I’d love to get my hands on data for comparative analysis of the resources required to design remarkable products vs marketing ordinary ones.
Robert Stephens, the founder of Geek Squad that was acquired by Best Buy, reportedly said that “Advertising is the tax you pay for being unremarkable.” Given the choice, I would always select voluntary taxation such as consumption/sales taxes and/or lottery instead of mandatory, regressive income taxes, however, the governments have the luxury to extract both and don’t give us much room for choice. The reasons companies elect to pay an “advertising tax”, that often reaches 30% of retail price, is because we, the Customers, pay it.
I do realize that advertising is only a part of the marketing budget, and wonder what role the rest of the marketing organization play in maintaining competition based on the price per feature strategy. How much do marketers know what their Customers think about the product they purchased? Have they realized the value they were expecting? If not, what is the best way to close this gap?
Based on 64,601 Customer Reviews published before January 26, 2010
When you exceed Customer expectations, just unobtrusively help them to share their experience as much as possible. At this point all they really need is a really tall soapbox.
I took almost a month to recover from my CES2010 and now I can attempt to write something more or less cohesive. The experience was absolutely overwhelming. Bright images on gigantic screens and loud sounds continuously blasting away are to be expected at Consumer Electronics trade show, but my mind could not function very well in these conditions. I have not visited such large, noisy and heavily attended events for a few years and the assault on my senses was very difficult to bear, but I managed.
We are a new associate member of the Consumer Electronics Association and this was my very first visit to this event. CEA offers a terrific Mentoring program to its members and I came to Las Vegas to take advantage of it. It is amazing how much one can learn from truly knowledgeable and generous people even during a short personal meeting. I am very grateful to Bill Matthies of Coyote Insight for sharing his deep knowledge and understanding of the marketplace. I started this company with an idea of converting virgin data into actionable information, and we have almost succeeded – Bill made me realize that the link between our metrics and an action is very obvious to nobody but me, and advised to share that link with others using “stories” and “pictures” like this:
Robert Heiblim of BlueSalve and my CEA Mentor, helped me understand the inter-workings of the CE community better and to meet people in CE product marketing to learn more about how they go about conducting their business. I only wish I could get more of Robert’s guidance and advice.
Consider the actions a marketing product manager can take based on the data that their product ABC has a low satisfaction score. I can’t think of any other action than to learn more, i.e. to discover more data. Presumably information is created when our marketing product manager (or product marketing manager) compares ABC’s product satisfaction score with the one of a competing product, hence comparison of two points produce information, i.e. higher value.
Correlating the information produced by tracking these two data points over time with sales numbers can create knowledge – “product with an inferior reputation tends to undersell its competition by X%, when sold at competitive (i.e. similar) price”. Now, this is an actionable piece of knowledge as our MP/PM manager can attempt to discount the ABC product to stimulate sales or attempt to improve the customer’s opinion about it.
Can you suggest any scenarios where aggregated customer feedback about reliability of a product XYZ can lead to/suggest an action that protects and/or improves its profit margin? Your help will be deeply appreciated.
Meaning: from the many, one. The following illustrates how many voices can come together via social networking and the internet to help us spend our money more wisely.
Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist says in this interview:
“Posting information about products and experiences as everyday as hotel stays (”Generally all my reports are shower-related,” he said) helps other people make more educated purchases, he said during a panel session Tuesday, and can ultimately lead to better customer service when large numbers of people weigh in on social-media forums. Participating in these sites is an act of compassion, in some sense patriotism.”
Think back to your last “pig in a poke” purchase or “Hotel from Hell” experience. What would you give to have had someone spare you that? We all tell our friends our good and bad experiences in the marketplace. Now with social networking our “friends” can be like friends squared, we have the ability to reach the full six degrees of separation (just about anyone who has an internet connection) and share information. I agree with him that the numbers have to be large for it to really work and your idea of a great laptop and mine may vary due to what we want or require from it. Each reviewer contributes a piece of the puzzle to give shoppers a better picture of the product or service.
While it is often our own current economic woes that are making us choose more carefully where we spend our dollars, it is also the “green” thing to do. There is a lot of waste in the process of returns, and many products, particularly electronics, are not disposed of in an environmentally friendly manner. In the end, the manufacturers and retailers include that cost of returns into the purchase price of their products. If we were able to choose more wisely, resulting in fewer returns, perhaps prices would reflect that. While my skepticism prevents me from holding my breath for that, (it could happen) I totally agree with Craig that it is a public service we can provide for one another and benefit from ourselves.
