Successful failure

Marketing, Methodologies, Product Management, Testing

I read this term today while I was reading the book The Bezos Letters by Steve Anders.

I just finished reading the 1997 letter to the shareholders and started reading the first chapter of the book. I was astonished by the amount of emphasis Jeff Bezos places on successful failure.

I keep writing about testing everything because only the market has the right to decide what will succeed. You may have the best product, the most expensive and elaborate media roll out, but if you don’t first test and see, it can bomb.

But Bezos takes it further, he’s talking of billions of dollars that he’s spent on failures, learnt from them and made other things successful and made many more billions.

In marketing and product management, especially when you are a small company , you need to be very agile at testing continuously, learning and adapting to make your product more attractive in the market.

When you do testing ensure you only do with one variable at a time, to keep reducing the risk of a complete disaster. Never try multi variable testing because you will never be able to figure out the interplay between two variables which could create an indeterminate third variable.

Everything that you do has risk. You mitigate it by testing, identifying the failures and then converting into success.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Asking the right questions in the market

B2B, Marketing, Questions, segmentation, Testing, value proposition

Understanding which questions to ask is an art. It was said that Socrates had a great method to ask questions which got him to the bottom of a problem.

I have actually been very weak in asking questions. It takes me a lot of understanding to get down to the bottom of things.

I have used frameworks like the 5 Why or 7 Why model to figure things. I have used things like the 80/20 rule to try to identify the small causes for repeatable/fractal patterns.

In most areas in life asking the right questions makes a lot of difference to your success.

In marketing its all the more important because you are dealing with different types of people. In B2B marketing where there are even more players involved at the customer level, understanding the different drivers for each player becomes critical.

If you ask a question about “why is the customer not wanting to buy from me” versus “what could be the compulsions for the customer to not look at my solution ” you could get completely different answers.

Those questions will totally change the way you address the issues in the market. You may be able to figure out a completely different value proposition from what you were thinking about. Your niche or segmentation could completely change.

The other thing about marketing that I have learnt over the years is that there are no absolute truths in the market. The market and its participants have a mind of their own and their perception is their Reality. Once a perception has been created it becomes very difficult to change.

So the bottom line is to think of questions from different vantage points to get to different possibilities and then Test them.

I am still learning this art and working to improve myself. How about you?

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Testing…more testing …and even more testing – Part II

Positioning, Product Management, segmentation, Testing

I wrote a post, a few days back, on this topic for identifying the right message, the correct strategy, the correct segment etc. with respect to marketing.

I was wondering if I was being too headstrong in insisting on this.

I just realised, that the nations who were able to bring Corona / Covid19 under control faster also relied on this. While keeping a safe distance and wearing a mask are the only deterrents to catching the Covid19, for the people who are involved in pandemic control, the only method was to test and see how the rate of growth of the pandemic was taking place.

The faster and higher the number of tests being done, the faster the identification of the possible infections , the quicker the response to isolate the people and quarantine them, thus reducing the opportunity for the virus to spread.

On the manufacturing floor also the higher the tests you do in the process, the lesser is the chance that the final product will have defects and will need to be scrapped.

When I visited Paris recently, I visited one of the perfumery companies and they showed us the process of launching a new perfume and how multiple tests had to be conducted to ensure that it did not react with people’s skin and the kind of audience reactions.

For releasing any vaccine they have to go through multiple rounds of tests.

So my rant that the only way to figure out what would succeed in the market is to test, then do more more tests and then even more tests, is actually a standard practice in all kinds of domains. I therefore don’t understand why people in marketing are averse to the idea of having a very serious process of testing their segmentation, niche, messaging etc.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Testing….more testing…even more testing

Marketing, messaging, Positioning, Product Management, segmentation, Testing

A lot of times people ask me what is the headline that I write so I will get a response. My answer generally is I don’t know. And they look at me and…..but you have been doing marketing for 25 plus years.

I have a checklist which kind of acts like a framework but inspie of that I still make different versions of my emails and ask my team to test. Once something succeeds, then we use that as a control, to tweak the content or the subject line…only one variable at a time.

The reason for this is the market has a mind of its own. I cannot claim to have better wisdom than the consolidated wisdom of the market.

I was not born with this modesty. I actually have a massive ego.

But the market has taught me , after so many failures, that I cannot think I know everything, that I cannot predict success of a product or a message. That I should only follow one rule and that is to test and keep testing to improve.

Incidentally this is also true of stock markets. Most of the successful veterans will tell you, that they have frameworks on how they invest, but they cannot predict how a stock will move .

Especially if you are in the technology product management field, you have two variables to handle.

The underlying technology and the product you have built on it…..Cloud as the technology and your service management product as an example
The market’s perception

As I have mentioned many times earlier, in marketing perception is reality. So if someone thinks that Cloud is not a secure technology then they won’t use your product even though you have a great product.

Make testing as the bedrock of all that you do so that you fail fast , learn, adapt and become successful.

Till next time.

Carpe Diem!!!