#69/111: Marketing High Technology

What is it about?

We are in 1986. Windows 1.0 will be released in a year and high technology is mostly the semiconductor industry. William H. Davidow worked for Intel and fought several wars. He explains what is important and why marketing is civilized war.

What can I learn?

Go for defensible market segments: Unbelievable important principle which executives/entrepreneurs often don’t get. What does defensible mean? Firstly, just releasing a product isn’t entering the market. You have to gain customers and establishing your product. Davidow estimated that it takes about 0.7 times the sales volume of the market leader to enter a market. Visualize this. If the market leader in your market segment makes $25mio in sales, you will need approx. a $17m investment just to enter the market. Secondly, you have to defend your position. In the mid- to long-term the two or three leaders dominate a market. If you can gather at least 20% of the market, you will probably vanish in the mid- to long-term. In conclusion, look for an appropriate market segment (i.e. which you can enter), gain enough customers and fight the war!

Create great products, not just great devices: Devices are your fundamental offering, e.g. the code for your software. However, a product is your device plus its marketing (positioning, usability, UX, etc.). What does this mean? If you know a techie, you probably had a discussion over the iPhone/iPod. He says that they are inferior to product X because they don’t have feature Y and Z. This is device stuff. Does the mass care about that? No. They care about the product. It is easy to use? It is trendy? Who else uses it? This takes us back to Baked in. You’re device and marketing have to work together and create a whole product.

Install Marketing Quality Management: If you read the previous paragraph you know how important marketing is. Therefore you should assure the quality of it. It begins which checking the positioning of each product to helping internal cooperation. Only if your marketing and device development are working hand in hand, you can create a great product.

Conclusion

Marketing High Technology was written in 1986. Yes, it about 25 years old and kicks ass of most books released today. This book showed how awesome Intel works like in Only the Paranoid Survive. If your business creates product, this is a must read. There is so much insight which is seldom used today. Recommendation!

#54/111: Getting Real

What is it about?

How do you build a simple and easy product? The people at 37signals tell you how. They show you how 37signals work and how you can apply the same principles on your company and product.

What can I learn?

Half a product instead of an half-assed product: Build simple and easy products but make them great. One example is the iPod. At the beginning it lacked most functionality but it was extremely easy to use, simple and looks great.

Epicenter Design: You should start with the most important thing and then build the rest. For example, if you design a blog interface/design you should start with the headlines. Afterwards go to the actual content and at last do things like navigation, tags, etc. This approach forces you to think about the purpose of your product.

Design Blank Pages: Blank Pages are the first thing a new customer will see. They haven’t yet added content. Most designers neglect these first-time-pages. Don’t do that. Create a great welcome page for new customer with screenshots, how-to boxes and a let’s start guide.

Conclusion

Getting Real covers most of the topics of Rework. It is a bit more development focused and there are quotes from other authors. However, if you read Rework first, you don’t really need to read this book. If you read none yet and you are a developer, read this one. Otherwise, Rework is the more appropriate choice.

#41/111: Attention!

What is it about?

Do you know the five easy steps to own a yacht? I don’t neither but maybe I got your attention. Jim F. Kukral writes about generating attention and how to use it to make money.

Key points?

Be different: To get attention today, you have to be different. Try to draw outside the lines. Let’s take job applications, Jim Kukral saw that his future boss used post it notes to organize himself. So, he decided to write 50 post it notes with positive attributes of him and glued them on a big board. His future boss was impressed and hired him.

Sell benefits: What is in for your customers? Do they really need to know that you product get feature XY? Probably, no. They want to know how they can benefit from your product. Save time, increase productivity or higher the comfort. For example, a car offers lots of features from ABS to a air conditioner. The benefits are a more safety and conformable transportation.

Don’t try to be everybody’s darling: Don’t try to avoid every confrontation just because you could shy away some people. A example is again the iPod. A lot of techies complained about missing features. Though, most people don’t care about the features, they want a simple device for listening to music.

Conclusion

This book is actually interesting but lacks a bit of usefulness. He talks about a lot of one hit wonders from the Pet Rock to the Million Dollar Website. Sure, it’s fun to hear about such products but they aren’t a sustainable business.

#8/111: Baked In

What is it about?

Bogusky and Winsor shows different examples for merging your product and its marketing. They present how innovation changed companies and how to improve collaboration between companies silos.

Key points?

Do not disconnect marketing and product development. The product itself should be your marketing instrument, e.g. Apple’s Ipod.

Conclusion

This book offers some great examples of innovating your product and explains how you can overcome these barriers in bigger companies. Although there are some nice inspirations for companies of every size. For example, try the opposite of the status-quo: If they build big, build small (e.g. cars). Or sacrificing instead of adding features.

In conclusion, I really like Baked In because it presents you a lot of actionable possibilities to improve your product.