Category Archives: Technology

You must have heard that a picture speaks a thousand words. That’s so much true, and equally true is the fact that a video speaks a million words. Video is like simulated pictures, lots of pictures passing in quick succession (yeah I know you don’t want me to prove it mathematically, but just for the sake of argument). A video has a greater appeal than a written memo or a static picture because you can give much more details using a video and use sound to increase the impact. Essentially, if you create a video just to explain a picture, you are delivering the message you were trying to deliver through the picture in an easier and better way. With the decreasing cost and ease of use of the video cameras, advent of broadband and growing popularity of podcasts and online video communities, videos are gaining popularity as the standard way of delivering message at any level.

Just like any other technology, videos have their usage in the field of marketing. Advertising through video clips on television is time tested successful way of reaching a customer, so I think we can take that to be a well known application here. Videos can be used in several other ways to enhance marketing. One of the most important application which can directly impact the customers is product demonstration videos. Companies create such videos to familiarize the customers with their products and services. These videos can be as simple as a 360 degree view if the product and can be as complicated as a completely interactive demonstration of the product with voice descriptions. Videos for product demos is a very economical and effective way to reach the customers. Video demos online have become more important now than ever before because more and more companies are trying sell products directly through Internet.

Another use of videos is to create product brochures. The difference between the number of people reading a novel and number of people watching a movie based on the same novel is huge. Number of people watching the movie is manyfolds as compared to reading the novel in normal cases. Similarly, instead of writing a beautiful product brochure for a product, if you show a few minutes video of the product, you will get more people to watch it as compared to read the brochure. In other cases, video brochures can accompany paper based brochures to appeal to all kinds of customers. These video empowered brochures can either reach customers by distributing them traditionally in the form of discs or can be viewed on the Internet. This is a growing practice in marketing organizations and significant product brochures that come to mind are that of BMW and Starbucks Interactive Cup Brewer. Marketing brains can come up with many more useful applications of videos to better reach the customers and create buying a product a much better and satisfying experience.

With the fast moving world and rapid improvement in technologies, the marketers are getting new tools to reach to the customers. Video is one of them. In order to succeed in this fast changing environment where customers have more options than ever before, marketing should make a point to stay at the cutting edge of all the technological advancements happening around them. The bottom line is to reach the customer in the best possible way and today if creating an attractive video serves that purpose, you got to go for it.

A typical definition of 80-20 rule in the field of product development is 80% users use 20% features of any product. A slightly different interpretation – 80% of time a user ends up using 20% features of a product. This is true for any product in the software industry out there and lots of companies have become successful by pioneering those bare minimum 20% features of the products. The question that arises here is how? How can a company survive without fulfilling 100% customer requirements? Or in other words, why does a customer stick to a product which only fulfils 80% of their requirements? I think there are several reasons for that. First and foremost, is the barrier to change. Most customers start using a product when they feel that the product is fulfilling most of its requirement, which the product does. Now when they come across one requirement which is not fulfilled by the product, their natural tendency is to find a work around for this feature rather than abandoning the product and using something else. Another reason, cost associated with the change. Customers who paid certain amount to purchase the product that fulfills most of their requirement, normally chooses not to pay again in order to get a product that meets those edge case requirements. And if for any reason, that edge case becomes a common one, if starts getting close to that 20% basket and gets added to the product feature list.

This is the case for a typical software product out there installed on a customer’s computer. Now lets move on to the Internet. Is it the same there? Does this 80-20 rule works there as well? I think we should consider the points that help 80-20 rule work for desktop products and see their standing in the Internet world. First, the barrier to change. The barrier to change for a typical application on WWW, like search or online store is as negligible as typing a new url in the Address Bar. So if some customer is trying to search lyrics of a not so common song or looking for some special merchandise and cannot find it at one particular destination, they can just type in a different web site address and see if they can find it there (Yeah there is some barrier in case of an online store if you want to buy something you need to provide a payment source and your address, but I think you won’t mind doing that if you find a merchandise you didn’t find at your regular store). Second, cost of change. Well with most applications not charging anything to the end user to use it, I think the user has no cost of change. Talking about our previous applications, search run on advertisement revenue, so are free for the end user and an online store only charges a user when they are buying something over there. This means the 80-20 rule doesn’t work that well for a Web based product.

In fact, I think this 80-20 rule sometimes work against the product if the customer is able to locate an alternative with answers to all their requirements. If I am looking for some very uncommon information and I find it through one particular search engine, that search engine promptly secures a place in my list of favorites. Now I will know that whatever I want to search, I will look for it here. So now slowly I will start using this for my other 80% of the common queries as well. Similarly for an online store. If I find a not so common merchandise on a particular online store, the next time I want to buy something, I will go back to this store hoping that I have a much better chance of finding the product here. This is the reason behind the success of lots of Web based companies. They try to fulfill 100% of customer requirement. How do they do that? Its by maintaining a long tail…whether you do it by writing a better algorithm that fulfills all customer’s search requests or by supporting a more exhaustive inventory to find the customer any merchandise they are looking for. To sum up, these companies need to be highly customer focused and align their products and services to address customer needs in agile and innovative ways.

The Internet has revolutionized many things in many ways. One of the most significant things Internet has radically affected is products service based products delivery. It has reduced the distance between the customer and the producer of products. One of the interesting developments is the Beta release of products to the end customer. So what’s new here? Beta stage has always been there in technology products where the product is debugged, i.e. the stage after alpha (new features added to the products) and before release candidate (all important bugs removed). But this conventional definition of Beta is no longer true in the Internet World. How I see the Beta now is a stage encompassing market research, development, testing, debugging and early adoption. The idea is to get the initial concept out there to the customer with some prototypical implementation and do the rest with the help of the customers.

This is a great concept in many ways. Market research gets a whole new perspective. With the help of business intelligence software, market researchers can track the customer usage of the products, analyze the early responses and adoption scenarios. Product development becomes an agile process. The speed of an idea to convert into a product is more rapid then ever before. Reason – there’s no need to wait for market research to be completed and requirements to be assembled to start the development. It’s more of an ongoing process. Features can be added sporadically while customers are adopting the product as per customer needs and requirements. The biggest benefitter of all is testing and debugging. Instead of a few dedicated resources to test the product, Beta release opens the doors to the World, potential future customers to test the product. This in no way can replace those dedicated resources, but still the combined force of many many people using the product is like a great addition. Beta release is also a great way of booking the early adopter’s loyalty. Adding features to the product, fixing bugs and making changes based on feedback from early adopters make them advocates for the product which helps in mass adoption.

Beta release has some drawbacks of its own, specially for the established brands. If a product is launched in Beta and is very buggy and hard to adopt, it’s not easy to attract the customers back to the product with the competition providing equally compelling and attractive options. Another downside is if the company is not able to attend to the early adopters, take in their feedback and respond to it, these customers can influence mass adoption in a negative way. The bigger the brand behind the product, the more vulnerable is a Beta release.

Beta release is a real delight for start-ups wanting to establish a brand with the help of Internet community. With the immense power in the Web to connect people, it’s really good to have a positive word of mouth behind your brand as a whole and product in specific. It is very important to give due credit to the early adopters and recognize them in making the Beta a success. Companies roll out schemes to recognize the early adopters in different ways. One of the most prominent ones in the recent years which comes to mind is Gmail Beta. Google provided early adopters option to invite new users to have a Gmail account. This helped Google fulfill two objectives – gave early adopters a feeling as if they were a part of Gmail product in development and increased the public adoption of Gmail. Before the beta tag will get off Gmail, it will already have more than a million customers.

So when should a successful Beta release get rid of the Beta tag? I think, the best time for a product to come out of the Beta is when the product is ready to cross the chasm (Geoffrey Moore). Things like bug free product, stability and other technological issues are important considerations, but removing the Beta tag in a timely manner is also very important to attract a certain type of users who are not very excited to adopt a product which they think is not yet officially released. So when the product has enough customers to help it get into the main stream and get mass adoption, it should evolve into an official release.

There is no information asymmetry in today’s digitized World. Consumers are getting more and more empowered with information on their fingertips. The world is getting compressed. Consumer is closer to the producer then ever before. Companies can leverage direct input from the consumer instantaneously in every field including product design and testing. So where is marketing really headed in this world?

Before talking about any one specific field, it is very important to understand what the digitization brings to the table. Digitization has changed the World in many ways. It has impacted business in numerous ways as well. Actually, talking in broad terms, it has revolutionize three things dramatically – communication, information and collaboration. The way people can communicate in today’s World has been digitized. Whether it’s one-to-one communication using technologies like VOIP, Live Meeting and instant messaging or mass communication using tools like blogs, newsgroup or newsletters, it’s become a lot easier and cheaper then ever before. When you talk about information, it’s the same thing. People can access any information in the World online instantaneously. The search engines have become gateways to the World of information. The information which costed big bucks a decade ago is now available freely and easily, thanks to the digital revolution. Another important thing that is affected by this digital wave is collaboration. People can collaborate with each other, work on projects together and have discussions without any ackles. Basically, the fiber optics have shrunk the World and tied the ends together with miles to go from where we are today.

Now lets talk about marketing, where it is today and where it is poised to go. To discuss this, its very important to answer one question – communication, information and collaboration – how do these affect marketing? I think these form the backbone of marketing. Communicating the message effectively to the consumer is one of the most important jobs in marketing. Any form of communication used in marketing, be it advertising or campaign, product feedback or requirement collection, is heavily impacted by the digital revolution. Advertising effectively to the right customer at the right time through the right medium can be done using the digital technology. Proper software creation and use of data mining can lead to identifying the most appropriate time and medium to target the customer. Digitization of the World has taken communication in terms of product feedback and requirement collection miles ahead. Blogging plays a critical role here. Corporate blogs like FastLane by General Motors and 787 Dreamliner by Boeing are prime examples of how companies can talk directly to the customers, create buzz about their products and gain feedback. So where are we heading? I think marketing communication will become lot more economical through digitization. In the field of advertising, the companies will be able to target the appropriate audience with a higher precision, lowering the advertising cost considerably. The blogs and newsgroups will replace, or atleast complement to a large extent, editorials for reviews of the products.

Information is one of the most important tools required for marketing. Any company requires a large amount of information about the market, competitors and customers to make sound decisions. On the other hand, companies also want their product information to reach the customers as soon as possible. Information delivery and distribution has become a lot cheaper due to digitization. Another significant impact digitization has made is in making the information posting easier using blogs and newsgroups. So marketing organizations can have two way information exchange with their customers seamlessly through digital media. Going forward, the digital media will become much more prominent source of information interchange amongst various entities. Digitization in Information interchange and advancements in software to translate information in different languages instantaneously will also take globalization to the next level. The marketing organizations will have to strategize their information distribution on the Internet more accurately to address the much larger global audience. The benefits of this will be huge cost savings in the field of information retrieval and distribution by the marketers.

Now moving on to collaboration. Collaboration is another important aspect of successful marketing. To be successful, any company needs to have marketing as the core part of its decision making process. Marketing is the organization which is closest to the customers. So the marketers viewpoint should get prime attention in research, product development and financial decisions made by the company. That’s the reason marketing wing of any company needs to collaborate with all other parts of the company. The digitization of the world has made this easier than ever before. The marketers in the field can collaborate easily with anyone anywhere with great ease. They can provide instant feedback to product development and research organizations and help steer the company in the right direction. Similarly, digitized world can empower collaborative work amongst marketers and with customers and partners effectively and with great ease. With software enhancements and digitization increasing its reach, the collaborative process will become more easier and cheaper for all parts of the business to use.

To sum up, I think marketing is one of the prime areas influenced positively by the digitization of the World. This is one field which is revolutionized a lot all through the digital evolution and will continue to do so in the future with digitization touching new heights.