Blog

The "Bad" – thinking that if you have the best technology/product you will win the most market share/sales.   

I’m a big fan of Google and use many of their products.  I’m also a fan of Seth Godin
and regularly read his blog. That’s why when searching Google video the
other day I stopped when I saw this video by Seth. It was captured
during his presentation to Google about the power of brands. It’s long
(48 minutes) but really good. I especially like Seth’s into statement
that having the best technology does not guarantee success but rather
it gives you a shot to do great marketing.

OK, I know my first post said I’d comment on B2B marketing but I’m also a consumer and just had to point out this example of bad marketing by Comcast.     The "Bad" – announcing a big new product/service without any information on the Web.

For years I was a loyal customer of DirecTV and especially their TiVo service (one of the greatest new products ever).
Unfortunately I recently moved into a house where it is
cost-prohibitive to install DirecTV and so my only alternative was
Comcast digital cable. Imagine my delight when I saw the press release
from the CES show announcing that Comcast is partnering with TiVo. Even
better, they have developed a software application that will enable
Comcast to deploy the service to existing set-top boxes without an
additional in-home visit by a technician.

So,
where is the bad marketing? Well, for starters the press release did
not give an availability date…or even a rough estimate like Spring
’07. So naturally I went to the Comcast site
to find out more information. Unfortunately I couldn’t find anything
… nothing …. nada …. zip …. not even the press release which is
only on TiVo’s site. Talk about the lack of integrated marketing! Why
make a big announcement and then not have any info on your site to fuel
demand. They should have at least had one web page on the
features/benefits of the combined service and a sign-up form for
customers to receive an email once the service is launched. I didn’t
call their Customer Service group (didn’t want to wait on hold that
long) but I bet they don’t have any information on this either. I can
appreciate the executive pressures to "get more press" but to what end?
PR is just one part of a fully integrated product launch, the goal of
which is to capture market share and drive revenue. The product
managers in charge of the launch had two options 1. stop the release
from going out until they had the marketing fully ready, or 2. scramble
like crazy to at crank out a couple of simple web pages and train the
customer service folks (couple of days effort at most).

What would you have done?

Over my career I’ve seen plenty of examples of bad marketing and thought to myself "what were they thinking?"  Since I’ve primarily dealt with B2B marketing, I’ll point out the good, the bad and the ugly of that aspect of marketing.  I
hope that you will share your comments with me, and that we as a community we
can learn from our mistakes.