by Johnny | Mar 22, 2006 | Marketing
The Pfeiffer report has an interesting report on technology trends. Something that’s been obvious (well, to me) for a while already: features & benefits are getting less and less important as product differentiators. I experienced this when looking for a digital camera: everyone has mexapixels galore, and all functions are comparable. So what do you differentiate on?
User experience, for one. It may be the new buzzword (fits right in with the new trends towards experiential marketing) but there’s certainly something to be said for it. The report highlights 10 key rules to go by:
- More features isn’t better, it’s worse. You’re just going to confuse people.
- You can’t make things easier by adding to them. Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity (the old KISS principle still applies, folks!)
- Confusion is the ultimate deal-breaker. If it’s too complicated and confusing, people will tune out. Period.
- Style matters. One word: iPod.
- Only features that provide a good user experience will be used.
- Any feature that requires learning will only be adopted by a small fraction of users. Nobody has time anymore to learn all the features on all their devices.
- Unused features are not only useless, they can slow you down and diminish ease of use.
- Users do not want to think about technology: what really counts is what it does for them.
- Forget about the killer feature. Welcome to the age of the killer user-experience.
- Less is difficult, that’s why less is more.
Read the Pfeiffer report here.
by Johnny | Mar 18, 2006 | Marketing
If you’re into Karate, and have surfed the net before 2004, you may be familiar with 24FightingChickens. It’s Rob Redmonds site where he once published some really interesting – yet controversial – articles on the topic of Karate and martial arts in general. Sadly, something happened in 2004 that made him take his site down.
But now it’s up again, without his old content and articles, but there’s still some good things to read and ponder on his site. He’s even planning on writing a book! Go and have a look at www.24fightingchickens.com
by Johnny | Mar 18, 2006 | Marketing
I took part in some experiential marketing trainings recently. There were a lot of interesting discussions, but what I learned from it is that there is a big need for real “integrated” marketing. Too often companies run different marketing programs online and offline without any true integration in terms of look&feel, offerings etc.
And I’m not the only one who thinks like this: a Google sponsored survey by the EIU ‘Economist Intelligence Unit” detected little apparent co-ordination between online ad spending with traditional media budget allocations. According to them, the integration of online and offline marketing remains the exception rather than the rule, with 52% of executives admitting their online and offline marketing efforts either run in parallel or are not integrated at all.
So a lot of people seem to know the discrepancy, but no-one seems to know what to do about it. I guess there is no straightforward answer to that one.
by Johnny | Mar 9, 2006 | Marketing
I’m in the process of reading “ Experience the message” by Max Lenderman. Quoting from the book “Today the average consumer is exposed to 3000 to 4000 marketing messages (…)” … per day. That is “wow” … how did it come to that? Do you agree? Are we in Europe also bombarded to that degree?
But most of all, how do you break through the clutter, and still stand out?
by Johnny | Mar 5, 2006 | Marketing
After some offline time, I decided to pick up the thread of the blog. Still some work in progress on getting it all integrated in a decent way.
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