Tag Archives: Consumer

How Do You Execute the Product and Market Timing Plan? Five Points

Situation: A company’s CEO is operating in a complex marketplace. Product pricing and consumer acceptance are issues. Consumer education about the product is an important part of the market plan. It may take a couple of years for the market to develop. How do you execute the product and market timing plan?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Important issues are survival while the market develops and maintaining a unique technology advantage.
  • As a small player in a busy and rapidly evolving market, a critical element of the strategy will be to rapidly gain the attention of the people that Seth Godin has named the “sneezers” – those who have significant influence on their consumer and business peers and who can quickly help to create the momentum that will drive the company’s market position.
    • Examples: give the product to the key influencers at target companies.
    • Make it easy or free for the key influencers within your partner organizations to experience, love and spread the word about the product. Allow them to give a few free copies to friends.
  • To avoid becoming roadkill, fly under the radar.
    • Look for opportunities as they occur in this evolving market. They may come from many players.
    • Have a solid strategy in place to execute once an opportunity arises: What do you want to achieve? What is the timeline? How will you measure achievement?
    • Have multiple back-ups to the key partners that the company is currently courting.
  • Instead of looking for VC funding to fund the next round, why not secure the additional funding from the company’s original backer?
    • To earn this the company will have to demonstrate: interesting partnerships, traction in the marketplace, and assurance that an existing major player won’t squash the company.
  • A perceived barrier is that the product is not quite ready to deliver the experience that customers will expect.
    • What is “not quite ready”? Most successful products are not 100% ready on introduction. Look at Microsoft’s strategy. From their earliest products to the present, new versions are launched when they are 80-90% complete. They then respond quickly with updates based on customer feedback. Many other companies have done the same.
    • Historically, first to market has beaten later, more complete entrants.

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Can Social Marketing Leverage Your Competitive Position? Six Points

Situation: A company seeks to leverage the difference between information from traditional media and the richer information available through social media. Their objective, using publicly available information, is to identify individuals’ specific plans or preferences to better target their clients’ marketing dollars. Can social marketing leverage your competitive position?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • The principal value proposition is the ability to mine publicly available information from consumers through social media and make it useful to advertisers who want to reach those customers.
  • If the company’s technology allows access to shared data which can be used by many companies this is less expensive than clients’ trying to go it alone.
  • The most important differentiation will be the timeliness of data. Many firms collect data after the fact – for example after a key purchase is made. What advertisers desire is the ability to anticipate purchases. An example is a consumer’s plan to buy a house. This information is valuable to many companies. If data is mineable, it is valuable.
  • The essential question is how the client will make more money from data being near-real time. If the client can use the company’s data to enhance their marketing database, this adds value.
  • Consider partnering with the agencies that B2B and B2C companies hire to advertise their products. Even the largest consumer B2B and B2C companies work with outside ad agencies because these companies have better access to targeted customer lists than the companies.
  • Consider a subscription model, offering access to unique, current data to many customers. The differentiating value is the currency and timeliness of the data. A subscription model generates an ongoing revenue stream.

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How Are You Responding to Market Instability? Seven Thoughts

Situation: Market swings in recent weeks have shaken up some people. A CEO is curious about how other companies are seeing this as well as how the see their companies doing in the current economy. How are you responding to market instability?

Advice from the CEOs:

  • Business turned back up two years ago, and we are working on major sales opportunities.
    • Actions Taken:
      • We reduced executive expenses.
      • We are sharing a bookkeeper with another business to reduce salaries.
  • In April we increased staff to respond to strong first quarter demand; however since April revenue is flat to declining.
    • Actions Taken:
      • Let a few people go, may have to do more of this.
  • The current economy benefits our industry because our service thrives in an uncertain economy. We have not yet had to make adjustments.
  • We continue to see a big shift from direct hire and full-time to temp and part-time employees – this is working in our favor. Weaker competitors have closed shop.
  • Business is going well. Most customers have cash. The major decision that we face is how much to grow. We’ve seen some project cancellations, but not enough to hurt.
  • What concerns you about the future?
    • Availability of credit lines.
      • Varies by bank and your relationship with the bank.
      • Securing additional or increased lines may be difficult.
      • Anticipating a raise in rates by the Fed, lines may carry a higher interest rate.
    • The trickle-down effect from consumer spending continues to be weak. We are looking for opportunities less sensitive to swings in consumer spending.
    • Receivables are being pushed out.
  • What are you doing about this?
    • Proactively having employee meetings and being straight with employees about how the company is doing.
    • Good opportunities to lean up:
      • Cutting expenses.
      • Cutting less productive employees.

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