Description
It covers various examples in the computer industry which led to disasters in the market due to mistakes or stupidity.
e.g. Borland,WordStar,IBM,Lanier,MicroPro Computers,Motorola,Netscape
Tags : Books,Book review
In Search of Stupidity Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
In Search of Stupidity Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
In Search Of Excellence- Oh Really!?
• Co-authored by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.. • Came at a time(1982) when the U.S. business was crumbling under the Japanese hi-tech domination. • An excellent corporate culture is one that loves the customer, loves its employees, loves the company's products, and loves loving the company. • But it was realized that many of the firms listed in the book seemed to be, well, less than excellent. • Something was very wrong with the book's concept of business excellence.
About
• Authored by Merrill R. Chapman • Talks about the product management and product marketing mistakes of the PC world. • Presents a high level analysis of marketing blunders by the biggest names in the industry • 11 chapters with different sets of stupid marketing actions • An analysis of what the companies should have done in each scenario
The Book- background
• Stupidity manifests itself in various interesting ways in the high tech industry • Winners are not brilliant, simply less stupid • Written about a time when the software industry was evolving“The Big Bang” • A time of tremendous technical turmoil with no roadmap to anywhere • Most cases bring in Microsoft somewhere- and reasons for its success • All in all, a ‘heavy’ book that must be taken in small doses at a time
Avoiding Stupidity
• Why do companies fail? – Based on fraud and illegal business practices – Built around unrealistic assumptions – No strategic vision or plan for success – Failure to execute • Companies must analyze what kind they are: - Technology driven - Sales driven - Market driven - Finance driven
Lanier-Come Josephine In my Word Processor Machine!
• A company that "lives, sleeps, eats, and breathes customers.” • They promoted the fact that the president of the company personally handled service calls. • Lanier was a sharp marketing bunch, too! The company knew that the term "word processor" put everybody "off." That's why Lanier called its word processors "No Problem Typewriters." Sheer advertising genius.
Lanier- Extinct as a dinosaur?
• Lanier was a company that apparently did everything but have sexual relations with its customers. • But it never found out that they were interested in buying an IBM PC or an Apple with a good word-processing program that did everything a Lanier word processor did at a fraction of the cost and did other things as well, like run a nifty type of new program called a "spreadsheet“!
IBM- Atlas Shrugged!
• In 10 years it went from an American icon to an American tragedy. • By 1981, admiration, reverence, and fear of IBM had reached neo-cult status. • IBM was "Big Blue," and its chief competitors in the mainframe business were referred to as "The Seven Dwarfs."
IBM-Intentional Biggest Mistake?
• Prior to the appearance of the IBM PC standard, firms had rarely purchased computers per se; rather, they bought packaged solutions that combined a company's hardware, software, and services. • In this tightly bound environment, IBM had clawed its way to overwhelming dominance by dint of ruthless marketing and good products. • IBM having launched IBM PC in 1981,a highly functional computer with an open architecture, did the last, most significant thing it would ever do in the microcomputer hardware business. It did nothing. And it did it for 6 crucial years.
IBM-Intentional Biggest Mistake?
• This led to a flourishing and open hardware universe that dominates the technology industry to this day. The open hardware architecture had ambled clear of the ability of any one company to control or manipulate it to its exclusive benefit. • The PC's creation led to the decoupling of software from a reliance on proprietary silicon.
IBM-Gone With the Wind!
• As it became obvious to everyone that PCs were simply collections of standardized parts that anyone could assemble, interest grew in the actual distinguishing characteristics of one computer from another. • Intel recognized this opportunity and took advantage of it in the coming years to become the closest thing the industry has to an arbiter of hardware standards, though the company's ability to dictate terms and conditions to the market has never approached IBM's imperial authority.
MicroPro - Introduction
• Founder - Seymour Rubinstein. • Rubinstein was serving as Managing Director in IMSAI- a company building clones of the seminal Altair system. • Micro Pro’s Initial Goal – Develop and publish a high-end database management system (DBMS) designed to compete with Ashton-Tate’s dbase.
The Success Story
• Then why a Word Editor? – Less development time than a database. – Continuous revenue stream till the development of database. • Launched first product as “Word Master” in 1976 as a piece of 137,000 lines of code written down in 4 months. • The success led to the release of full-featured word-processing program based in the year 1978 and christened it as “WordStar”
WordStar – Instant Hit
• WordStar became an instant success as – It was power packed with features. – It had Control-key interface. – First of WYSIWYG word processor. • Attempted diversification by publishing – Info Star: long dreamed database – Chart Star: business graphics product – Cal Star: spreadsheet full of bugs – PBM: own in house CP/M computer
The Downfall
• Clash between management and the development team because of which either the team was fired or they quit. • They lost the ability to ship an update of WordStar exactly at the time when it was needed. • To its rescue came AT&T which proposed to integrate WordStar with its UNIX operating System and C language. • After desperate efforts they decided to make the new product – WordStar 2000, the focus of their future sales.
Positioning Mistake!
• Release of WordStar 2000 pitted MicroPro against itself. • MicroPro was selling two high end word processors priced at same price of $495 to people using IBM PCs. • Precious marketing resources had to be expended in creating collaterals, ads, and promotions for the two products while attempting to provide a convincing rationale for the existence of both. • Management forbade both the teams from talking to each other to resolve the internal conflicts. • In 1987, MicroPro lost its leadership of the word-processing market to Microsoft Word and WordPerfect.
The Last Leap
• To regain its lost market MicroPro needed the release WordStar 5.0, the latest upgraded version. The version 5.0 lacked a printer database. • The dev group discarded the WordStar 2000 printer database and replaced it with a newer one based on hierarchical database. • Older one was based on a flat relational table base while the newer one was based on a tree structure. • This decision delayed the critical 5.0 release for over half a year. • Sales dropped and time spent on re-creation of the printer database was the time lost on adding newer features to the product.
The Collapse
• Cumulative effects of three blown financial quarters and disappointing sales led to Micro-Pro’s upper management being marched out. • MicroPro lost its chance to regain its position in the market. • WordStar finally faded away in the early 90’s subsumed in a merger with a flock of similar unsuccessful and second rated companies.
Borland
• Borland International made its debut in the industry in a big way with the release of Turbo Pascal in November 1983. • Turbo Pascal was a port to DOS and CP/M of COMPAS Pascal, and it was re-released by Borland at a price that, about one-tenth the price of comparable products. • With a single stroke, it had upset the price structure of a market category, with a tactic that can be employed again and again in the future.
Turbo Pascal
• Turbo Pascal integrated an editor, debugger, and compiler in what would later become known as an integrated development environment (IDE). • The product was a runaway smash and to this day Borland dominates the market in Pascal-based development tools. • It was the first product of its type to bypass the software distribution channel and be sold directly to customers. • It instigated “the desire of companies to bypass the intermediary and sell directly to their customers versus the power of distribution systems to "break bulk" and reach a wide audience of potential buyers quickly.” • As Turbo Pascal neared completion, the company found itself long on chutzpah but short of the cash needed to advertise it.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• Borland made its first play for big-league status with its 1987 purchase of Ansa and its Paradox database. • The product's initial claim to fame was its introduction of query by example (QBE) capabilities to PC relational databases. • A Paradox user could quickly recall records by simply checking off boxes from an onscreen image of the database, and then save these visual queries for future use. • This capability combined with powerful form creation and scripting features, made the product a viable competitor to Ashton-Tate's dBASE and the various Xbase clones.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• Paradox was widely considered to be the "best of breed" in the DBMS desktop market. • The Paradox scripting language manipulated "objects" such as queries, reports, and forms within the Paradox environment and resisted compilation technology. • Paradox was accessible enough to allow third parties to develop utilities for and extensions to the product. • The combination of power, price, and third-party push helped Paradox begin to make major inroads into a market formerly dominated by Ashton-Tate and the Xbase alternatives.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• In 1991, Borland took over Ashton-Tate, having product named, dBASE. • In market, “FoxPro” was considered to be the best of the Xbase clones, and and better than dBASE. • The purchase of dBASE also unleashed a positioning conflict within Borland. • There was no natural technical synergy between the two products. • The Paradox development community thus paid no attention to dBASE and continued to focus on its side of things.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• Complicating matters was the fact that customer and developer interest was turning increasingly toward the release of Windows-based databases. • Borland only made the situation worse with the positioning strategy it finally did hammer out. • In this scheme, dBase was to be the "high-end" product, whereas Paradox was repositioned to be the "end-user" database. • Paradox wasn't priced to reflect its new end-user status, also, the Paradox development community never mastered the language of Xbase.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• Paradox remained Borland's fair-haired darling. • Paradox was assigned the bulk of Borland's advertising and marketing budget for its database products. • New releases of Paradox were consistently released earlier and with greater fanfare than new dBASE versions. • dBASE would always be treated by Borland as the company's ugly stepchild. • The new 1.5 version of dBASE would have been a smash hit in 1988, but by 1992 it was another me-too product and there was still no compiler.
Borland’s “Paradox”, “WinDos”
• WinDOS included both the DOS and Windows versions in the same box. • It wreaked total confusion amongst prospective buyers. • Some thought that, – The WinDOS "product" was a hybrid of Windows and DOS. – It was a DOS product that looked like Windows. – It was a special Windows version of Borland that ran under DOS. – The box contained the complete versions of both products. • "WinDOS worked like a competitive upgrade's (Windows) evil twin."
Borland’s “Paradox”, “WinDos”
Results: • It turned out that someone who wanted the Windows version of the product had little interest in the DOS version and vice versa. • Borland now had three mutually incompatible development platforms: dBASE, Paradox for DOS, and Paradox for Windows.
Motorola-And We All Fall Down!
• Introduced StarTAC-cool analog system when demand was for digital system • Want to talk atop Mt .Everest or in the middle of the Atlantic – here is the $5billion Iridium project • The other condition is that your phones will not work indoors, in the shadows of building or under trees • 66 low earth satellites were launched which spend 70 percent of time over oceans and weren't usable for much of their life
Netscape – the Loudmouth
• 1993 Marc Andreessen gave first version of Mosaic browser for download – a radical step in browser design • Joined Jim Clark and founded Netscape and wrote new browser named “Navigator” • Released over the internet in December 1994 • 1995-captured 80% of market share • Stock pre IPO value at $28 opened at $71 and close at $58.25
Netscape – the Loudmouth
• Andreessen – a nice PR package • The smart move – baited and threatened Microsoft by telling the world that new language Java in conjunction with Netscape's browsers was the application platform of the future and would replace Windows calling it a “poorly debugged set of device drivers” • Made some witty and memorable observations like “We’re gonna smoke’em (Microsoft being the intended smoke.) “It was like a visit to Don Coroleone.I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day.” • A Forbes article proclaimed Andreessen was the “next Bill Gates’
Netscape – the Loudmouth
• 1995- After Netscape’s IPO company’s worth was $203 million whereas Microsoft had $10 billion • Netscape’s core products weren’t hard to build and Microsoft had the resources to build them • Microsoft was a stronger development organization – Netscape’s Communicator designed to kill Microsoft’s IE developed a reputation of slow, flaky and overloaded with features which never really worked • Java as a replacement for Windows proved to be a fantasy
Netscape – the Loudmouth
• The existent Bill Gates took him seriously and dedicated all his time and energy to destroy Netscape • 1998- game is over for Andreessen and had to subordinate to AOL. • It should have kept its mouth shut and bought time to survive the inevitable Microsoft onslaught • Marc Andreessen after realizing that his career at AOL was going to consist mainly of teaching members of the executive staff how to program their VCRs, he left to form a new Internet services and infrastructure company aptly named as “Loud cloud”
Lessons
• Successful positioning requires a clear, consistent approach with brief, strong statements that communicate the desired idea to potential buyers • Arrogance is destructive • Don’t choose a product name that hurts its positioning • Choose a product name that can’t be confused with a competitor • Can you purchase the domain name that corresponds to your product’s name? • Don’t differentiate by taking away features from the standard product - people don’t like to feel like they’re buying a cheap, crappy version of something
Lessons- Successful Positioning
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Visualize Perform image creation and attachment Layer Build a marketing vocabulary Create descriptors Describe the product Repeat and integrate
To succeed….
• New technologies don’t have a shot at success without the following conditions: – The kernel of a new idea. – A market for the new idea. – An significant advantage to entice people to switch. – An infrastructure to support the new technology. – A means of distribution. – A reasonable price for the new technology. – An acceptable level of quality - maybe not great, but good enough
The Worst Piece of High-Tech Collateral Ever Created
Software that creates a brutal, Darwinian battle for survival in YOUR company! We’d stay to chat more, but we have to hunt down the customer service department and kill them
THANK YOU!!
doc_414065054.ppt
It covers various examples in the computer industry which led to disasters in the market due to mistakes or stupidity.
e.g. Borland,WordStar,IBM,Lanier,MicroPro Computers,Motorola,Netscape
Tags : Books,Book review
In Search of Stupidity Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
In Search of Stupidity Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters
In Search Of Excellence- Oh Really!?
• Co-authored by Thomas J. Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr.. • Came at a time(1982) when the U.S. business was crumbling under the Japanese hi-tech domination. • An excellent corporate culture is one that loves the customer, loves its employees, loves the company's products, and loves loving the company. • But it was realized that many of the firms listed in the book seemed to be, well, less than excellent. • Something was very wrong with the book's concept of business excellence.
About
• Authored by Merrill R. Chapman • Talks about the product management and product marketing mistakes of the PC world. • Presents a high level analysis of marketing blunders by the biggest names in the industry • 11 chapters with different sets of stupid marketing actions • An analysis of what the companies should have done in each scenario
The Book- background
• Stupidity manifests itself in various interesting ways in the high tech industry • Winners are not brilliant, simply less stupid • Written about a time when the software industry was evolving“The Big Bang” • A time of tremendous technical turmoil with no roadmap to anywhere • Most cases bring in Microsoft somewhere- and reasons for its success • All in all, a ‘heavy’ book that must be taken in small doses at a time
Avoiding Stupidity
• Why do companies fail? – Based on fraud and illegal business practices – Built around unrealistic assumptions – No strategic vision or plan for success – Failure to execute • Companies must analyze what kind they are: - Technology driven - Sales driven - Market driven - Finance driven
Lanier-Come Josephine In my Word Processor Machine!
• A company that "lives, sleeps, eats, and breathes customers.” • They promoted the fact that the president of the company personally handled service calls. • Lanier was a sharp marketing bunch, too! The company knew that the term "word processor" put everybody "off." That's why Lanier called its word processors "No Problem Typewriters." Sheer advertising genius.
Lanier- Extinct as a dinosaur?
• Lanier was a company that apparently did everything but have sexual relations with its customers. • But it never found out that they were interested in buying an IBM PC or an Apple with a good word-processing program that did everything a Lanier word processor did at a fraction of the cost and did other things as well, like run a nifty type of new program called a "spreadsheet“!
IBM- Atlas Shrugged!
• In 10 years it went from an American icon to an American tragedy. • By 1981, admiration, reverence, and fear of IBM had reached neo-cult status. • IBM was "Big Blue," and its chief competitors in the mainframe business were referred to as "The Seven Dwarfs."
IBM-Intentional Biggest Mistake?
• Prior to the appearance of the IBM PC standard, firms had rarely purchased computers per se; rather, they bought packaged solutions that combined a company's hardware, software, and services. • In this tightly bound environment, IBM had clawed its way to overwhelming dominance by dint of ruthless marketing and good products. • IBM having launched IBM PC in 1981,a highly functional computer with an open architecture, did the last, most significant thing it would ever do in the microcomputer hardware business. It did nothing. And it did it for 6 crucial years.
IBM-Intentional Biggest Mistake?
• This led to a flourishing and open hardware universe that dominates the technology industry to this day. The open hardware architecture had ambled clear of the ability of any one company to control or manipulate it to its exclusive benefit. • The PC's creation led to the decoupling of software from a reliance on proprietary silicon.
IBM-Gone With the Wind!
• As it became obvious to everyone that PCs were simply collections of standardized parts that anyone could assemble, interest grew in the actual distinguishing characteristics of one computer from another. • Intel recognized this opportunity and took advantage of it in the coming years to become the closest thing the industry has to an arbiter of hardware standards, though the company's ability to dictate terms and conditions to the market has never approached IBM's imperial authority.
MicroPro - Introduction
• Founder - Seymour Rubinstein. • Rubinstein was serving as Managing Director in IMSAI- a company building clones of the seminal Altair system. • Micro Pro’s Initial Goal – Develop and publish a high-end database management system (DBMS) designed to compete with Ashton-Tate’s dbase.
The Success Story
• Then why a Word Editor? – Less development time than a database. – Continuous revenue stream till the development of database. • Launched first product as “Word Master” in 1976 as a piece of 137,000 lines of code written down in 4 months. • The success led to the release of full-featured word-processing program based in the year 1978 and christened it as “WordStar”
WordStar – Instant Hit
• WordStar became an instant success as – It was power packed with features. – It had Control-key interface. – First of WYSIWYG word processor. • Attempted diversification by publishing – Info Star: long dreamed database – Chart Star: business graphics product – Cal Star: spreadsheet full of bugs – PBM: own in house CP/M computer
The Downfall
• Clash between management and the development team because of which either the team was fired or they quit. • They lost the ability to ship an update of WordStar exactly at the time when it was needed. • To its rescue came AT&T which proposed to integrate WordStar with its UNIX operating System and C language. • After desperate efforts they decided to make the new product – WordStar 2000, the focus of their future sales.
Positioning Mistake!
• Release of WordStar 2000 pitted MicroPro against itself. • MicroPro was selling two high end word processors priced at same price of $495 to people using IBM PCs. • Precious marketing resources had to be expended in creating collaterals, ads, and promotions for the two products while attempting to provide a convincing rationale for the existence of both. • Management forbade both the teams from talking to each other to resolve the internal conflicts. • In 1987, MicroPro lost its leadership of the word-processing market to Microsoft Word and WordPerfect.
The Last Leap
• To regain its lost market MicroPro needed the release WordStar 5.0, the latest upgraded version. The version 5.0 lacked a printer database. • The dev group discarded the WordStar 2000 printer database and replaced it with a newer one based on hierarchical database. • Older one was based on a flat relational table base while the newer one was based on a tree structure. • This decision delayed the critical 5.0 release for over half a year. • Sales dropped and time spent on re-creation of the printer database was the time lost on adding newer features to the product.
The Collapse
• Cumulative effects of three blown financial quarters and disappointing sales led to Micro-Pro’s upper management being marched out. • MicroPro lost its chance to regain its position in the market. • WordStar finally faded away in the early 90’s subsumed in a merger with a flock of similar unsuccessful and second rated companies.
Borland
• Borland International made its debut in the industry in a big way with the release of Turbo Pascal in November 1983. • Turbo Pascal was a port to DOS and CP/M of COMPAS Pascal, and it was re-released by Borland at a price that, about one-tenth the price of comparable products. • With a single stroke, it had upset the price structure of a market category, with a tactic that can be employed again and again in the future.
Turbo Pascal
• Turbo Pascal integrated an editor, debugger, and compiler in what would later become known as an integrated development environment (IDE). • The product was a runaway smash and to this day Borland dominates the market in Pascal-based development tools. • It was the first product of its type to bypass the software distribution channel and be sold directly to customers. • It instigated “the desire of companies to bypass the intermediary and sell directly to their customers versus the power of distribution systems to "break bulk" and reach a wide audience of potential buyers quickly.” • As Turbo Pascal neared completion, the company found itself long on chutzpah but short of the cash needed to advertise it.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• Borland made its first play for big-league status with its 1987 purchase of Ansa and its Paradox database. • The product's initial claim to fame was its introduction of query by example (QBE) capabilities to PC relational databases. • A Paradox user could quickly recall records by simply checking off boxes from an onscreen image of the database, and then save these visual queries for future use. • This capability combined with powerful form creation and scripting features, made the product a viable competitor to Ashton-Tate's dBASE and the various Xbase clones.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• Paradox was widely considered to be the "best of breed" in the DBMS desktop market. • The Paradox scripting language manipulated "objects" such as queries, reports, and forms within the Paradox environment and resisted compilation technology. • Paradox was accessible enough to allow third parties to develop utilities for and extensions to the product. • The combination of power, price, and third-party push helped Paradox begin to make major inroads into a market formerly dominated by Ashton-Tate and the Xbase alternatives.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• In 1991, Borland took over Ashton-Tate, having product named, dBASE. • In market, “FoxPro” was considered to be the best of the Xbase clones, and and better than dBASE. • The purchase of dBASE also unleashed a positioning conflict within Borland. • There was no natural technical synergy between the two products. • The Paradox development community thus paid no attention to dBASE and continued to focus on its side of things.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• Complicating matters was the fact that customer and developer interest was turning increasingly toward the release of Windows-based databases. • Borland only made the situation worse with the positioning strategy it finally did hammer out. • In this scheme, dBase was to be the "high-end" product, whereas Paradox was repositioned to be the "end-user" database. • Paradox wasn't priced to reflect its new end-user status, also, the Paradox development community never mastered the language of Xbase.
Borland’s “Paradox”- A Database
• Paradox remained Borland's fair-haired darling. • Paradox was assigned the bulk of Borland's advertising and marketing budget for its database products. • New releases of Paradox were consistently released earlier and with greater fanfare than new dBASE versions. • dBASE would always be treated by Borland as the company's ugly stepchild. • The new 1.5 version of dBASE would have been a smash hit in 1988, but by 1992 it was another me-too product and there was still no compiler.
Borland’s “Paradox”, “WinDos”
• WinDOS included both the DOS and Windows versions in the same box. • It wreaked total confusion amongst prospective buyers. • Some thought that, – The WinDOS "product" was a hybrid of Windows and DOS. – It was a DOS product that looked like Windows. – It was a special Windows version of Borland that ran under DOS. – The box contained the complete versions of both products. • "WinDOS worked like a competitive upgrade's (Windows) evil twin."
Borland’s “Paradox”, “WinDos”
Results: • It turned out that someone who wanted the Windows version of the product had little interest in the DOS version and vice versa. • Borland now had three mutually incompatible development platforms: dBASE, Paradox for DOS, and Paradox for Windows.
Motorola-And We All Fall Down!
• Introduced StarTAC-cool analog system when demand was for digital system • Want to talk atop Mt .Everest or in the middle of the Atlantic – here is the $5billion Iridium project • The other condition is that your phones will not work indoors, in the shadows of building or under trees • 66 low earth satellites were launched which spend 70 percent of time over oceans and weren't usable for much of their life
Netscape – the Loudmouth
• 1993 Marc Andreessen gave first version of Mosaic browser for download – a radical step in browser design • Joined Jim Clark and founded Netscape and wrote new browser named “Navigator” • Released over the internet in December 1994 • 1995-captured 80% of market share • Stock pre IPO value at $28 opened at $71 and close at $58.25
Netscape – the Loudmouth
• Andreessen – a nice PR package • The smart move – baited and threatened Microsoft by telling the world that new language Java in conjunction with Netscape's browsers was the application platform of the future and would replace Windows calling it a “poorly debugged set of device drivers” • Made some witty and memorable observations like “We’re gonna smoke’em (Microsoft being the intended smoke.) “It was like a visit to Don Coroleone.I expected to find a bloody computer monitor in my bed the next day.” • A Forbes article proclaimed Andreessen was the “next Bill Gates’
Netscape – the Loudmouth
• 1995- After Netscape’s IPO company’s worth was $203 million whereas Microsoft had $10 billion • Netscape’s core products weren’t hard to build and Microsoft had the resources to build them • Microsoft was a stronger development organization – Netscape’s Communicator designed to kill Microsoft’s IE developed a reputation of slow, flaky and overloaded with features which never really worked • Java as a replacement for Windows proved to be a fantasy
Netscape – the Loudmouth
• The existent Bill Gates took him seriously and dedicated all his time and energy to destroy Netscape • 1998- game is over for Andreessen and had to subordinate to AOL. • It should have kept its mouth shut and bought time to survive the inevitable Microsoft onslaught • Marc Andreessen after realizing that his career at AOL was going to consist mainly of teaching members of the executive staff how to program their VCRs, he left to form a new Internet services and infrastructure company aptly named as “Loud cloud”
Lessons
• Successful positioning requires a clear, consistent approach with brief, strong statements that communicate the desired idea to potential buyers • Arrogance is destructive • Don’t choose a product name that hurts its positioning • Choose a product name that can’t be confused with a competitor • Can you purchase the domain name that corresponds to your product’s name? • Don’t differentiate by taking away features from the standard product - people don’t like to feel like they’re buying a cheap, crappy version of something
Lessons- Successful Positioning
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. Visualize Perform image creation and attachment Layer Build a marketing vocabulary Create descriptors Describe the product Repeat and integrate
To succeed….
• New technologies don’t have a shot at success without the following conditions: – The kernel of a new idea. – A market for the new idea. – An significant advantage to entice people to switch. – An infrastructure to support the new technology. – A means of distribution. – A reasonable price for the new technology. – An acceptable level of quality - maybe not great, but good enough
The Worst Piece of High-Tech Collateral Ever Created
Software that creates a brutal, Darwinian battle for survival in YOUR company! We’d stay to chat more, but we have to hunt down the customer service department and kill them
THANK YOU!!
doc_414065054.ppt