Archive of Marketing Articles

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.

We write a lot about value-driven prioritization of software requirements. It’s easy (when defining requirements) to forget that we have to sell the product before anyone gets any value from it. With internal use software for large companies (like enterprise software, intranets, erp systems), “sell it” means “get high user adoption rates.” High user rates are key to getting ROI when process-improvement is one of the targets of the software.

The three most important things to understand about the quality of your software are the three things most relevant to your business and your stakeholders (and arguably, your boss).

Top three measurements of software quality

1. How do people perceive our quality?
2. How big of a problem is our quality?
3. How bad is our software, really?

They key to writing a great spec is knowing how to specify software that mets our customers’ needs.
It can be a daunting task. First, we have to define what our customer needs. High level requirements are just requirements that are too vague or high-level to be directly actionable. “We must reduce our cost [...]

Lauren Arbittier Davis recently started Alkali Marketing, a boutique marketing outsourcing company here in Austin.  I’ve personally worked with Lauren over much of the past decade, and couldn’t be more excited about her company!  When Tyner Blain is ready to build awareness (beyond our current viral approach), Alkali is who we’ll call.  In addition to [...]

When you launch a new software product, or start a new blog, or a website, one way to get the word out is by viral marketing.
Thanks to this post on the Presentation Zen website, I found a great presentation by Seth Godin here. Lots of good examples, from Google to the Macarena to the [...]