RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

marketing

  • One of the keys to breaking into a new market is to establish a strong word-of-mouth reputation among buyers. Numerous studies have shown that in the high-tech buying process, word of mouth is the number-one source of information that buyers reference, both at the beginning of the sales cycle, to establish their “long lists,” and at the end, when they are paring down their short ones.

    Now, for word of mouth to develop in any particular marketplace, there must be a critical mass of informed individuals who meet from time to time and, in exchanging views, reinforce the product’s or the company’s positioning. That’s how word of mouth spreads. Seeding this communications process is expensive, particularly once you leave the early market, which in general can be reached through the technical press and related media.

    — Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • 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, but they are like new software. At this point, it works best to think of the historic brand identity as the operating system, which is inevitably still defined by the old story. All the new software needs is to be compatible. You can update the operating system, but replacing it requires you to start over, losing your brand equity.

    — The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark, Carol S. Pearson

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • There is a principle in human perception, the contrast principle, that affects the way we see the difference between two things that are presented one after another. Simply put, if the second item is fairly different from the first, we will tend to see it as more different than it actually is.

    So if we lift a light object first and then lift a heavy object, we will estimate the second object to be heavier than if we had lifted it without first trying the light one. The contrast principle is well established in the field of psychophysics and applies to all sorts of perceptions besides weight.

    — Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

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  • No matter what you’re after, in the internal groundswell, the secret to thriving is culture. This is not about technology implementation but about managing and changing the way organizations work, a change that needs the blessing—or, even better, the active participation—of top echelons of management. It’s nearly impossible to force social technologies on organizations from the top down, because, by their definition, these technologies require the participation of your employees.

    You can’t force them to adopt groundswell thinking, any more than you can convince reluctant managers to deploy social technologies with your customers. But it sure helps if the social technologies have an executive or two behind them.

    — Groundswell by Charlene Li, Josh Bernoff

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • But the principle of constantly expanding your experience, both personally and vicariously, does matter tremendously in any idea-producing job. Make no mistake about that. Another point to encourage you. No doubt you have seen people who seem to spark ideas—good ideas—right off the “top of their heads,” without ever going through all this process that I have described.

    Sometimes you have only seen the “Eureka! I have it!” stage takes place. But sometimes you have also seen the fruits of long discipline in the practices here advocated. This discipline produces a mind so well stocked, and so quick at discerning relationships, as to be capable of such fast production. Still, another point I might elaborate on a little is about words. We tend to forget that words are, themselves, ideas. They might be called ideas in a state of suspended animation. When the words are mastered the ideas tend to come alive again.

    — A Technique for Producing Ideas by James Young

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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