Scott Sehlhorst reminded me about Geek Marketing 101 by John Dodds.

John writes,

It is so named because I see amongst many geeks a pervasive misunderstanding and consequent distrust of what marketing is, and a failure to recognise that much technology marketing is no longer geek to geek since complex products are increasingly being bought by non-geeks. Of course, these observations are equally applicable to geek to geek and non-geek businesses.

Scott adds,

Don’t let them know, but we’re on our way to understanding how this stuff works.

I spend time with marketers and developers constantly yet I often forget about the chasm between the two. A marketer says "Talk to me like I was a five-year-old," a phrase which translates for a developer to "I don't know enough to work here."

Technical people are often obsessed with technology--the "how" of the product--but people don't care about the 'how' until they understand the 'what'. Marketing people are often obsessed with competitive positioning, the unique selling proposition--they are more concerned with the "what" than the "how"--but customers don't really care how you're better until they understand what you're gonna do for them.

Geeks and flakes need to meet in the middle: what are we going to do for customers?

Some people (not me, of course) download songs from Apple’s iTunes, immediately burn them to disc, and then reload them from disc to remove the Digital Rights Management protection (aka DRM). Newer albums on Apple’s site come in “iTunes Plus” with the DRM protection removed yet they are still in Apple’s proprietary format.

Meanwhile over at Amazon, songs are available for the same 99 cents but in MP3 format.

As much as I value the elegant interfaces of iTunes Music Store to iTunes client to my iPod, buying MP3s from Amazon is almost as seamless. You can buy an album (such as Good and Reckless and True by The Alternate Routes) and the files are downloaded and loaded directly into iTunes. Pretty straightforward too—without the pain of converting from a proprietary format to standard.

In The Innovators Solution, Clayton Christenson argues that you must switch from proprietary to standard when “good enough” becomes available. For instance, Apple should have licensed the Mac OS when Windows 1.0 became available and TiVo should have licensed its superior software once Comcast started offering a DVR. In this case, at least for me, the effort of downloading new tunes from Amazon to my iPod is now good enough and Apple’s proprietary file format is no longer acceptable.

Sure, Apple has to deal with the idiots at the various record labels with their stupidity about DRM, but once allowed to offer unprotected music, Apple should offer an industry standard instead of their own proprietary format.

What non-standard formats are you imposing on your customers? A proprietary database? An in-house report format? An internal scripting capability that is “better” than whatever is out there?

One key aspect of being tuned in to your customers is to see your offering from their viewpoint.

Win/Loss analysis is an extremely important activity yet is performed by fewer than 20% of product managers. Sales people either don't do win/loss or don't do it well. Companies who invest in win/loss find more process problems than product problems. Which is easier to fix? And who better to tell what we do right and wrong than someone who recently tried to buy?

Barbara Nelson explores win/loss analysis in her free webinar Why Are We Winning? Why Are We Losing? this Friday, February 8, 2008 at 10:00a PST.

Wired reports that Humans Are Mathematically Incompetent:

A recent study from Cornell University suggests that because we tend to use precise numbers for small amounts and round off very large numbers (lots of zeros), sellers can actually con consumers into thinking a price is smaller than it is by replacing those zeros with other digits.

Read the article. It's fascinating.

I wrote about the value of data and stories in my post on survey research. Jeff Lash has some additional insights in Understand qualitative vs. quantitative research.

SoftwareCEO’s annual Software Innovation Awards recognize our industry’s efforts and accomplishments in bringing innovative software products and new business models to market.

They write,

We invite software companies, software service providers, and companies serving the software industry to apply for the SoftwareCEO/CompTIA Software Innovation Awards.

We’re looking for technological and business model breakthroughs that deliver innovations in software and content delivery. They can be in the form of products, ideas, services, companies, or business models.

Winners will be announced at the Software Marketing Perspectives conference this May in Santa Clara, Calif.

"Download our free white paper and enter to win a free iPod."

Some companies just don't get it. By now almost everyone has learned that "download our free white paper" means "give us your email address so we can spam you for the rest of your life." Marketing departments (and their agencies) need to learn that impressions do not have to become sales leads.

You cannot trick someone into buying your product.

What is the formula for success?

Step 1: build a remarkable product. Learn more in Practical Product Management.

Step 2: get your customers to tell their friends. Learn more in The New Rules of Viral Marketing--a new e-book by David Meerman Scott. Download it now; it's free and there's no annoying registration requirement. Forward it with your marketing department.

Has this happened to you? A company reached the business decision (due to financial & legal pressures) to replace a third-party engine in their product line with a similar but entirely different engine from another provider. 

Read this case study on how personas provided focus to this project on Bonnie Rind's Product Persona blog.

You are busy at the office — there are too many meetings and projects and can’t miss any of them. Your customers are located far away and travel budgets are tight. Your customers are too busy to talk to you. You don’t have any customers yet. Your sales staff doesn’t want you visiting customers. Sure, it would be nice to visit customers, but with all these impediments, it’s just not worth the effort. And besides, visiting customers isn’t that important anyways, right?

Sound familiar? Read more in Avoid excuses for not conducting customer visits on Jeff Lash's blog.

Here's an exec who knows the value of product management.

Art Petty writes,

Few roles in B2B and technology organizations carry loftier expectations or face more challenging tasks than that of the Product Manager. This position tends to be backed by a job description with responsibilities that makes many executive roles look tame by comparison.

Read more in In support of the Product Manager as MVP.

If you're thinking SaaS, you should also be thinking agile. Eric Kuhnen shares his view on SaaS and agile.

Have you ever considered that the industry doesn't move as quickly as everybody thinks? XP and Scrum both appeared in 1996--yep, over a decade ago. Officially, the agile movement officially began in February 2001 with the Agile Manifesto. At Pragmatic Marketing, we've been advocating a more agile approach to product planning for years and now--Holy Tipping Point, Batman!--agile is now finally a hot topic at many companies.

If you need to get up to speed, Scott Sehlhorst offers this series of articles on agile. Or bring your developer with you to our next Requirements That Work session.