Boredom in marketing….cause for distraction

Distractions, Marketing, Marketing Stamina, messaging

One of the main causes when a person gets distracted is because of boredom. The other three being hedonic adaption, negativity bias and rumination. As per Nir Eyal in his book Indistractable, the way to avoid boredom is to get curious. Even very mundane tasks as per him can be made interesting if we are curious about something. Curiosity can kill boredom and can stop you from getting distracted

Marketing is applied psychology. What is valid for the individual in his daily routine is also valid for the person who gets your marketing message.

If your message is boring, the prospect will get distracted from your message and move to something else. So you need to make the prospect get curious about your offerings. That’s the only way she will be interested in interacting with you further.

When do people become curious. In my opinion when the message has something directly to do with THEM. Which means the message should look like it’s ONLY TO them and ABOUT them. If the message anywhere screams marketing, it will automatically get banished.

So the messaging has to look one – on – one (to them) and should target the conversation that could be going on in the mind of a prospect (about them). It cannot be a sermon. It has to be specific because people now have a very short attention span.

Which brings us to the most difficult part. Understanding the conversation in the mind of the prospect, building multiple communication pieces which invoke curiosity in her mind.

And you then need to have staying power to ensure, because people respond when they want to respond. If you don’t have the marketing stamina to last long enough then you won’t be able to win.

Till next time then….we will continue on this

Carpe Diem!!!

Dissatisfaction is progress in the market

Lateral Marketing, Marketing, messaging, Product Management, segmentation

Do lions get dissatisfied or for that matter zebras or giraffes. My guess is “No”. Lions and zebras and all the other animals have more or less remained as they were more than a 100000 years back. The lion in the image above still hunts its prey when it feels hungry and then just goes and rests with its family exactly what its ancestors did a hundred thousand years back.

Humans have evolved over that same time. One of the reasons is the fact that we had real estate in our head, due to which our brains could grow and evolve and are still evolving. In one of my earlier posts I wrote about how scarcity is the mother of all development. If we don’t have food, we try to find ways to grow food, we create GM seeds so that pests and weather don’t impact them. If we don’t have water we seed clouds or desalinate water from the sea.

I will qualify that while scarcity causes us to think of solutions, its the dissatisfaction with the scarcity which is the mother of all progress. If we are not dissatisfied with the fact that we are short of something and we need to find ways to get out of the situation, we would never move from being cavemen to what we are today. Not being able to find food would have made us look for ways to build weapons that could be used to kill wild animals and help us not get killed.

But its this same dissatisfaction which cause us to feel bad, feel low etc. Its what gets us emotional about issues. And the negativity with the issues causes us to also do negative things like arson, robbery etc. So its a double edged sword.

Marketing and product management is all about finding the dissatisfaction in the market and providing a solution. If you can clearly identify different areas of dissatisfaction, you can segment the market in different ways. Quite a lot of times the dissatisfaction is latent…..nobody knew they wanted a car versus a horse carriage.

But yes people were fed up of dirty taxis, high fares & tantrums and someone thought of ride sharing without owning any taxis.

However more often then not you don’t create a product or service from scratch. You have to mould what you have, by adding features or deleting some, to meet a specific need of a specific segment of the market and then carry your messaging in a way that the market gets it. I would highly recommend you to read Lateral Marketing by Philip Kotler to learn the frameworks of how you can create new segments/uses by making subtle changes in your products.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Single Target Market- once again

B2B, differentiation, Marketing, messaging, Product Management, route to market, segmentation, single target market

This is such a major piece in any market plan that I cannot lay enough emphasis on the topic. I have already written a lot of posts on just this one topic , but there’s so much at stake in your plan with just this one concept that its critical that you get this right.

Some would call this segmentation, some would call it finding a niche. Call it by whatever name, the idea is to start in a minimum viable piece of the market, learn everything and then expand. Never ever try to address all segments at once.

You can segment by geography- so choose only one location to start, or you could look at a vertical industry to start with if you are in the B2B market.

One useful way to find the Single Target market is also by usage. Suppose you have a service and as an example say you decide to focus on New York City. But NYC has 9 million people. So you could then either break it down by identifying the neighborhood because different parts of NYC have different buyers in terms of paying capacity.

You could then go further down to see if your service is for first time users, or for emergency usage, or a a replacement service etc.

Once break it down to such granularity each interaction with a prospect becomes a learning and you can quickly understand and test different messaging, different media etc. so that you can quickly dominate the market.

If you are in anyway responsible for product management and going to launch a new product or service or in marketing in a similar situation first get clarity on this aspect.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Riding the elephant- you still need to market

B2B, Marketing, need, relationships, Riding the elephant, route to market, Symbiotic relationship

While I keep harping about the advantages of using my philosophy of riding the elephant. You need to be aware that, at the end of the day you need to keep your marketing principles in mind over there also.

I have written on some ofvthese points earlier also, but its important to identify the need of the elephant. The elephant has to see the benefits of giving you a ride.

This is a critical aspect, because if you try to tell the elephant about your capabilities to cut branches of trees, then the elephant may not be interested in you. On the other hand if you show the elephant that you can help him get bananas faster, it may become your friend and give you a ride. However some elephants may not be interested in bananas, so you may end up missing judging and spending time in convincing the wrong elephant.

Year before last, we invested a lot of time in building a solution on one of the biggest cloud service providers. We had a unique solution and we thought that the cloud service provider would take us along where they saw prospects. But inspite of spending more than a year we realized that the technology platform that we were working on was not a priority for them in India. So this elephant was not interested in the fact that we could help it get bananas faster, because it was not interested in eating bananas.

So whether you are going out on your own or you are using my philosophy of riding an elephant you still need to identify that one need in the market which you can address.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!