Archive of Marketing Articles

It isn’t just about finding customers anymore. You have to build fans. Take a look at the dynamics of word of mouth marketing and how they can cause your product to succeed. This article includes tips and references for helping you move through each stage in the cycle of fans, maximizing opportunities for word of mouth marketing for your products.

Pragmatic Marketing runs an annual survey of product managers. We looked at 440 results from the 2006 Product Manager Survey to uncover the trends in how different product manager roles are defined. The survey involved questions breaking down the allocation of time to different activities. In this article we look at how those activities varied for product managers, product marketing managers, segment / market managers, and technical product managers.

Marketing is as foreign to most software developers as swimming is to fish. We’ve found a list of ten truths of marketing, and we’re secretly sharing them with the developers who hang out here. Shhh. Don’t tell anyone in marketing.

There are three main models for selling software. You can hire a direct sales force. You can spend a lot on marketing and advertising. You can let your users sell the software for you, a technique commonly known as viral marketing. There’s a catch with viral marketing – users have to like your software.

Mike Mace provides us with some great insight about market research – helping us to avoid ‘the blender’ and ‘the gap’. The gap is a reflection of the inability of most customers to innovate. The blender is the loss of useful market information into a homogenized input that pushes only the lowest common denominator – again stifling innovation. We have to avoid the blender and the gap to get useful data from our research.

Web Ink Now has a great article and analysis of the gobbledegook that passes for marketing messages. They’ve done an analysis of over 50,000 articles during the first nine months of 2006. Not only have they identified many of the most ridiculous terms, they’ve ranked them (or stack-ranked them, as a former employer would say) based on frequency.

Jeremiah Owyang, a Silicon Valley Community Manager writes about the difference between product managers and product marketing managers.

More great stuff from Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users. Kathy contrasts the traditional budget-busting marketing promotion approach (one of the classic 4Ps) with a nickel-and-dime approach to inspiring and educating users and customers. We’ve talked about the importance of persuasion in the new Ps. Kathy’s stuff is right on the money for this one.

Kelly Odell posted a single-sheet marketing plan template, after being frustrated with the massive templates that others have promoted in the past. John Sviokla recently wrote about how the 4-P’s of marketing are changing to the 5-P’s of marketing. Marcus Ting-A-Kee found John’s essay and wrote about it yesterday. Guy Kawasaki suggested that Kelly adapt his template to John’s new approach. Kelly chose to mix the best of both worlds. We add our own spin at the end.

A grass roots campaign has been started by Peter Provost to get Microsoft to include unit testing support included with all versions of Visual Studio 2005 (VS). Currently, Microsoft is only including it with Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) versions of VS. This looks to be a great example of a killer feature in a product providing so much surprise and delight that people are demanding that it be universally available. This is also a great example of market segmentation by Microsoft. The irony is that there is an open source alternative that makes the opportunity cost very low, and yet people are still clamoring. Let’s see why.