A Marketing Role in Product Development – Creating Buzz… & Links!
What makes your product or service different from your competitors’? What about your product makes it better? Most importantly, why should people buy your product over your competitors’?
These may all seem like the same question but they’re not. Not only that, they’re questions you’d be much better off asking your competitors’ customers than your own. Why? Because marketing is all about attracting new customers. If your product falls short or simply isn’t the best option, your competitors win. If your products offer something theirs don’t, there’s value in that, and you win. You need to find out what most often motivates the sale, be it: price, features, convenience, customer service, etc. and modify what you offer to suit.
I’m a marketer who’s all about winning. So here are some tips to help out your marketing department, perhaps even by letting them get involved in product development.
Start simple
Lisa Barone did a great post the other day about how to listen to and watch your current customers in order to make your products work better for them. It’s a great place to start because, let’s be honest: if you can’t keep your current customers happy, how do you expect to attract new ones?
Listening to your customer complaints & suggestions while watching, observing, and noticing how they use your products can give you insight (you may never have thought of) on how to improve the way they work. It also shows you care about your customers. These days customer support/relations is vital for the health of your brand, but don’t let that be the only answer you have for the three questions…because if it is, you’re more than likely missing out.
Creating Perceived Value
It’s likely that your competitors list their products’ best features in bullet points. Whether it’s on the box, website, or some other marketing medium, they just can’t help it. Why? Because sometimes it’s the guy with the most bullets that wins. (If this is starting to sound like a bad western movie…we’re getting close.)
If you ask a competitor’s customer why they bought their product over yours, you’re most likely to hear something like this: “Because theirs has x and yours doesn’t.” or “Because their x is bigger/faster/better than your x.”
A lot of the time customers won’t even use the feature, but having it there gives them a sense of value over other products that don’t have it. It may simply be a security blanket, status symbol or an excuse to brag, but that perceived value was there and it got the sale. Beyond the sale, however, if you intend to create a buzz about your product, you’d better have something to brag about…
I can think of no product line that illustrates this better than cell phones:
Innovation – Solving Needs & Creating Wants
They say: necessity is the mother of invention. If you truly believe that these days, however, you’re probably not in marketing – or you may not be very good at it. In the 21st century needs have become wants*. In fact, the health of capitalism actually depends upon the creation of wants that are independent from our basic needs. The real trick to marketing is blending the two: turning products into wants that feel like needs.
*I realize this is a cynical viewpoint, and really depends on how strict a definition of the word “need” vs. “want” you’re using, but there’s (at least some) truth to it.
As Lisa finished up in her recent post:
“It’s a lot easier to sell someone what they already want than trying to create a need they never had.”
While on the surface it seems like a true statement that nobody can really argue with, the problem I have with it: is that it’s not universally true. Why? Because: (a.) most people don’t know what they want until that something becomes available. And (b.) It’s simply not true for certain products. Hacks and alternate uses (that can become part of the product itself) are somewhat rare. The example of twitter adding #hashtags because their users began widely using them is a very rare exception to this rule.
My other problem with Lisa’s quote is that it suggests an easy way out and does nothing to promote true innovation. So I’d like to propose an alternate quote:
True innovation solves needs that most of us never knew existed.
Some of the most successful products are truly innovative because they make things faster/easier/better in a way that nobody had thought of before.
Example 1: The iPod scroll wheel – This is a feature that’s SO innovative; it’s difficult to find an MP3 player without one these days…until the iPod touch came out (of course).
Example 2: Nintendo Wii – Certainly a want more than a need, Nintendo re-invented gaming…again; and created a product with less “features” yet more buzz and demand than its competitors because of one (perhaps not so simple) technology called motion sensing.
Example 3: Knowem.com – Lisa actually used this as an example for me of a service that “solve(d) an established frustration” but for how many people (I wonder) was this a frustration for? Certainly a wonderful service for those of us in Social Media Marketing, but not something anyone “needed”. Rather, it’s something that makes our lives easier in a way nobody had thought of before, and now something we can’t go without.
Buzz & Links – Taking advantage of Product Development
Truly innovative products will create a buzz, attract links, and pretty much market themselves. Word-of-mouth marketing should be the ultimate goal of any product development (for marketing) plan. This is, of course, extremely rare and for most of us, adding features and improving products require a bit of a push in order to achieve successful buzz. Here are my rules to make sure product development marketing goes smoothly:
Rule #1 – Nothing new = nothing gained
In order to attract real buzz for a product launch/re-launch, you either need to have something nobody else has, or do it in a way nobody else does it. Otherwise, you’re just another product with all the bells and whistles to boot.
Rule #2 – Don’t ruin the product
Features are great, sometimes even if they don’t get used. A problem can arise, however, if adding these features complicates the product by making it more difficult to use. This is a BIG NO-NO and can cause more harm to your brand than buzz.
Rule #3 – Put your best foot forward
If you’re adding a number of improvements to a product, do some market research to find out which feature is most likely to make customers swoon over. Focusing on that one feature (especially if it’s your “advantage” of your competitors) instead of the whole update is your best bet…otherwise they can sometimes drown each other out. If they sit on an even keel, then perhaps you can take a lesson from the idon’t commercial (above).
Rule #4 – A little push is needed
Unless you’re reinventing the wheel, you’re going to want to put a good amount of marketing dollars into publicizing the improvements you’ve made as the “newness” of your features will ware old quickly. Product updates/launches tend to have a better ROI than most re-branding campaigns and you can sometimes even get away with less expensive forms of marketing (like press releases) to start that viral domino effect. Even my 3 examples of truly innovative products needed a push to get going.
Rule #5 – Create Buzz not Hype
Don’t try to force your product launch into a conversation. Let the people do the talking. Otherwise you’ll end up with more naysayers than positive buzz and/or more expectations than you can handle. (i.e. don’t over-promise and under-deliver)
Rule #6 – Raise the curtain S-L-O-W-L-Y
The products that create the most buzz seem to have information slowly “leak” out into the public. Then ever-so-slowly: rumors turn into facts, and imagination turns into excitement and impatience. I wouldn’t suggest faking a product “leak” by any means, but slowly giving people enough information to be interested while leaving enough to the imagination is a GREAT way to feed buzz.
Rule #7 – SEO tip – Internal Press Release
Make sure you have a page on your website or a separate site that describes (in detail) the product or updates you’ve made. Giving people a place to link to and get accurate information will all but assure you get links and traffic back to your site if the launch creates enough buzz. Big brands seem to get this wrong many times, although they’re rarely concerned with SEO like the rest of us 
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