A common marketing mistake, is using the wrong language with clients.

An example of wrong language is the flight information provided by the captain over the intercom: “Our aircraft is flying at 625 knots Indicated Air Speed“ Knots? I can barely convert miles to kilometres. Air-speed? I would rather know the aircraft speed.

I would recommend not to use techie jargon with your clients. Fit with your client’s measurement system, or s/he will continue to nap.

Have you ever filled a super-long survey that “shouldn’t take more than 5 minutes?”

As marketers, we design questionnaire for qualification calls. Some questions are required by the sales team, some others by the company veterans. Questionnaires often turn out being a long and bothering list of questions; a key fiasco factor for any marketing survey.

Surveys should start with a brief product description, before asking maximum five questions. Gather only the information you need, and gather it as efficiently as possible.

1. Tell about the software benefit in (few) plain words
2. Follow up with a brief questionnaire
3. Be nice and entertaining
4. Reward the responder somehow. A paper of his interest would be fine.

Ethic of reciprocity: don’t do to others what you don’t want to be done to you.

Women have been used to sell products to men for decades.

IF         – Male brain is wired to respond to attractive females.

AND     – Engineering software are mainly used by young males

THEN   – Engineering companies should attract prospects with sexual marketing tactics

I wonder whether this would have real impact on sales. A study made by a Neuro-economics expert, (”Heat of the Moment: The Effect of Sexual Arousal on Sexual Decision Making”), shows that men who are sexually aroused are more focused on short-term gratification than on long-term logic.

Being a software buying process the outcome of a long term logic, I recommend No-Bikini in your marketing campaign. Professors at MIT say it won’t work.

In theory, the level of competition is proportional to market size and market size is proportional to competition.

Anyone can be tempted by entering a market with an intense competition. A common business plan statement is: “market size is estimated at $100 Millions, we assume conservatively to get $1 Million”.

Never conservative enough, I think. Top players have marketing budgets matching their size, and newcomers-business will be hardly profitable.

Few engineering companies use movies for marketing purposes, though a movie is worth a thousand pictures.

Take DEM software. It computes the motion of large numbers of small objects (like molecules or pills) for engineering. Now take Realflow software, computation of the same small objects but for the entertainment industry.

It’s amazing how engineering and entertainment became close to each other. Nevertheless the first still promotes through still images, the latter through video clips.

Companies like Google and Netscape knows what it takes to run a successful business. It is the business model, and not the product that determines success or failure of software companies. That’s what many start-ups have unhappily discovered for themselves.

I’ve still much to learn, yet something have learned on what start-ups should better do:

1. -remain a “product company” long enough to build a customer base, before offering customization and services
2. -run the business independently from distribution channel
3. -avoid appointing the chief engineer as business manager.

YouTube succeded over GoogleVideo.

Although YouTube had unique features, and more elegant interface if compared to Google Video, it was its viral impact that made the difference. In YouTube, not only can users know about the popularity of a video posted, they can also make it more popular -via comments, ratings and embeddings. Users can make a video succeed or fail, and this is having a viral effect.

I wonder which comments and ratings would be given to the contents of our corporate websites, if our clients were allowed to.

Citizen marketers are customers who generate media on behalf of companies. They can either promote good things or call out bad things about your product.

Unsatisfied clients rarely send negative feedback to companies, they leave them across the internet. The majority of consumers fail to provide that feedback because of contact barriers, or lack of responders.

Citizen marketers could be turned into an opportunity for the company, if identified in advance on the early stage of the sales process. Companies should better identify the customers who have their own web site. Networkers and social media users should be enrolled as occasional marketers.