Product marketing is surely not limited to advertising and promotion, but I would like to focus on this function of the job for this particular discussion. There is a great deal of debate about the role, effectiveness and ROI of social marketing efforts. The explosion of direct or indirect social interactions between people, using social media platforms, offers marketers two new opportunities:

1. To learn (research) market conditions very economically and as a continuous exercise, rather than random events (focus groups). A huge surprise to many is the willingness of individuals to disclose and share their private and quite specific data on the public domain of the Internet.
2. To practice “trust-based marketing” and “peer-to-peer marketing” methods in an effort to effectively reduce the uncertainty of a product purchase.

Elliot Schreiber – Clinical Professor at Le Bow College of Business, Drexel University, teaches courses in brand and reputation management. He has written in his blog:

“The best way is to look at the product from the outside-in, the way the customer sees it and to understand the needs and interests that determine the buying decision. I would suggest that there are two basic variables driving buying decisions: 1) the amount of fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) that the customer has in making the decision to buy; and 2) the complexity of the buying decision.”

Traditional marketing “push” methods are generating less and less return on their investment, as new technologies in traditional channels (Tivo, DVR, etc) help customers avoid advertising messages, and offer very little accountability. Pursuit of the same behavior among the new channels (Internet, mobile, etc) will cause a similar backlash. There are already browsers and plugins, enthusiastically discussed on Twitter, that enable the blocking of these advertising messages.

Glen L. Urban of the MIT Sloan School of Management published a paper called “The Trust Imperative”

“…the Internet is a great enabler for consumer power – consumers are more educated and more informed than ever before. Consumers now have more tools with which to verify company’s claims or to seek out superior product options. At the same time, companies have less power to push messages onto customers. Companies must decide what to do in the face of this overwhelming convergence of forces. One answer is to “push harder” with traditional marketing methods to torment customers. Another choice is “trust based marketing” and partnering with customers to jointly succeed.”

Like in any evolutionary development there are challenges to overcome:

1. Relevancy – the scale and the span of channels help to generate enormous volumes of data. Technology providers are more attuned to aggregation and management of new channels and more data than with providing actionable, filtered, relevant information; perhaps because there is too little process thought leadership is available. There are good monitoring or “listening” technology tools available on the market, however buyers (marketers) are often more interested in what channels they are monitoring than with “why” they are doing it and “what” they are going to do with the discovered information as illustrated in this “On Twitter, information beats Sentiment” blog post.
2. Authenticity – some people have always tried and will keep trying to substitute better product or better marketing with shortcuts of misrepresentation and outright fraud. Transparency of customer feedback practices is emerging and there are technological efforts under way to reduce the impact of those who are “slow” to learn.

This is surely not a complete list, but may be a good start. Your thoughts and comments are always welcome.

As a shopper for an all-in-one printer, comparing these two printers below on a retail site, the Epson Workforce is the easy choice – as customers on Amazon rate it at 4 out of 5 stars as opposed to the HP printer at 2.5 stars out of 5. Given the similar price and supply availability, this decision is a “no brainer”.

However, as a product marketing manager, responsible for the HP C4280, I would really want to understand the nature of  its  failure to earn a better reputation with its customers, before giving up on it and returning to the drawing board for the next model.

From the graphic above, a screen shot of our V2P Accelerator, the most noticeable diversions in reputation for these two competitors are in Functionality and Support scores, while customers expressed disappointment with the Reliability of both machines.

45 of 83 reviews (54%) explicitly addressing the functionality of the HP printer, expressed a negative sentiment about it. What’s even more telling is the intensity of the sentiment expressed – these customers’ negative sentiment intensity is an average of 0.073 which is nearly unacceptable. My hypothesis is the HP marketing organization has created unattainable expectations through its marketing communications. Let’s look more closely at what is causing this uproar:

Many customers point at software compatibility issues. I will only quote reviews from those authors who have identified themselves.

“This product does not work with VISTA. Their software upgrade that is supposed to fix it also does not work. ” nitropolo13;

“This is printer is a money pit. It constantly prints documents in color, no matter how I configure the software.” mcduck_rules;

“The software does not work and is not fit for purpose. If you have more than one user on xp it will insist on installing multiple copies of printers, each time corrupting you initial installation requiring the lengthy install and uninstall.” andrewmanly2;

“the software keeps trying to reinstall itself repeatedly! I have to keep task manager open to keep stopping the installs.” lequiqui;

“The c4280 is an exercise in frustration, at least with Windows Vista. Vista keeps forgetting the printer and then HP reinstalls the printer automatically so you end up with multiple copies in your “Printers” list. Prepare to spend lots of time waiting for HP to reinstall the c4280 several times a week. Oh, and HP installs all kinds of software on your machine — just nothing to resolve this problem.” dtfroats;

The software issue is, statistically, the most acute cause of “pain” to customers. Product managers should be able to produce a downloadable “fix” to remedy the problem and if the availability of such a fix is well communicated to the HP support organization and to existing customers, the reputation of the printer could improve significantly. In my view this is a low hanging fruit – fixable, low cost of distribution and a very high impact on Product Functionality Reputation.

Reviews related to the HP’s Product Support damages this product’s reputation even further – 16% of all customer reviews explicitly complain about their support experience:

“Spent an entire day with HP tech help trying to get the drivers installed correctly and when I did get them installed the print options menu was incomplete — I spent another day dealing with HP on the phone — it’s as if I don’t have better things to do – by massthreat”

“HP’s customer service is a disgrace. – by robert_walsh@condenast.com”.

“HP tech support is non-existent, I have spoken with customer reps in Canada, Philippines, and India and none of these people have used the printer or have a clue about the problem. The web tech support is also useless.This is the last Hp product I will own. – mcduck_rules”.

“I spent over 6 hours on customer support to try and fix the problem and I was told it wasn’t fixable. I climbed the customer service ladder and was finally able to speak to an English speaking “Case Manager” who clearly told me that “. . scan functions on any printer have a tendency to malfunction for various reasons. .- by philbechtel

“I called HP – and they have the worst customer service department I’ve ever dealt with. I spent hours and hours on the phone with them, and all they knew how to do was read instructions out of a book. – by nbasile”

It is hard to come up with any specific conclusions except that the cost of supporting this printer must be horrendous. I would love to run our analysis engine over the transcripts of the service calls and the email communications to extract the roots of the problems and recommend possible solutions, but these transcripts are not available to us.

By the way it took me about 15 minutes to conduct this analysis using our V2P Accelerator.