RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

Brand is about what people aspire to be — a good mom, a capable leader, an innovator, eternally young — and the best ones make us feel good about ourselves. The emotional aspects of brand are often underinvested in by technology companies because it doesn’t directly correlate to sales. This is where small actions can add up to a big difference.

— Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Martina Lauchengco

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Good teams have product, design, and engineering sit side by side, and they embrace the give and take between the functionality, the user experience, and the enabling technology. Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers’ struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Good teams understand who each of their key stakeholders are, they understand the constraints that these stakeholders operate in, and they are committed to inventing solutions that work not just for users […]
  2. So what do you do when there is a real need for a culture change “…”? Ideally, you introduce a new story while also valuing and honoring the old one. This is a little like having one brand identity while recognizing the power of the category essence. An organization’s fundamental story is usually derived from its product line, its founder, and early decisions that were made and encoded in an oral history that becomes its story. Over time, the company hires people who have the right chemistry—meaning that they live by the same story. You can introduce new stories, […]
  3. Mental models are blueprints we can use in various contexts to make sense of the world, interpret information correctly, and understand our context. They give us predictable outcomes. A recipe is the most basic form of mental model; each ingredient has its role, time, and place. However, a recipe is not applicable to anything outside the realm of food. Thus, we find ourselves in a position of wanting to learn a wide range of mental models (or latticework) to prepare ourselves for whatever may come our way. We can’t learn ones for each individual scenario, but we can find […]
  4. If the technology is new, you very likely don’t have anyone on the teams who has been trained on this new technology. This fact ends up scaring off many leaders, or they occasionally think they have to partner with a third party that does have the necessary experience. But if the technology is important to you, your company needs to learn that technology. And the sooner the better. The good news is that this is rarely that difficult. Your best engineers are probably already considering this technology and would love to be able to explore further. In the best […]
  5. Winning over one or two customers in each of five or ten different segments—the consequence of taking a sales-driven approach—will create no word-of-mouth effect. Your customers may try to start a conversation about you, but there will be no one there to reinforce it. By contrast, winning four or five customers in one segment will create the desired effect. Thus, the segment-targeting company can expect word-of-mouth leverage early in its crossing-the-chasm marketing effort, whereas the sales-driven company will get it much later, if at all. This lack of word of mouth, in turn, makes selling the product that much […]

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