QOTW: If you could wave a magic wand, how would you change your product marketing?

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Permalink Reply by Sohail Somani on March 24, 2009 at 7:45pm

I would use your magic wand to make a better UI for my product, make the product widely applicable and then try and get lots of blog coverage, perhaps via free licenses. As it is now, my market is small although I do have a small user base who are very happy with the software.

I'm working on the first two right now but your magic wand would be very helpful.

I know you asked for product marketing but if your product isn't right, all the marketing isn't going to help.

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Permalink Reply by Ian Tebbutt on March 25, 2009 at 12:21am

If I had one wish, it would be to really understand what my customers want, and then how to get them to pay for it. Focus groups, forums, trade shows, they all seem such an incredibly inefficient way of getting input, OTH sales people are expensive - how do you find out what they want?

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Permalink Reply by Tim Lentine on March 25, 2009 at 3:12pm

I would use your magic wand to understand and reach those with purchasing authority in organizations. We presently reach the end users with our product marketing and while this provides an "in" with the prospect, it would be nice to reach the people who actually make the decision to buy much earlier in the process. Having an internal "champion of the cause" within an organization is great, but no one is going to sell the product's features and benefits better than we will.

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Permalink Reply by Stewart on March 25, 2009 at 4:53pm

Speaking hypothetically... Two things... a deeper, documented understanding of the buyer personas and well-constructucted value propositions. Seems simple enough, but probably two of the most important tools in the product marketing toolkit.

Stewart

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Permalink Reply by Steve Jones on April 2, 2009 at 7:47pm

I think it would be to get the product marketing people to be more creative, and not just view this as a sales interaction, but more of a knowledge transfer to prospective clients. Get them interested and engaged, listen to them, blog, twitter, do things that create a two way dialog with people.

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Permalink Reply by Sarah on August 6, 2009 at 12:44am

I'd use the magic wand to find out WHERE my customers are. I'd be like one of those mystical dowsing rods. You can use the internet to find out what people what to buy already...but it's a bit more difficult to find out where they hang out on a daily basis or what websites they go to on the internet. Offline, are they at a coffee shop? A sports club? A night club? In front of their TV? With friends camping? On the internet...do they hang out in forums? Are they visiting blogs? So, with my magical wand that acts like a dowsing rod...I'd hold it up, close my eyes, and zzzzzzzzzzzz OOOP! There you are my wandering customer. Why didn't you come to my site in the first place instead of spending hours getting frustrated trying to find what you need when i already had it? :P

One of the sites I used to target customers on the internet: http://www.blackduvetcover.net

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Permalink Reply by Mark Dalgarno on August 6, 2009 at 8:11am

If I could wave my magic wand I'd change product marketing so that it could accurately distinguish features people say they need in a product and eventually use from those they say they need in a product but never use.

If I could wave my magic wand a second time I'd use it to give product marketing 100% accuracy in determining the value planned product features to the customer.

If my wand hadn't run out by then I'd give product marketing absolute certainty that they had identified the best-possible prices for our products.

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Permalink Reply by Alan Wexelblat on August 11, 2009 at 9:03pm

This (distinguishing needs from purported needs) is the point of user interaction design. Methods such as Contextual Inquiry, ethnography, and other forms of user research involve actually watching what people do (as opposed to listening to what they say they do). From these observations an expert synthesizes information about problems and opportunities. This information is then translated into things like business requirements, functional requirements and yes, feature requests.

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Permalink Reply by Jason Glover on August 11, 2009 at 9:58pm

If I had magic then I would hardly need a marketing strategy. I'd simply wave the wand and everyone would magically know about and want my product. Not only that, they'd be happy with the features it shipped with and be willing to may 50% more for it than for the competition.

:p

Since there is no magic wand I'll continue to rely on engaging my customers directly. Marketing is all about undetstanding your customer ... no better way to do that then to get in their back pocket. That's the real magic!

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Permalink Reply by Naicu Octavian on August 12, 2009 at 9:15am

I would use this wand to see how much my competitors are making with similar products, if they don't make that much money, then its time to focus on other products/markets.

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Permalink Reply by Ersan Bilik on September 3, 2009 at 9:40pm

I'd build something remarkable to change the paradigm (Seth godin - purple cow)
I'd give something people would talk about it ( give something people to talk about )
and i'd use the magic wand to accomplish these two :)

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