While this blog’s focus is on marketing and the media in the high tech investment arena, it is still worth taking a look at some principals of marketing that are generally universal in scope. In fact, good marketers have skills which are very transferable—from B2B to consumer to members to employees and across industries. Of course each of these universes has its own quirks, acronyms, and special needs. As long as a marketer knows marketing basics, industry-specific and audience-specific important details can be learned. And while there are lessons that cross divides, it is also worth noting that what works for one product in one situation can rarely be replicated. However, you can take away elements that have been useful, adjust them for your own technological product or service, and build them into your own, solid marketing plan and media plan.

So, here are some useful things to know:

• Creativity without persuasion is just fluff. The best ads are not necessarily the ones that everyone loves – many of these are memorable, but the product being advertised can get lost.

We can all remember wonderful ads, ones we love, but cannot remember what the product is that’s being advertised. Recently, I love the television ad about a couple about to say their vows. The fiancé starts discussing things in financial terms, and the best man ends up marrying the bride. It’s a funny ad (albeit a sexist ad), and I know it’s for some non-US bank, but that’s all I remember.

• Do not state claims for your product which are exaggerated or questionable; you may not be able to recover if you’ve lost credibility.

Read what the Federal Trade Commission has to say about this: http://www.ftc.gov/redflag.

• Persuasion without a decent product is hollow and short-lived.

Customers and clients may try it once, but unless they’re stuck with a major purchase, such as a business communications system, there will be no repeat business or positive referrals.

• If you put out ten messages and nine of them are true, the public will focus on the one that isn’t and rarely ever give you a chance to make good on it.

There’s an old expressive about one bad apple ruining the whole batch. Truth in advertising is imperative if you do not want your credibility questioned. And while your competitive may be stretching the truth and gaining market share, this will probably backfire in the long run. The same thing is true for earnings reports and other key indicators (think Enron).

• If one customer is unhappy, that customer will tell many more people (the number varies depending on who is being quoted) about this than the customer who is very happy.

No need to elaborate; this one everyone know!

• If you act wisely when you’ve got a problem and are forthright and quick to react, customers can be very forgiving. In fact, if you’ve made a large blunder and admitted it, you will usually be more admired in the long run than you would have if everything went right in the first place.

A case in point is the classic one about the package tampering and Tylenol scare back in the early 80’s when J&J recalled all of its products. This is called crisis management, but it’s also very wise marketing. See http://www.personal.psu.edu/users/w/x/wxk116/tylenol/crisis.html.

• The first to market often has only a 50-50 chance of staying ahead of the pack.

This statistic is not backed by fact; rather, it comes from my own experience observing the marketplace. While sometimes the early bird does have the edge, often it’s better to let the innovator take off from the gate first, tackle the early kinks and landmines, and then pave the way for close followers to perfect the offering and delivery of it to the customer or client. This means that even though you’re not first, if you are skillful in executing the business essentials, your prospects are often very good.

• What you learned in kindergarten…you’ve heard the rest of this before. There is still a lot of truth here. In the consumer market, if your 5-year old finds your product appealing, it’ll probably be a hit.

Now the following is a low tech story, but worth mentioned. Back in the early 90s, my friend wanted to teach his young children about the stock market and investing. He let them select which companies to buy, and then gave them seed money to buy just a few shares of each. This was during the high tech and telecom industry build up. Of course, his children picked brands they knew and liked best—brands like McDonald’s, Apple, Coke, Pepsi, Nintendo, Disney and Keds—and, not surprisingly, these did very well, and the kids made a nice profit. Many of these brands are still strong today. Translating this info the tech world, I’d say 1) trust your instincts and 2) don’t be intimidated by jargon and elaborated technological explanations (again, I can cite Enron here; this is one of the reasons why sophisticated people got duped).

• If it takes you several sentences to explain your new innovation, you haven’t found the core benefit yet for the customer. This was a lesson that marketing and product managers working with Bell Labs had difficulty mastering.

You learn this the hard way when you have just conducted a focus group, exploring benefits and features of a new concept in the market, a wireless business phone system, and—this really happened to me—several of your participants, all telecom managers for medium sized businesses, start asking questions that reveal they had no idea of what they were talking about technologically during the past hour and a half, and you want to scream.

• When you reinvent the wheel you can often make major leaps in progress.

Third world countries that never developed their own expensive communications infrastructure were able to leap over this constraint when wireless telecom products became ubiquitous.

• Do not try to communicate more than one strong message in your advertisement. When advertising your product, keep it simple.

This is a frequent mistake when marketers try to cram in too much information about a new product or service. Instead of remembering the key point, people often don’t remember any of the points. Focus on its key attribute, the one you want the client or customer to remember most of all.

• Word of mouth is often the most effective public relations you can have.

Of course, this whole area deserves more attention and will be addressed again and again.

• It’s more believable when your average customer rather than your top customer praises your product’s virtues. Potential customers relate better to people who are like them. This is one of the main reasons why businesses are paying more attention to ethnic marketing and diversity. 

The whole multi-cultural sphere is important. Further, if you expect to go global, you’d better learn as much as you can about the markets you plan to enter.

• Once you’ve built a respected brand, guard it very carefully, like the crown jewels.

For instance, coop and other co-marketing arrangements may be good for boosting business, but if the other brand is not highly valued or loses credibility in the marketplace, your brand will suffer.

• Similarly, you can never count on having a well-known spokesperson always behaving in an exemplary way. There’s always a risk when you use celebrity endorsements. When you link your product to a celebrity, you are putting your brand at the mercy of a precarious situation that you have no control over – their reputation.

There are many examples of having to dump an ad campaign when the spokesperson appeared in the news in an unfavorable way.  O. J. Simpson and Hertz is just one well-publicized example.  If you are considering going this route, you’d better do a great job of vetting them.

• Early decisions are critical and can make a huge difference on how appealing your product is positioned: packaging, logo, primary color, look and feel, channels and delivery, promotions. In fact getting the early decisions wrong can be very costly. If you’ve gone pretty far down the development road before you’ve hit a roadblock, it’s often prohibitively expensive to correct it.  Although many things cannot be anticipated, some worst case scenario planning may be very valuable.

You’ve heard this: Had it been caught early on, it would have been a quick, inexpensive fix. I learned this early on when AT&T had deployed software systems for all the Bell companies across the U.S. Another analyst in our programming group forgot to include a period at the end of a software command, didn’t test it adequately, and sent out software that messed up all of the business marketing customer databases. There was not an easy fix and it varied by operating company. The entire computing staff on this system had to work for a full week to resolve this. Had this happened to a smaller company with fewer resources, it would have put them out of business.

• It never hurts to do some research early on. Also, research done up front may seem costly and may seem to be holding up product development or a launch, but can have exponential benefits down the pike. The principal here is the same as the one above.

Read what marketingprofs had to say: http://www.marketingprofs.com/6/young38.asp.

• Do not confuse sales and marketing. Often the sales managers think they are marketers and provide anecdotal information that is positioned as definitive. There’s a big difference between the two functions.

One area of difference is the focus. Sales is now. Marketing can be now, but it can also be long term, well planned and strategic. Sales gets commissions and works to move products out the door. Thus, they can over-promise and often are not around to pay for the consequences of dissatisfied customers.

• Do not develop a great idea and then look for the target market for it; it may not exist. At best, you’re retrofitting the target audience into the idea instead of leading with the needs and interests of the target audience.

Again, Bell Labs comes to mind. Not to downgrade the important role they played in helping American become a dominant world force through discoveries such as lasers, but they also developed a lot of technology which didn’t have a chance in the market and never saw the light of day.

• Your biggest competition may not be the company that builds a better mouse trap; it may be the company that figures out a way to deal with the mouse without any trap.

This is the old story about companies with competing products being so focused on their direct competition that they don’t notice that someone has come along with a complementary product that destroys their business function.

• While it is frequently true that when you increase prices, your sales volume decreases, this is not always right. Marketing has a major influence on what happens.

For instance, if your product is in the luxury category, like gemstone settings and perfume, your sales may actually increase by increasing your prices and boosting the product’s prestige.

• The adoption curve for new technology is often shaped like a hockey stick – it starts slowly and flat, doesn’t take off right away, but once it catches on, its market penetration increases rapidly.

The theory goes, and this is often right, that it’s the innovators and very early adopters who will try out a product or service that’s so new that no one knows how to use it very well. Besides being risk takers, they help others learn about the value of this new technology. When word spreads, purchase and usage becomes exponential.  Classic examples abound – from calculators to ATM machines to PCs and software.

• It’s better for you to find the problems first before your customer finds them. There are examples of companies that knew about problems, but kept them hidden. I suppose that if the public never discovers them, the company may be able to skirt the issue entirely. However, if it does surface that the company knew about the problems much earlier, this is disastrous for business.

The tobacco industry comes to mind as an example of this phenomenon.

• Branding can be tricky:

If the product name is descriptive of what the product does, it cannot be trademarked.
If the product name is a common word, it may be difficult to remember and may take a lot of advertising dollars to inculcate in the public’s collective mind (example: Windows).
If the name is new, as in a made up word, it may be disliked at first due to its unfamiliar sound; however, if there is enough advertising and momentum behind it, the name can be powerful (example: Verizon).

• When naming a product, remember to consider difficulty with pronunciation, spelling, how it sounds, what it elicits in the customer’s mind, any negative associations. If your product may go global, it’s important to extend your naming research and searches to each country you anticipate being in; unfortunately, there’s no way to bundle this work.

Be sure to explore the meaning of your product’s name in many other languages. Whether this is U.S. based only or international, it’s worth working with specialists who can provide trademark and service mark search support as well.