market strategy
After Mary Schmidt’s "Somebody will always buy it"
Mary Schmidt has a little goodie over on her blog, where she asks the questions we all need to ask when we’re bringing a B2B technology product to market:
Who would buy it?Who would buy more than one?How many “whos” are there? (Horton may be able to hear ‘em, but can you sell to them?)
Oh, [...]
The tortoise and the hare: in praise of consistency
Product launches. Grand openings. Big events. Most of us have done more than a few. If we had to account for the results of these activities, could we say that they were worth it? Seth Godin says, “Probably not.”
Make a list of successful products in your industry. Most of them didn’t start big. Not the [...]
Progress is good, right?
The New York Times wrote about the return of the browser wars last week. The browser world is getting interesting again; Firefox 3 will be released this month, Microsoft is showing test versions of IE8, and Apple’s Safari is making inroads thanks to the iPhone and their unfortunate decision to push out to Windows users [...]
Specialists and generalists
Are you a specialist, or a generalist? Should you hire a generalist or a specialist? Seth Godin suggested that there’s no reason to be a generalist (note: since I first read it, he’s toned it down a bit):
If I need an animator, I can find the world’s best animator. If I need a bond [...]
Niches will be filled
When people talk about what’s ailing the newspaper business, there’s one little company whose name comes up again and again: Craigslist. With Craigslist offering free classified ads in cities all over the world, how can newspapers compete? In an interview in the New York Times, however, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark questions that idea:
In the face [...]
Things change
Are you ready for a change in your market? Take a lesson from American automakers:
Automakers reported higher sales of small cars as oil and gasoline prices climbed to record highs in April, but said Thursday that overall vehicle sales in the United States plummeted during the month.
Sales decreased 29 percent from April 2007 at Chrysler, [...]
Does your brand have an ecosystem?
I’m one of those people who likes to drive a car until there’s not much car left to drive. Sure, a shiny new car is fun, but it’s not that much fun to me; I think that 150,000 miles is the time to start thinking about what your next car might be, and the ideal [...]
Advice for Realtors
If you are a realtor wondering how you’re going to cope with the currently ugly housing market, Seth Godin has some advice for you: get another job.
That’s probably excellent advice for a lot of agents in a market that’s likely to be difficult for some time. For those who want to stick with it, [...]
The Business Model Shuffle
A recent AP article profiled a company called Baby Plays, the brainchild of Houstonian Lori Pope. The idea is simple: instead of buying lots of toys for your kid (and watching your kid get sick of them), Baby Plays will rent you toys Netflix-style; you get a set number for a monthly fee, and when [...]
When Life Hands the Other Guy Lemons… Chinese Toys and American Toymakers
Recent news about lead-tainted toys manufactured in China have been helpful to one segment of the toy industries: small companies making hand-crafted toys in the US. But it’s hard for small operations to gear up to meet unexpected demand, so we see - for example - things like this from a toymaker in Maine:
This is [...]
