ProductMarketing.com

Naming (and renaming) products

ComputerWorld reports: CA Inc. has unveiled plans to simplify the naming of its entire software range over the next 12 to 18 months to better brand its products and more clearly indicate their function. The software vendor will do away with the names currently denoting its various software families, like its Unicenter systems management offerings and its BrightStor storage products, according to a company spokesman. CA will also drop specific product brand names such as PestPatrol and FileSurf in favor of the company's name and a descriptive term for the particular piece of software. For instance, Unicenter Service Desk will become CA Service Desk, while eTrust Access Control will be called CA Access Control.

A few years ago, one of my collegues at CA told me that they estimated the cost of renaming a product at $1,000,000. As those of us who have worked closely with code know, as much as we might plan to put the product name in a constant so it can be easily changed, the product name is usually hard-coded in plenty of places. A name change isn't as trivial as it appears to marketing and management. Nothing seems difficult to those who don't actually have to do it.

So, if it's so hard and so expensive, why do it?

For companies with limited promotional dollars, we need to make every dollar count. The company focuses all of its promotion at a single entity rather than spreading small amounts here and there with little impact. Even Microsoft, with all of their marketing money, tends to invest in promotion for the suites rather than the products. That is, MS Office tends to get the lion's share of promotional spending rather than individual products like Word or Visio.

There are two strategies for naming: descriptive or unique. Names that are unique like iPod, Nuvi, and RAZR work best for B2C products. For B2B products, the descriptive approach, such as that CA is following, is best. Certainly when you have hundreds of products, the name has to carry the positioning message along with it so that customers (and sales people) know what the product does just by reading the name.

Most companies can afford to brand only one thing: the company, the product suites, or the individual products. How about you? Is your product message lost in your naming schema?

Tips For Delivering Consistent Services

The services you deliver with your software - implementation consulting, installation, and training - aren't accessories to your product, they are an integral part of the product and its success. Software plus services plus customer effort equals success.

Because of this, it's critical to take steps to make each service you deliver predictable, complete, and consistent across customers, channels, and the individuals who provide it.

Yet unlike software, the human element involved in service delivery brings the potential for wide variation in content, quality, and effectiveness. The people who shine in front of your customers, delivering stellar services, are often highly individualistic. Their priority is to perform well when they're in the spotlight - AKA the hot seat. Like sales reps, they don't focus on adhering closely to guidelines but on reaching their goal come what may.

To build consistency in your services, read Tips For Delivering Consistent Services.

Positioning begins with reality

from Messages That Matter :

"A good positioning strategy can do more than create awareness and demand for your B2B product or service. Through thoughtful execution of your strategy in marketing campaigns, you can also make your selling more productive by beginning the sales qualification process during the positioning process. But it works only if you are willing to face reality, and recognize that your product or service is best suited for a specific set within a target audience, not every buyer."

Read the from full article.

Customers Are Color Blind

from Customers Are Color Blind:

"In today's e-commerce age, where everyone is forced to type and to remember names with absolutely correct spellings, companies with big branding campaigns only hurt themselves with their old-fashioned, painted, colorful advice. They must all reconverge and regroup and realign their thinking to cope with today's name-driven economy.

Contrary to branding beliefs, customers don't really care about, and are completely oblivious to, a corporation's image being tied to a very specific color."

BOSE: the value of design in marketing

I walked by the BOSE booth in Denver's airport on Friday and watched in fascination as one customer after another put down $299 for a set of BOSE noise-canceling headphones--and then I did too. The clerk didn't have to cajole or persuade; she only had to ring up the order. The clerk quickly explained the set of wires and adapters (including which airlines used which adapter!) and demonstrated how to install the battery (included). A savvy sales person, she also explained that this pocket holds your CDs or DVDs and your iPod will fit here. She knew her product and she knew how it was used. What better place to buy noise-canceling headphones than at the airport before a flight? The sales person appeared to have sold more than a dozen sets as of 10am. Behind her stand was a PILE of discarded packaging left by customers who bought for their upcoming flights. BOSE advertises in travel magazines but the best marketing is the implicit customer endorsement by all the frequent flyers on my flights. While waiting for my credit card to be processed, I gawked at the BOSE SoundDock for the iPod. Just place your iPod in the cradle and voila! superior sound. The system has a remote control and also recharges the iPod. And with BOSE's reputation for great sound, this will surely be my Christmas gift to myself this year. Audiophiles--the technology elite--are rather annoyed at BOSE's success because BOSE products are neither the best nor the cheapest. Instead BOSE products are elegantly designed, well placed, and never discounted. BOSE customers care about brilliant design, and are willing to pay extra for it. great design + great placement = great marketing

Pride, Denial, and Product Positioning

Jacques Murphy explains, "For Product Managers who are have not been through the product positioning exercise a few times, the greatest difficulty about it may not be the effort itself but what you need to do in order to be ready for it. That's because in order to position your product well against the competition, you need to get past the all-too- natural pride and denial about your own product to a point where you can be accurate and objective about it and its rivals.

Crafting the positioning of a product is an art unto itself. But what holds so many people back is that they can't even get to a mental clean slate from which to start their positioning effort. It's human nature to develop a very subjective loyalty to your own product, and you tend to become blind to your product's faults and fiercely defensive against competitors."

Read more in Pride, Denial, and Product Positioning.

Naming That Thing: A Critical Step

Naming that new thing is the most critical and extremely controversial part of the innovation cycle. Read Naming That Thing: A Critical Step before you hold a naming contest for your latest product.

Risk-Sharing and Customer-Perceived Value

Whenever customers buy your product or service, there's a leap of faith that they will get value from you. An alternative is to offer your solution in return for some of the savings--and to measure this in the customer's own business units. Even if you fall back on traditional pricing, it will help the customer assign real value to what you deliver. Read the full article on Product Bytes.

Is your product positioning sesquipedalian?

Merriam-Webster Online: Main Entry: ses-qui-pe-da-lian Pronunciation: 'ses-kwuh-puh-DAIL-yun' Function: adjective Etymology: Latin sesquipedalis, literally, a foot and a half long, from sesqui- + ped-, pes foot--more at FOOT 1 : having many syllables : LONG, as in "sesquipedalian terms" 2 : given to or characterized by the use of long words, as in "a sesquipedalian television commentator"

Intel Strips 'Gigahertz' from Computer Chip Names

Chip speed in CPUs is like horsepower in auto engines, an irrelevant metric. Taking a page from automobile marketers, Intel will now assign model numbers to its chips and eliminate measurements of raw speed from its product names. After spending two decades convincing us that raw chip speed is important, they now must teach model numbers to the consumer. It's a branding challenge: when you're building a commodity product, you market the brand; when you're building a product that can be differentiated, you market the differentiation.

Seth's Blog: Worth a thousand words?

Seth's Blog: Worth a thousand words?: "Art directing your brand (or you) is not a dumb thing to do. In addition to satisfying one's vanity, it's a chance to establish an image that might last a long time. The top half of my head, for example, first showed up in Fast Company and then on Permission Marketing. The time spent working with Brian Smale (a great photographer) clearly paid off in building the image of the brand."

Effective Marketing Using White Papers

"Companies that sell complex technology products and services face different marketing challenges than those selling easy-to-understand commodities. Sometimes the features and benefits of a company's offerings are too complex to be readily apparent at first glance. White papers can be an effective way to educate potential customers on the merits of such products and to explain the complex technologies involved. Although they aren't the most exciting kind of collateral, white papers offer a benefit that more glamorous advertising and marketing materials cannot provide. They lend validity to product claims and help prove that there's 'steak' behind the marketing 'sizzle.'" Read Effective Marketing Using White Papers by Elissa Miller.

Branding and Positioning

Lawson Abinanti asks, "Branding and positioning: What's the difference? And can you afford it?" Read his article on Branding and Positioning.

Differentiating

It pays to clearly and compellingly differentiate your products from those of your competitors’. Read how to Stand out in the crowd by Lawson Abinanti.

The Secret

Eran Livneh shares The Secret of Moulin Rouge and the Art of Product Positioning.

Positioning

Before your next positioning session, check out The Visual Thesaurus. Based on the ThinkMap platform, it shows words and definitions, letting you navigate their synonyms graphically.

Bad writing

Barb asks, Why is it so easy to find good examples of bad marketing writing? In a McAfee Personal Firewall Plus mailing we read: "Using heuristic-like functionality, McAfee provides a tertiary layer of protection by logging items that display symptoms of attacks or characteristics of hack attempts." Huh?

The Golden Rule

Michael Fischler gives us a Golden Rule of positioning: A strong position is one that already exists in the mind of the market segment. Find his other excellent articles at MarketingProfs.com.

Charlie Knapp reports

Mobium Creative Group in Chicago recently released survey results that identify top problems with b-to-b communications. The survey, which was conducted in conjunction with a Starch research audit of business-to-business ads, produced the following results:

• Contain too much product and company information and lose the key message--74%.
• Marketing communications messages don't address the needs and concerns of the target audience--66%.
• Ads are full of "chest pounding" by companies--39%.
• They lack human interest and passion--28%.
• They don't take creative risks--20%.
• Contain stock photographs of corporate environments--19%.

From MarketingProfs

The act of positioning is a core element of a successful marketing strategy. This is a change—a healthy one—from the days when it was considered simply a tactic: A means of deriving a slogan and providing some kind of fabricated difference between a product and its competitor.