Marketing Bones

Ideas & Answers on all things Marketing

Posts Tagged ‘Marketing Strategy’

Why Tactics and Execution goals matter

February 27th, 2010

Scenario : You have a good business growth plan – heck, you have a GREAT business growth idea. You’ve just delivered your elevator speech to the CEO and he tells you to pitch your idea to the executive team. You walk into the room and begin. First, the idea, the strategy, the market, the competitive landscape and the financial/operational goals.

Then, the CEO asks you. “How are you going to implement this?” Either you have a series of next-level tactics on hand or you fumble about how different members of your team will keep working hard to make this happen.

The meeting ends with no financing approved. What went wrong? » Read more: Why Tactics and Execution goals matter

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Posted in Marketing, Marketing Strategy

Retromarketing – Tormenting Customers and how they’ll love it

December 11th, 2009

It was a few years ago when I first read this HBR article on Retromarketing by Stephen Brown which was quite eye-opening.

The premise of this article was based on the fact that marketing folks always keep telling us to mollycoddle our customers and do things like customer care, customer delight, customer is king etc. etc. I agree with Mr. Brown to an extent; Some customers are uninformed and only focus on one attribute on a product, which is mostly price. » Read more: Retromarketing – Tormenting Customers and how they’ll love it

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Posted in Marketing, Marketing Concepts

Tags: Marketing Strategy marketing tactics

The Positioning of David Mamet

October 5th, 2009

It’s hard to pin down David Mamet – copywriter, director, writer etc etc and this entry here is not about how to do that. Rather, it’s about celebrating his art. Mr. Mamet’s art is different. He builds his characters with little complexity and yet, we’re astonished when they act in ways that surprise us.

His dialog is direct, focused, thrilling, to-the-point, unambiguous and compact. Every single line is loaded. That, in itself, is an art. » Read more: The Positioning of David Mamet

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Posted in Positioning

Tags: Marketing Strategy

How to grab Market Share from an existing leader

September 27th, 2009

This sure aint easy. You want to enter or expand in a market where someone is a dominant player who has excellent distribution, is strongly positioned as the leader and has a few brand extensions. What do you do?

Situation : You’re a runner-up firm in a certain industry and you want to enter/ expand. Start with the basics. Ask yourself what you would like to accomplish here. » Read more: How to grab Market Share from an existing leader

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Posted in Marketing Strategy

Tags: Marketing Strategy marketing tactics

YouTube and $3.99 movies; A win-win

September 5th, 2009

The day before, it was all over the news that YouTube was in talks with Hollywood studios to rent and view new movies online. This was an interesting development. I’m aware that iTunes and Netflix does this. But, the fact that YouTube was looking at this opportunity as a viable revenue stream meant that it wanted to tweak its ad-supported business model. Which meant that Google was looking to get back into the online video rental business. Incidentally, they got out of it, when they bought YouTube for $1.76bn three years ago. Rather than merely muse about what could be, I’d like to present an analysis (objective mostly & some subjective) on what this means for the industry. » Read more: YouTube and $3.99 movies; A win-win

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Posted in Marketing Strategy

Tags: Marketing Strategy

Market-Followers or How No.2 can be as good as No.1

August 14th, 2009

market-follower-strategies-to-ursurp-the-market-leader Clever firms are always looking for the next best thing that they can add to their product or service platforms and in the process differentiating themselves from their competitors.

If you’re No. 2 in a market, you could spend tons of time reinventing the wheel and trying to ‘discover’ something new or…

You could wait till No.1 aka the market leader has borne the costs of having a product development process, developing a new product or variation, educating the market about it, setting it into distribution and promoting it. » Read more: Market-Followers or How No.2 can be as good as No.1

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Posted in Marketing Strategy

Tags: market follower strategies Marketing Strategy marketing tactics

What’s wrong with Amazon’s Kindle?

August 2nd, 2009

Someone on Linkedin asked a question about whether Kindle was merely a hyped up product which didn’t proliferate among its target market and I decided to answer. Here’s a slightly modified version of my answer.

My thoughts on Kindle : Here’s the thing: Somehow, Jeff Bezos’ hubris led him to spend millions of R&D resources in the hope that he could create the next…iPod? Wii for books? I don’t think he knew the answer yet and neither do I. » Read more: What’s wrong with Amazon’s Kindle?