Why, before sending out your product,
you should make sure it’s - um - good. And, if you’re sending it out “free” in return for reviews by bloggers - well, be prepared. You ain’t gonna control the conversation. Your “brand” isn’t going to be your logo, your spiel, your PR flacking, or your product name. It’ll be whatever blogville decides it is. After reading Joel Spolsky’s post re Sprint (link below), I now think of their new phone as “The Fisher Price phone.” Not good if you’re planning on selling to grown-ups.
Here’s Joel talking about the new Sprint phone and Power Vision Network. A wee snippet:
…In the meantime, if, say, hypothetically, you were pausing because you live in a country where the police brutalize people, and a policeman was brutalizing you, and you wanted to stop the music so you could try to figure out what the policeman wanted and perhaps there was some way if you could just hear him that you could get him to stop beating you with a riot bat, you’re already DEAD by the time you figure out how to make the pause button actually pause.
If you’ve ever worked in product development, you’ll groan as you laugh. But, you will laugh (a lot). If Sprint is smart, they’ll take Joel’s comments and use them as a design guide for the next phone.
Read More re Product Development: And, a rose by any other name may still be a rose, but how do you know it’s a rose (if you’re not in smelling distance)? Check out Stupid Product Names III at Bad Language blog. (okay, I’m getting silly a little early this week, but it’s a short one - and Bad Language makes some excellent points.)
Tags: branding, blogging, marketing, marketing troubleshooting, product development, Sprint
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November 21st, 2006 at 12:08 pm
OMG! Great post…
The thing about new marketing is that it actually forces you to give more than lip service to providing excellence throughout your entire organization. One slip up anywhere, be it customer service, product delivery, QA or anything will get you a visit to the BlogVegas Woodshed that you’ll not soon forget.
November 21st, 2006 at 2:30 pm
Yeppers. And, marketing can’t be just a department or group. Everyone has to be involved in “marketing” as a culture and a mindset. And, increasingly customers get to play as well - we’re now entering th era of the “participatory economy” where consumers can have much more control over what products get introduced and how they are supported.
The funny (ha-ha and strange) thing is how many companies don’t understand how dramatically and quickly things are changing. “Oh, those silly bloggers!” Hello? MBNA? Comcast? Sprint? Verizon? Well, we may be silly but we are also legion, and your name is getting bandied about a few thousand (or million) times a day, and not in a good way. So, if you’re mistreating your customers and/or offering bad products, your entire market may be lost and you won’t even know it. You’ll just lay off the marketing department, increase quotas n sales, and cut heads in service - yeah, yeah, that’s the ticket! And Wall Street will love you…for a quarter or two.
January 29th, 2008 at 8:21 am
[…] a** walking wallets. Oh, wait a minute…what’s that I hear about Google? Related Post: Why, Before Sending Out Your Product (You Should Make Sure It’s Good) - on Sprint’s intro of a new phone and the Power Vision […]