by Reena Kapoor

I am hosting the next Product Marketing & Management Roundtable for the NorCal BMA on November 19th in Palo Alto on this terrific and interesting topic. I urge you all to attend this breakfast roundtable because it promises to be a real eye-opener.  I've been watching this area and was struck by its power and potential with Netflix's recent foray into this (and take a look at Waze). But Crowdsourcing has much greater potential than just for product development.  So if you want to come learn more about it now is your chance to do so, from two industry veterans! 

Details here:  http://norcalbma.org/programs/productmarketing_html

by Reena Kapoor

I invite you all to the Product Marketing & Product Management Roundtables for the BMA in Northern California.  I am going to be hosting these starting October 15th.  These are typically held as breakfast meetings in Palo Alto on the 3rd Thursday of every month.

Please do come and attend the October 15th Roundtable.  James Hipkin is someone I have worked with and is one of the most principled and insightful marketers I know. His presentation will be definitely worth your time.  He is going to be talking about: Customer Marketing in a Challenging Economy – Where to Focus?

Sound relevant? You bet!  Please come and let me know what you think.  You can sign up here.

by Reena Kapoor

Lately I've been advising a couple of different companies who are either introducing a new product or contemplating a new market. Invariably the question comes up how should we think about which markets to enter.  Simple answer: wherever you can maximize your opportunity!  Well not so simple really, when you start thinking about it. 

Arriving at the answer takes some -

• research: investigate, research, and think through who are your ideal users, how they (will) buy and who they are, how to reach them
• analysis: what are the criteria for evaluating each segment, vertical, market (and what constitutes the market in the first place?) and
• discipline: yes we want to go after all the big opportunities out there but we can't possibly do it all; so we have strategically determine and go after the ones where we can maximize our win.

Needless to say this is a critical, intensive and thoughtful exercise when done right. But meanwhile I wanted to share a set of very simple (perhaps simplistic?) and over-arching set of criteria I use in conducting this analysis.  Hope you find it useful.  And please write and tell me what you think! 

by Reena Kapoor

I've worked with many clients to help bring new products (and services) to market and even when the offering has real value to offer and a strong, differentiable place to occupy in its universe, I find some common mistakes get in the way. Often a launch that can be great, is simply good or worse, mediocre.  Such an undesirable - and in many cases, undeserving - fate can be avoided. I offer here a check-list of some of the most common mistakes I've observed. These are based on my experience helping consumer-focused companies but they apply just as well to business-to-business (B2B) enterprises:

• Product is Not Ready: It's tempting to be on an impossible timeline (who isn't?) and I've myself been on the product management forefront urging the technical team to "just get it out". On the other hand you don't want to be a perfectionist organization that cannot launch to save their lives (I've been there too). These two extremes can be a problem and need to be managed strategically.  The solution lies in i) understanding clearly your promise to consumers (ultimately when all is said and done, what does your new offering stand for?) and what cannot be compromised? ii) prioritizing the features /functions of your product and knowing where to draw the line; this needs to be a criteria-based call and ideally a discussion that's happened early on in the process and iii) testing, testing, testing - concept testing, feature prioritization testing, prototype and product testing, beta testing (in software scenarios) and finally a controlled release or soft launches; all these can give you early feedback that you can take into account before you do a full blown launch.  All these mitigation scenarios take work and planning -- and may have some trade-offs too -- so they need to be carefull thought through.

• Overestimating Adoption: Often this is couched in "not spending enough on marketing, promoting" and while that is the problem, it is rooted in the fact that people close to the product often will overestimate its appeal and consequent adoption.  Again testing early in the process can help; developing an adoption model for new categories and tracking share and distribution trends for exisitng categories are all ways to mitigate this risk.  I'll run into people who say, "If I get 0.001% of this category..." and I know we're in trouble.  That's not a good methodology and can land you in trouble.  Instead I urge marketers to take a look at other offerings in their category, at adjacent categories and other completely new categories (perhaps with behavioral parallels) that were launched.  How did their adoption build, what "events"/trends/factors had a major impact on their build.  How did their distribution track? And compare their strengths and weaknesses (do you offer similar accessibility? ease of use? channels? pricing advantage?) to your own situation.  While it is hard to do for completely new categories, it can be done and is an exercise well worth it.  You may also find that for your category, you can only afford to launch in one segment - geographical area, industry vertical or distribution channel - because that's all you can afford to spend on. But even if you learned just that, your marketing dollars will go a much longer way vs. a poorly thought out effort that fritters your resources away.

• Underestimating Competition: Marketers will launch and competition - even the ones you did not think were your competition - will redouble their customer acquisition efforts, lower their price, launch a promotion and/or enter new channels.  I've seen this in mature catergories where competition is fierce and the incumbents are not giving their share away that easily no matter how compelling your offering is; but I've also seen it in relatively new categories where when a completely new product/format is launched the incumbents lower their price. And suddenly you're up against a new barrier to adoption.  Planning for a stronger-than-you-think competitive response - both from a positioning and promotional perpsectives - is a good idea. It will help you put a mitigation plan in palce, allocate dollars for it and be ready to move without losing precious time and customers.

• Not Having Tested - Adequately: I cannot say this enough.  Use exsiting market research where you can but have solid, evidence-based plans for most of your risks.  Often questions such as feature/function prioritization, pricing, positioning are left to the "judgement" of launch team.  Their judgement is crucial but we can all be dead wrong.  Talking to your consumers, customers, influencers, channels, partners -- every chance you get is a recipe for success.  All the data you gather will require your judgement to sift through and analyze -- but judgement without evidence is simply prejudice and can land you in trouble.

• Not Developing Success Criteria / Metrics:  A product gets launched and in the first six months the team cannot agree on how successful it is? and related to that what the causes are? and as a result how to fix them? Avoid this easily.  Create a success matrix.  Call out your assumptions clearly - this is important - and then lay out what you would consider success, how you will measure it (sometimes you need multiple measures for a single criterion and this in itself is a valuable discussion to have) and what it will take to get there.  This latter point is extremely valuable in that it can become the crux of the discussion when you're trying to make sure you get the resources you need for a successful launch. (Bonus: it also helps you manange your deliverables -- and career -- better).

• Not Leveraging ALL Your Influencers:  Make sure your marketing plan has at least one, if not more, line items for all your influencers - industry influencers whether they be analysts, endorsers, people who have an impact on how your customers think.  Your PR team will likely have a well-thought out plan to do this.  But don't forget who else has a significant impact on your consumers' thinking, their experience of your brand and who they encounter at the various touch points: your partners, channel, customer service, help-desk, etc.  Make sure you've sold all these constituencies on your offering and you've also gathered their feedback.  Besides becoming a marketing force for you, these customer touch points are often the source of great market data for you.

• Not Supporting Adequately - and Long Enough: Often products are launched and after year 1 they are forgotten.  This becomes a default approch vs. a well thought out one.  And the product loses share and never delivers on its promise.  It perhaps could have had a longer life but you did not plan to support it longer and as a result come year 2 everyone's forgotten about it.  Every product that is in the market needs a conscious plan for effective, profitable and actionable portfolio planning.  Otherwise you run the risk of having a negative impact on your profits, poorly using your resources and worst of all, confusing your customers - and channel. 

I can think of several other launch issues but I wanted to capture these since they encompass what I see most often.  Let me know your thoughts and what gets in the way of your successful launches.

by Reena Kapoor

An excellent talk on TED by Joseph Pine on What Consumers Really Want. He talks about how we've evolved from economy that was based on commodities, to goods, to services and now its about creating and selling experience.  In this context, authenticity is the new consumer sensibility and it's what consumers want to experience.  We're hearing this with social networking/web 2.0 taking off as well.  But the question remains: what is authenticity and how do we (as businesses) render it effectively?

Joseph Pine very wisely points out that rendering authenticity, while it is the new business imperative, is about creating an experience that the consumer considers authentic -- and not necessarily is intrinsically authentic. And in this regard, businesses need to understand their ability to render authenticity on TWO very important axes:

• Inner-directed Authenticity: How true they are to themselves i.e., knowing who you are, your past heritage, brand character and equities that you stand for; for example Disney is about "family values" and their business decisions (including new acquisitions) should keep this in mind

• Outer-directed Authenticity:  Are they (the business) who they say they are i.e., to consumers, do they deliver what is promised; this is about false promises (positioning that you cannot deliver on) that companies make in ads which they don't deliver on

His advice to business in delivering authenticity are THREE simple rules:

1. Don't say you're authentic unless you really are

2. It's easier to be authentic if you don't say you're authentic

3. If you claim you're authentic, then you better be...

Enjoy the video.