Pragmatic Marketing: Effective Product Marketing Rule #1

This is the first in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.

Effective Product Marketing Rule #1: Time spent on Gather, Assess, Focus, Measure & Improve reduces time and budget wasted on Build & Execute.

(Last Monday, I summarized Pragmatic Marketing’s approach to Product Marketing, which you may find useful to review to place Rule #1 in its full context.)

Sometimes we just want to get going. We want to just do something, try things out, get in the market. We don’t want to wait for everything to be analyzed to death, because that’s the sure recipe for, well, death. Paralysis analysis: who wants it? who likes it? who needs it? Let’s get going, kids. Let’s put on a show!

And thus, we jump into the deep end of the pool, ignoring the fact that the water is icy cold, and we don’t own a web suit; forgetting for a moment that we have lead weights strapped to our ankles and that, for good measure, we don’t know how to swim. (Ya know, there’s something to be said for paralysis analysis. It does keep you from drowning.)

A year or so ago, I was involved in marketing time and budget waster with a small software company I’d been working with. We were planning our first marketing program ever. While the budget was low, expectations were high. And the pressure to get a program off the ground was intense. We had a good product, a sharply defined market, and a decent program idea. What we didn’t have was a well thought-through pricing plan. Nor did we (yet) have a way to get into the market segment that we had identified as our "best bet" for the program. I urged caution - I wanted us to figure out a few more of the puzzle pieces before we dived in. But I also know myself: while I never get fully paralyzed, I do acknowledge a tendency to analyze things, if not to death, then to a near-death experience. What if, risk assessment, alternative approaches - I love thinking things through.

But the client urged jumping in.

Which meant scuttling a program idea that related to product pricing. We just weren’t willing to go there.

And which also meant selecting an unvetted, sub-optimal market segment for our first marketing program. I had done a little probing around the edges of this market and, while there was some there there, it was not our best bet - especially at the price point the company was insistent on promoting. The reason we ended up choosing this sub-optimal market segment? The lamest of all reasons: there was a mailing list available.

And there we had it.

Everybody into the pool! Which, to keep torturing this analogy, didn’t have enough water in the deep end. Not only were we executing in the wrong place, but we didn’t even have the budget to fully execute the program, anyway. We couldn’t afford the multi-touch, multi-vehicle approach, so we just spent what little we had on a one-shot deal.

Not surprisingly, the marketing campaign, not surprisingly, failed to turn up a boat-load of leads for us.

Although I had warned folks ahead of time that we were not likely to get all that much out of the program, even I was stunned by the poor response.

What could we have done differently?

Well, we could have kept gathering more information on the market we thought was best to go after, and focused on this market, rather than the one we did. (We weren’t quite trying to sell rabbit meat to vegans,we certainly weren’t going after our prime opportunity.) We could have done a better job assessing the merits of our pricing concept. And, after the fact - absent much of anything to measure - we should have done a post mortem and figured out how to improve things the next time. Instead we pretty much declared that direct marketing doesn’t work, so we won’t try that again. Grrrrrrrrr.

Pragmatic’s Rule #1 doesn’t just cover how to avoid numb-brained marketing programs, but how to help ensure that you’re building the right products for your market.

Yes, there comes a point where thinking has to come to an end, and doing begin.  But I can honestly say that, in my lifetime, I’ve seen a lot more leaping into the void than I have staring into the void trying to figure out one more angle of approach. I will never argue the bias towards inaction: the only thing that guarantees you won’t succeed is if you refuse to put yourself at risk of failure. Still, sometime being just a teensy-weensie little more plan-full can save you a big time in the end.

 

———————————————-

Here’s sometime amusing: spellchecker for Windows Live Writer suggests "Vegas" as an alternative to "vegans." Sure, what you eat in Vegas for the most part stays in Vegas, but I can honestly say that the vegan lifestyle is not one I would normally associate with Las Vegas.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.

The Opinionated Marketers | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice