Product Marketing questions I am pondering on

Marketing, Product Management, Questions, single target market

I have been reading the book The Road Less Stupid…… by Keith Cunnigham.

One chapter which has had me thinking extremely seriously is on Simplifying Growth. The reason it has got me thinking so much is that it is very closely related to product management and marketing.

It has all the related dimensions that I keep talking about how you need to go about marketing, yet when it comes from a third party and you read it, the significance of what is being written becomes even more striking.

Some of the questions which are given in this chapter which I am pondering about are

What has to happen for the customer to cause them to buy from me
What must happen to keep them coming back
What could happen to cause them to not buy

These are extremely deep for a product manager to look at. If you can get a crystal clear answer on these you can build your product marketing strategy very well.

If you choose a broad market then answering the above questions will be very tough if you are releasing a new product in the market. If you choose a very fine niche in the market then you can clearly answer them and build a much better plan.

Test it out and let me know in the comments below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Integrated Product Management

differentiation, Marketing, Marketing Ecosystem, Positioning, Product Management, single target market

I learnt a very important concept yesterday while watching a video of Brendon Burchard from the ilovemarketing mastery program by Joe Polish.

He was explaining about how he strategizes a book launch. A book launch is another form of a product launch with the product over here being a book.

I have been in Product Management for quite a long time and some of the concepts that he spoke about were standard.

However one thing which got me thinking and which you also need to understand if you are into Product Management is differentiating between ancillary products / services versus next set of products / services which are higher up in aspiration but are however part of a common ecosystem.

As per Brendon an ear phone, phone cover are ancillary while the iPhone, the iPad and the Mac all part of the integrated product set which Apple sell all the 3 items to their customer base all the time.

So even though Android is there with the so called “open” environment with a huge ecosystem, with full fledged interoperability and there are so many companies who sell more phones than Apple but no company makes as much money whether its with phones, tablets and computers.

This got me thinking. If you look at other companies who are really have ruled a lot of industries – the integrated product suite does come to mind.

IBM had their set of products and services which were generally all integrated. That was the biggest value to large customers who did not want the hassle of integrating products from different vendors. Customers could easily buy another set of products with a clear knowledge that they were safe because it was IBM. So even though a lot of companies came out with so called “open-systems” and individual discreet products, IBM had their clientele clearly defined and have been making a lot of money.

This has got me thinking. While we do think in terms of the next set of products/services that we should have in our suite, to clearly have an integrated suite where the customer has the comfort as well as the aspiration to take the next product from us needs to be thought off. We also need to clearly differentiate between ancillaries and next level of products so that we have 2 sets of revenue streams.

Pls tell me if you have had success with this kind of an integrated product suite. I would like to know your inputs in the comments section below.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Build your own framework – avoid flash in the pan success

B2B, Frameworks, Methodologies, Product Management

Always strive to have a methodology for getting something to happen. Frameworks, formulas, recipes, methodologies, call them with whatever name, reduce the chance of doing something random each time and then hoping for success.

Luck does play a major role in life, but with a process in place over a period of time you start eliminating things and standardize on things as far as possible. The lesser the number of non-standard items, the lower the possibility of luck.

But when you are starting a new product line or when you are new into the job as a Product Management person, how do you get started. First is the standard marketing books on the subject. But it will be very rare that you will get the exact process for your product.

First understand your product, the exact market niche you want to target, the ecosystem and infrastructure and then go out and start trying to succeed. You are bound to fail in the initial stages in either understanding the market, in identifying the message which will resonate etc.

Once you fail, also identify the causation and not only the co-relation. This failure will be the biggest learning for you to know what you don’t need to do next. And then the biggest thing – document it.

This documentation will be the basis of your own frameworks and methodology, so that when you get success you can keep testing it and seeing what parts caused it the success.

Till next time then.

Carpe Diem!!!

Getting blindsided

B2B, Marketing, Product Management, Technology, Uncategorized

Yesterday I wrote about my experience taking the COVID-19 vaccine.

Well yesterday late night the side effects of taking the vaccine started showing. I had so much weakness that all night and all day today, I was only sleeping.

Why am I telling this. It’s a known fact that there are side effects of taking the vaccine.

What is important though is that I got blindsided by the intensity of the weakness. Due to this I had to cancel all my meetings today.

In the technology market you can get blindsided so very often. A lot of you may have heard of the mobile phone brand Nokia. It was the number one brand and then it got blindsided by Apple with their iPhone. Today you don’t even hear about Nokia mobile phones.

For a product manager in the technology space, where the pace of change is so rapid its very easy to get blindsided and suddenly your product is not needed by your customers.

For today, this is all since I am still having a lot of weakness.

Carpe Diem!!!