especially ones that are more or less art — not only are they influenced by fashion trends of their genre, but of course also of production standards at their time. Today your $99 mobile phone shoots video with better image quality than a camera that cost $50,000 twenty years back. Today your $300 PC can (technically) help you create a more lavish sound design than a full-fledged studio in the mid-90s.

This applies for other areas as well. Only eight years back, you cold earn a lot of respect with web programmers when you developed your own CMS. Not today, because it’s an unnecessary effort — there’s more than a dozen free systems out there, why start from scratch?

How about your work? Are the things you’ve done and achieved worth acknowledging by today’s standards? Has the bar that used to protect your field of expertise lowered in a way that pretty much anyone can compete with you? And has the bar that marks outstanding results raised so high you hardly come close? And which is worse?

When more or less everything becomes ubiquitous, when everything is always available in one form or another, when scarcity is not a problem to deal with anymore, you’re way better off when you have managed to earn a prize with what you done, no matter when, it won’t really lose any of its shine. Even better when this one prize has a tradition and still exists today. It helps you stand out, makes you a winner, not only of the award, but overall, and for a long time to come.

Posted in business, creativity, marketing, media | Comments Closed

It Doesn’t Matter Where You’re From

February 15th, 2011

It only matters where we can find you, which is a very different thing.

Today I noticed a flyer for a concert, and each of the band logos had a caption telling me where the band was from. Guess what, I don’t care. Instead, what I care about is where I can listen to their music to decide whether I want to see their show or not.

When you have only one chance, say something that helps people proceed, don’t make them stop.

Posted in business, marketing, music | Comments Closed

Something For Nothing

February 4th, 2011

Picture this: A financially strong company builds a mall including all the infrastructure making it a super-hip (yet slightly expensive) place everybody loves. And no surprise everybody who used to have a shop with slowly declining revenue downtown craves the bonanza. And they understand they don’t get mining rights for free. We understand when we sell something on someone else’s premises they expect a share of one kind or another.

It’s also the way advertising works. Whoever wants to place an ad somewhere has to pay the owner of the channel because, well, he’s the owner. It’s ironic that people who used to own the channel, i.e. print publishers, don’t understand that when putting their channel inside another channel, i.e. the iPad, the owner of the latter won’t give it to them just like that.

Sometimes you eat the pear, and sometimes, well, it eats you. (huh?)

Posted in business, marketing, media | Comments Closed

Pick One

February 3rd, 2011

Something I learned today (not by myself): When you invite three candidates for a pitch (or job interview or…) and two totally screw up, making the obvious choice to pick the one that didn’t may feel like you’re picking the next best one — which is obviously a different choice than picking the best, and not as easy. Hint: Merely raising the number of people invited won’t necessarily cut it.

Posted in business, marketing | Comments Closed

Protection Won’t Save You For Good

January 29th, 2011

When Amazon released its numbers for the last quarter of 2010 last week, it was a small surprise for me that in the US e-books are already ourselling paperback books, after they have already done that with hardcovers last summer.

In the country considered the origin of press printing it’s easy to forget that the book market is not a free one in terms of pricing. Every vendor of new books is bound to the price the publisher sets, and this applies to e-books as well, there’s just a little catch: Print books are being sold with a VAT of 7%, whereas e-books have the regular VAT of 19%, making them even more expensive than their physical cousins. Not only has this regulated protection served the publishers, it’s also the reason Ye Olde Bookstore hasn’t yet had to surrender to discount retailers.

If you’ve being living in the real world for the last decade, it won’t be too hard for you to guess that this model is not set up to endure the future we’re heading to. What we have learned from the desastrous decline of the coal and steel industry in the last century is that a country can’t protect its perceived vital industries for good, because sooner or later global competition will have taken over, and you’re an anachronism, far behind the pack.

What not only Germany’s politicians and leaders of protected industries (let’s coin the term LOPIs now) need to understand:

  • trying to protect anything from competition does more harm than help in the long run
  • the business of physical products is steadily decreasing, at least in consumer markets
  • you need the courage to sacrifice your sacred cow in favour of a new not-yet-beyond-risk one or you’re going down
  • what’s more important: you need to have people you can encourage to come up with fresh ideas that take your business to the future, even better if they do it by themselves.

Posted in business, marketing, media | Comments Closed

Always a Day Away

January 27th, 2011

Recently a Slideshow by Microsoft showed up in which they try to persuade business partners to prefer Windows tablets over the iPad — there’s just one catch. If you’ve ever tried to sell something to a client, what’s working better? Showing ten slides or giving them the actual item and say “Go ahead, give it a try. … Doesn’t it feel great?”

Microsoft would have a better chance of getting some market share if they had a real, tangible product, not just a better idea of “That how it is. How it is going to be, tomorrow, one day. Maybe.” The former is how Apple did it with the iPad, once they knew the iPhone was working and the way of interacting with the device was accepted, they took the next step they’d been preparing for years in secrecy, not boasting about an idea of a future that would maybe never come.

Posted in business, marketing | Comments Closed

The Second Impression

January 25th, 2011

We’ve been told for years that one never gets a second chance to make a first impression. Is this why nobody tries to give a second one?

After all, it’s much easier to come up with excuse after excuse instead of straightening up and take responsibility. It takes more guts to say “We might have given you the impression of being a bit jerkish at the time we first met, but that’s not what we are, and you can rest assured we’ll continue working hard on getting better, being aware of the consequences” instead of “Y’know, it’s always a bit chaotic with us, but we’ll get it done somehow”. It might be easier to sympathize the second way, but you’re not giving a good example a all. Muddling your way through is hardly a reliable long term strategy.

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Voilà, Promotion

January 19th, 2011

The other day it just occured to me why Twitter is a better means of promotion than Facebook, not meaning advertising but “spreading the word”. The key is the default action, so to speak.

When someone posts something on Facebook, the default action to show your appreciation is to click the “Like” button. But this doesn’t create a movement (so it’s no literal ”pro-motion”), it’s a popularity feedback for the originator of the post because it stays within the boundaries of his circle of friends. The promotion happens when people click “Share”, so the post translates to their own circle — but that happens very rarely in comparison.

This is where Twitter does better, because it makes no sense to reply “I like your tweet” to the author. The only sensible thing you can do is re-tweet the original tweet (Twitter word for post), so now your followers will read it. Voilà, promotion.

Posted in internet, marketing | 1 Comment »

Island Thinking

January 7th, 2011

In one of his last year’s Linchpin Sessions, Seth Godin riffed on business using a model of sugar cane processing on an island. It’s worth adding that not only everyone has a sugar cane machine today — the islands (in the developed world) are gone too. Of course you can choose to only offer your services locally, but that doesn’t mean no one will enter your market area. There’s no more barrier to protect you.

Posted in business, marketing | Comments Closed

Different vs Better

January 5th, 2011

One year back, I was creating a TV trailer for a crime thriller feature, and when discussing the concept with the feature editor she insisted on having a certain shot in the trailer: “These wooden stick figures, they’re like the ones in The Blair Witch Project, that’ll help sell the thing.”

Except that the whole feature had nothing else in common with The Blair Witch Project. Whenever there’s something in your product that’s a reference to another product, you really need to question hard if that reference will do any good, because people can easily distinguish between “same but different” and “same but better”. And they choose accordingly.

[Just to tell the end: For me the only selling point were the two main actors. I'll leave it to you to make up why the feature went successful.]

Posted in creativity, marketing, video | Comments Closed

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