Does your company make and sale an excellent ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE? Do you have
#1 market share? Not seen appreciable growth for the past
few years. What to do? One of the jobs of product marketing is to justify a marketing budget (or more hopefully, a budget was already allocated for your product). Using the traditional 4P marketing framework (product, price, placement, promotion), let's see how we should spend our marketing dollars:
1. Improve the PRODUCT
2. PRICE adjustment
3. Make the product more available through better PLACEMENT
4. Increase incentives to buy via PROMOTION
1. Improve the PRODUCT
This
requires looking to perform a GAP ANALYSIS see if our product has any
deficiencies against our competitor's and against our target customers
needs. After performing a SWOT analysis, we discovered that our product
sometimes had inferior performance, but other times we had superior
performance. In order to tweak our products to make it perform as well
as our competition, the customer had to do additional work to the
product.
If the engineering team has the right sights but has not delivered, perhaps your marketing dollar can be used to motivate the developers, hire more developers, adopt new process (AGILE), deploy the latest tracking software such as Jira. But who wants to spend marketing dollars on product development?
2. PRICE adjustment
The original title of this was "PRICE reduction". But GMs cringe at this. The basic
premise behind dropping the price our our product is to increase sales
(lower ASP per product, but made up with volume). A PRICING ELASTICITY
graph will help to predict if we can sell more products should we drop
the price. We have trained our sales teams to VALUE SELL. That is, we ought to price our product by the pain it saves. This thinking is a must, especially in our circumstance where our customers are usually hardware manufacturers and think mainly in terms of OPERATING, GROSS, or PROFIT MARGINS. It is a paradigm shift that all software vendors needs to hold steadfastly.
3. Make the product more available through better PLACEMENT (distribution)
The
basic premise behind placement is that the more TOUCH POINTS your
product has with your customer, the high chances they will buy. Coke
made the a primary strategy in reaching their customers globally, poor or
rich.
Software placement has seen a major shift. Up until about 2000, software were sold and installed ON PREMISE. On premise software has two basic licensing model : PERPETUAL or SUBSCRIPTION. With perpetual licensing, you pay once, install the software on your own computer hardware (PC, Mac, ...) and own it forever. Common examples of this are PC games. With subscription licensing, although you still install the software on your own computer hardware (Linux/Sun/HP workstation servers), you can only the use the software for a fixed amount of time (1 week, 1 month, 1 year, in rare circumstances you can use the software 99 years or forever). The payment involves two portions : the upfront fee and the maintenance (or royalty) fee. After 2000, with the advent of CLOUD, Software-As-A-Service (SAAS), the software you buy is NOT installed on your local computer/workstation/server. The software now runs in a big DATA CENTER (aka cloud), located somewhere naturally cool with a much lower cooling utility bill.
What does this have anything to do with placement? With SAAS, anyone with a web browser (PC, Mac, iPad tablet, iPhone smartphone) or application (APP) can use SAAS. This is technology is possible thanks to a concept called MULTI-TENANT. Salesforce (stock CRM) is a pure SAAS example. With SAAS / cloud, selling software via subscription to any device is possible.
4. Increase incentives to buy via PROMOTION
What if you have the perfect product, ideal pricing, and global placement, but the product does not sell? Perhaps it is time to creative an INCENTIVE via promotion. There are two types of PROMOTION : PUSH and PULL. Pull promotion is adopted heavily in the B2C (business 2 consumer) sales which involves traditional coupons and 15%-off-sales. JCPenny tried to break away from that model and failed. Push promotion is normally deployed in B2B (business 2 business) enterprise software in addition to B2C. The promotions usually are at motivating your SALES TEAM. One common way to do this is to create a Sales Performance Incentive Fund (SPIFF) that will create an incentive for your sales team to sell your product. Sales people often have multiple products to sell from the same company, so there is competition amongst product lines within the same company.
If you had a marketing budget, how would you spend it?
Friday, January 30, 2015
Friday, January 16, 2015
i5 veruss i3 : More Powerful Processor -> Heat -> Slower (ironically)
 |
| http://tabtec.com/windows/surface-pro-3-intel-core-i3-vs-core-i5-performance-battery-life/ |
Thursday, January 15, 2015
Snapchat Pricing Model - Charge $750K For An One Day Ad Targetted At Coveted Teens
 |
| http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/snapchat-asks-brands-750000-advertise-and-wont-budge-162359 |
Tuesday, January 13, 2015
What Good Is Dual Core 64-bit Processor on an iPhone 5S? It Provides Powerful Editing Tools
iPhone5S has desktop PC class processing power:
- A7 64-bit ARM processor, dual core, 1.4GHZ, (L1$ : I64K+D64K/Core, L2$ : 1M, L3$ : 64M)
- PowerVR G6430 GPU (quad core)
- 1G LP-DDR3 RAM
- 16G/32G/64 Flash
- A5 motion processor
1. Audio editing (trim out areas of silence)
2. Picture enhancement/cropping (I would not have been able to read the writing on the grease board)
3. Video processing (add audio, add text, adjust color)
Monday, January 12, 2015
My Prediction for 2015
Here is my prediction of what will be big (or begin to be big) in 2015
What: Feedback from devices to the human. Common example right now is the little vibration you feel when you type on your phone screen. Another example is a video game control with vibration feedback. A recent experience with my Nintendo Wii remote vibrating every time the cursor passes a character as I am typing.
Why: Feedback from device to human encourages interaction and make it much more user friendly.
Current State: Currently in video games, phones, watches.
What to Expect in 2015: Improve the feedback feeling (smaller, more types of feelings) and on applications (messaging, ...)
2. Virtual Reality Goggles
http://www.virtualrealityreviewer.com/experience-paul-mccartney-live-concert-vr/
Why: Teleport people to places they never can be. Make existing media (movie) more interesting and entice people to buy & watch again. A win for the studios (entire existing library can be monetized), device maker, and consumer.
Current State:
What to Expect in 2015: Creation of more content (need equipment to record at 4K, 360), licensing the right to record (sporting events, music events), streaming technology (instaneously stream a live event to millions of people).
3. 3-D Printing
http://www.3ders.org/articles/20130524-high-school-student-designs-3d-printable-finger-splints-for-developing-countries.html
What: Create an object in 3-D and manufacture it at home on a 3-D printer.
Why: Anything that you need to custom make that is not sold in stores - a custom medical cast for your jammed finger, a custom plastic leg for your sound bar (broke or need custom height), a new toy for your bored kids.
Current State: Currently available and can print simple structures but cannot withstand 1.2KPI of static pressure.
What to Expect in 2015: More intricate, stronger, cheaper, & faster 3-D printers.
4. Laptops (Ultra) Will See A Re-Birth With Touch
 |
| Bezel on Apple Mac Air is big & ugly! Needs to support touch screen, too. |
What: Tablets (and Netbooks) have been growing at the expense of laptops... tablets have touch screens, are easy to carry around, is a fun and novel way of performing tasks that was done on the heavier/bulkier/touch-screen-less laptops
Why: Tablets are great OUTPUT devices and occasional INPUT devices. Booming social media only needs occasional INPUT. Hence tablet boom.
Current State: We are at the inflection point where touch-thin-ultra-books take the best of laptops (easy to use keyboard, local storage) and combine with the best of tablet (light, touchscreen, long battery life)
What to Expect in 2015: More intricate, stronger, cheaper, & faster 3-D printers.
IoT - The Next Cloud/SAAS?
Internet of Things (IoT)
IoT has been the new drum beat that everyone is beating to. Businesses need a new drum beat once every decade or so to energize producers and excite consumers. The last drum beat was Cloud/SAAS/Virtualization, which is near the point of the curve where the 2nd derivative is negative (transition from early to mature).
With IoT being crowned by all (cloud infrastructure provider, device producer, data analytics/big data producer), let's examine why this is so universal.
IoT will enable anything to:
1. connect - communicate & control
2. measure - input from sensors
3. collect -from existing sensors or sensorless sources
4. analyze - measurements are collected, transmitted, analyzed, then driven out
5. drive - output & feedback
Everyone will benefit. Semiconductors, analytics, cloud infrastructure. But do consumers want everything to be connected? Is there only limited application for IoT (machine 2 machine, industrial, medical, ...)? Or will this be a quiet revolution (despite the noise)?
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Monday, January 5, 2015
Amazon Product Teams : 1 for ideation, 2 for productization
http://www.fastcompany.com/3040383/following-fire-phone-flop-big-changes-at-amazons-lab126?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-manual-newsletter&position=anjali&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=01052014
Sunday, January 4, 2015
Thursday, January 1, 2015
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