ProductMarketing.com

P&G Chief's Turnaround Recipe: Find Out What Women Want

Sitting in his company's South American headquarters here, A.G. Lafley, chief executive of Procter & Gamble Co., shared some advice with a group of laundry executives: "The simple principle in life is to find out what she wants and give it to her. It's worked in my marriage for 35 years and it works in laundry."

The group erupted in laughter and Mr. Lafley smiled. But he wasn't really kidding. Hewing to this deceptively straightforward principle has helped the 57-year-old P&G veteran revive the fortunes of the maker of Pampers, Pantene and Tide. Five years ago, when Mr. Lafley took over the world's largest consumer-products company, it was floundering amid a botched attempt to overhaul its insular culture. Read more in Find Out What Women Want. (You may need to click here instead).

Marketing has a marketing problem

from Seth's Blog: "Marketing is not about trickery or even insincerity. It's about spreading ideas that you believe in, sharing ideas you're passionate about... and doing it with authenticity. Marketing is about treating prospects and customers with respect, and realizing that it's easier to grow the amount of business you do with happy people than it is to find new strangers to accost."

Advertising, Under Review

from Advertising, Under Review: "Today, the average American receives more than 3,000 marketing messages a day." Some would argue that traditional advertising is passe'; Dawn Hudson of Pepsi believes that advertising has never been more relevant.

Focal Point: Adding To Sales Discussions

Product Managers provide a unique role in a software company, something that may include skills in Sales, Marketing, and Development, but reaches well beyond the scope of any of those three functions. It's a role nobody else fills. Yet because of their in-depth understanding of the market and the reasons people want and need their product, and because of the paramount need to make sales succeed, Product Managers can easily find themselves pulled into more sales calls than they care to be involved in, given their other priorities. read more in Focal Point: Adding To Sales Discussions.

Fast Talk: Apple in Their Eyes

In Fast Talk: Apple in Their Eyes, four rivals talk about designing their answer to the iPod. "Digital-audio players weren't exactly virgin territory when Apple entered the fray in 2001. But the iPod -- with its sublime design, intuitive usability, unparalleled cool quotient -- set a new standard by which all other MP3 players would be judged."

Microchip pioneer Jack Kilby dead at 81

How Jack Kilby invented the microchip: Since he'd only been with Texas Instruments a few months, he wasn't eligible for paid leave when almost all the employees went on TI's annual mass vacation. Left alone to experiment, unencumbered by distractions, interruptions and scrutiny from peers and managers, Kilby came up with the device that changed the world.

Microchip pioneer Jack Kilby dead at 81: Jack S. Kilby, an electrical engineer and pioneer in the development of microchips, has died in Dallas after a brief battle with cancer at age 81.

United Airlines puts business first?

Inside-out thinking continues to prevail at United. Their new business1 program was clearly designed by employees thinking they know what people want, instead of researching it. For instance:

We understand how important it is to be reliable, especially in business. That's why Business1SM arrival times are guaranteed. If your flight is more than 30 minutes late, you'll receive 500 redeemable Mileage Plus? miles.

Whoopee. 500 more miles that I can't seem to use except during a lunar eclipse. And the disclaimer and restrictions section is longer than the announcement itself.

I can just hear a group at United sitting around a conference table asking, "What do business people want? On-time arrival and newspapers. Yep, that's it!"

Well, of course we would like to arrive on time but we understand when there are problems. All we really want is an honest appraisal of flight status, a comfortable seat, friendly service, and the freedom to check our bags without waiting an hour to get them back.

Oh wait. I've described JetBlue and Independence Air, haven't I?

Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak

The typical product team wants to make products "better" and adding features often seems to be the best approach. We hear "somebody might want to do this!" when the important questions are "Will our primary customer want to?" and "Will adding this make the product more difficult for our primary customer?"

This from Creating Passionate Users: Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak: "It's a gazillion degrees in my house right now, but I can't figure out the thermostat controls, so the heat's still on and the air conditioning unreachable. My new Denon receiver/tuner sounds amazing--good thing I'm using it mostly with my iPod; I have no clue how to tune in a radio station. When I bring up the newer versions of Microsoft Word, it looks so utterly foreign and overwhelming to me now that I give up and close it. And all I wanted to do was type a simple letter. Most of you here know that Don Norman talked about this forever in the classic The Design of Everyday Things, but why didn't the designers and manufacturers listen?"

My new car has a GPS. Cool! I use it all the time. But it asks "Add or Replace" when you choose a destination. Huh? I grabbed the book and learned that "Add" means to add this destination to your current route (ie., creating a multi-segment trip) while Replace means to replace your current destination with this new one. I can just hear the developers say "Someone might want to do this!" If the product was planned for a delivery service, this would make sense. But in fact, our primary persona will not want to do it and worse, adding it confuses him or her.

The True Measure of Success

Every other function in the company presents the anticipated ROI to the board when asking for capital to build a plant, acquire a company or open a branch office in the middle of nowhere. Until now, marketing has spent millions every year--year in, year out--and has never had to show an ROI. Instead, it charms the board with a sound and lights show.

If you're wondering why marketing lacks respect in the C-suite, if you're wondering why marketing budgets get cut at the start of the fourth quarter, here's a thought: If you refuse to behave like an adult and justify your existence like every other function, you will continue to 'get no respect' and be treated like a talented but irresponsible child.

Read The True Measure of Success in CMO Magazine.

On Reengineering Marketing

John Porcaro comments on the disconnect between the customer research that was being done, and the product engineers who were building the product. He writes,

"Almost two years ago, we had a 'Marketing Symposium' where Steve Ballmer made a comment about 'selling what we build, AND building what we can sell.' His point was that often we spend a lot of time building amazing features into products, only to see the features (or products) being ignored. Of course, marketers need a good story to tell when approaching developers. Some marketers dwell firmly in the land of intuition and 'street smarts', which in-and-of-itself might not be a bad thing, but most developers I know expect plans to be backed by logic, measurement, and a well-positioned framework." You can read his full post here.

Every week I meet product managers who want to know how to force developers to do what they want. They seem to feel that the title of "product manager" gives them power. But neither power nor credibility comes from a title. You want to get developers to listen? Here's how. Use market-facts. No developer is interested in intuition and street smarts; they want logic and market facts. Product manager credibility and respect are earned.

Have you visited a customer lately?

vendors who write for Windows

I spent all day Saturday fighting Windows. Thing is, I don't really hate Windows; I'm frustrated by the bad programmers who write for Windows. It's almost enough to make me switch to Macintosh!

Some programmer managed to do something to DirectX which made another program stop working. (It may have been that Windows Media Player updated itself even though I don't use it). The second program requires DirectX, found a NEWER version than expected, and failed. Come on guys!! Get it together.

So I restored back to before Media Player updated itself, reinstalled the second app and it now works. Luckily I wrote down ALL of the programs that have been installed in the last month since I had to reinstall them all.

(Take a deep breath. "Serenity now!")

Okay, so, granted, I'm a little on the edge already but then I loaded a PDF that hung my system. A PDF?? Oh, come on! [@#$%^&*.] A few minutes later I figured it out: Adobe Acrobat had put up a dialog that asked if I wanted to upgrade (although I have said "no" to this at least a million times) but the dialog box was UNDER the PDF window where I couldn???t see it. I cannot fathom what caused me to THINK to look.

Oh, and a quick thank-you to whichever programmer decided to delete my normal.dot file. But I had it backed up. Got you! HAHAHAHAHA.

I spent an hour on the phone helping my dad with some genealogy software. The end result: to put emphasis in notes, you have to press Ctrl-I or Ctrl-B. You know, like Word Star in 1985. (Remember control keys? Use ^o to get small text?)

Then I was working with a special MP3 program that refuses to use TAGS! I ended up using MP3 Tag Studio, Notepad, Word, and Excel to accomplish what I wanted. To Microsoft Excel programmers: thank you thank you thank you! I had to use this formula to make things work:

=RIGHT(REPT(0,6) & A4,6 & "-" & CLEAN(MID(MID(C4,1,title_length)) & "-") & MID(B4,1,artist_length),1,49))

What a workhorse Excel is! You can use Excel and Word to accomplish almost anything. Hey, waitaminute, both of those are available on the Mac....

So what's the point? While clear understanding of the user and his requirements should make the better product, the developers have to care. They just have to CARE about the people who use their products. "I can get it to work" is not an acceptable answer if a computing expert (like me or your typical product manager or other power user) cannot. And I'm not the typical user. The vendor's user forum is filled with page after page of wails of anquish from poor unsophisticated customers who want the result but didn't realize that they needed a computing degree to set the system up. (There's a workaround: all you have to do is use Excel, Word, notepad,....)

I think the iPod and iTunes are brilliant (even on Windows). Perhaps these were the result of clear requirements but they were definitely the result of a development team that loves music. They put in some wonderful subtleties that couldn't have been in the requirements.

Every week I meet product managers who are frustrated with the usability of their products. They believe that they need to somehow articulate the requirements better or differently. Perhaps so, but the developers also have to care about usability; they have to care about the users of the products; they have to care.

Meeting Promised Development Dates

If you have worked in or with the software industry at all, you have lived through some dramatic delays in product development. For instance, Product Guernsey, originally announced last year, was due in January. It's now the beginning of June, and it's announced that the product, now called Providence, won't be out until September. Or your last major release was supposed to take nine months. A year later, it won't be out for another nine, so technically the team has worked for a year but it's twelve months late.

Sound familiar? Read more in Meeting Promised Development Dates.

Managing people is a lot like teaching your daughter to drive a car

Here's an interesting question: How does a manager decide when a product manager is ready to make decisions on his/her own?

Managing people is a lot like teaching your daughter to drive a car. At first you watch her very carefully: make sure she keeps the radio off and her eyes on the road; you grow a few gray hairs as you try to not scream SEE THE CAR? DO YOU SEE THAT CAR?? But after a while, she's driving competently and you let her out on her own. But you make sure she has a mobile phone and make her promise that she'll call if she's going to be late. You grill her before she leaves and again when she comes home: Where are you going? When will you be home? What will/were you doing? And after a while, once she has earned your trust, you give it to her. At some point, you're merely curious IF she came home, not WHEN she came home.

Isn't managing the same? We watch carefully and want frequent updates at first. Then, once they've earned it, we give them our trust. At that point, all we want is a heads-up on anything that's going to blow up in our faces. Now managing is less about "What are you doing?" and more about "How can I help you get your job done?"

This is equally true for a product manager's relationship with counterparts in other departments: a developer, marketer, a sales person. We watch carefully at first until they've earned our trust. And then we give them our trust and respect.

Alas, Cash-Strapped Airlines Try In-Flight Advertising

"On a recent Alaska Airlines flight, passengers were told to remain buckled and seated for the last 30 minutes before landing at Reagan National Airport. It was a standard security measure for flights heading into restricted airspace over Washington. It also turned a planeful of passengers into captive customers who were then pitched a Bank of America Visa card -- with little chance of tuning it out. Over the intercom, a flight attendant encouraged passengers to sign up for the Bank of America credit card. Then other flight attendants went down the aisle handing out applications." Read more in Cash-Strapped Airlines Try In-Flight Advertising.

WiFi is certainly preferable to in-flight phone use

"Assuming it can stay in business long enough, United Airlines may end up being the first airline to offer wireless Internet access on domestic flights. The carrier said Monday that it had received regulatory approval to install cabin equipment for Wi-Fi service after demonstrating that its 'Air-to-Ground' wireless technology did not interfere with normal airborne operations." Read more on Good Morning Silicon Valley.

Time to Reengineer Your Marketing Model

Many marketers who agonize over how to differentiate their products or services feel perfectly content to use the same marketing model year after year. Most of a CMO's energy is focused on optimizing marketing spend across well-established categories. Rarely are these allocations based on the ability to connect investments to interim metrics, and then to specific financial outcomes.

Marketers who think about straying from convention run into resistance from the established network of agencies and service providers that reinforce the existing marketing model. Most of these entities have a vested interest in sustaining the status quo, regardless of the outcome.

Despite the challenges, reengineering the marketing model should be a priority for any CMO. Read more in Time to Reengineer Your Marketing Model in CMO Magazine.

June newsletter posted

I've found that the key to success in technology companies is an understanding of Star Trek. Most engineers, developers, and technical people are familiar with these characters. Perhaps the Star Trek characters are familiar because we work with them every day. The characters of Star Trek give us the typical personas in a technology company. Is your company The Original Series or The Next Generation?

Read more in the June newsletter.

Issue 3: End of Life: Retiring a Product

Outdated software can turn into a monster. How do you discontinue a product that is no longer profitable? And how do you know that it's time? Read "Retiring a Product" and other articles in the new issue of productmarketing.com.

Microsoft uses personas

"Stan is a hands-on sort of guy. The entrepreneur's day starts at 7:30 a.m., when he gets into work and checks his e-mail. At 8:30, Stan starts preparing for the daily 9 o'clock sales meeting. The rest of the day is a blur of calls and meetings: Stan's banker, his accountant, his suppliers. The chubby, graying 41-year-old usually leaves work at 5:30 with a briefcase full of reports to read that night. Sometimes Stan goes straight home to his wife and two children. But often he goes out to dinner with a client and doesn't get home until late.

Stan may sound like you, or many hardworking small-business owners you know. But there's one important difference: Stan doesn't really exist. He's a fictional character dreamed up by researchers at Microsoft to help them develop Office Small Business Accounting 2006, a new financial-management application that will hit stores in September. "

Read more about Microsoft's application of personas in Getting to Know You.

RSVME for Outlook

I really like Outlook add-ins that use the address book instead of tedious and error-prone (ie., workaround) exports. Check out RSVME Outlook surveys. The publisher says,

"RSVME is a survey tool that integrates with Outlook and e-mail packages, and enables obtaining feedback from people. You can put together a survey on any subject, from the best time for soccer practice to who is bringing what food to a party. Then select names out of your address book you want to send the survey to, and send."