Product Marketing Theory and Practices: Product Marketing Deals With The First of The "4P"'s of Marketing
Product Marketing Theory and Practices: Product Marketing Deals With The First of The "4P"'s of Marketing
Product Marketing Theory and Practices: Product Marketing Deals With The First of The "4P"'s of Marketing
practices
Product marketing deals with the first of the "4P"'s of marketing,
which are Product, Pricing, Place, and Promotion.
• What products will be offered (i.e., the breadth and depth of the
product line)?
• Who will be the target customers (i.e., the boundaries of the
market segments to be served)?
• How will the products reach those (i.e., the distribution channel
and are there viable possibilities that create a solid business
model)?
• At what price should the products be offered?
• How will customers be introduced to the products (i.e.,
advertising)?
Product marketing vs. product management
In other companies the product manager creates both the MRDs and
the PRDs, while the product marketing manager does outbound tasks
like giving product demonstrations in trade shows, creating marketing
collateral like hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets, data sheets, and
white papers. This requires the product marketing manager to be
skilled not only in competitor analysis, market research, and technical
writing, but also in more business oriented activities like conducting
ROI and NPV analyses on technology investments, strategizing how the
decision criteria of the prospects or customers can be changed so that
they buy the company's product vis-a-vis the competitor's product, etc.
One issue that faces Product Marketers is that they are chartered with
developing much of the content for the various constituents (sales,
marcom, customers, blogs, etc.). Creating content tends to be given
more value than the actual research and thinking that is behind all the
content.
• Market data
• Customer feedback
• Competitive analysis
1. Step 1
2. Step 2
3. Step 3
5. Step 5
Post your MRD somewhere where everyone can have access to it. It
can be printed and distributed, posted to a file server or uploaded
to an internal website, for example.
6. Step 6
In addition, a wide variety of other improvements and extensions have been identified.
None of these are defined as gating items for the release, so may be postponed if they
threaten timeliness or functionality of the release.
Target customers are expected to fall into the following categories and usage profiles:
1.3.1 Current customer base, looking for performance upgrades and improved
diagnostics. Most are currently on support contracts, so do not generate incremental
revenue - but are our leading source of references and upgrades. Usage patterns should
be similar to current applications, with increasing use of new diagnostic features and on-
line downloading of financial indicators.
Most vocal current customer is HP printer logistics division, which needs to ability to
make urgent deliveries to remote customers at low cost. Babylon-6 should allow HP
Logistics to centralize printer supplies in Roseville CA and Bangalore, reducing real
estate costs and in-pipeline inventories elsewhere. See detailed use case attached…
1.3.2 Hi-Tech Mergers & Acquisitions users, who will be most interested in reducing
latency of financial updates and pricing. Moving price data through teleportation gives
program traders and hedge funds a way to "lead the market" by as much as 5 seconds.
For this group, raw transmission speed is the only criterion.
Figure A shows a schematic how our system will fit with pricing data from major
exchanges, (NYSE, NASDAQ as delivered through Reuters/TIBCO) and buy-side
interfaces with portfolio trading apps.
Chart B shows current and future performance (in absolute and price-performance terms)
for this segment. If necessary, a market-specific lease option will be created to lower
upfront buy-in costs.
1.4 Competitive Strengths and Weaknesses
Our biggest competitor has failed to address key aspects of this market. They have
neglected new transport methods in favor of old-style fuel-based mobility. "Babylon-6"
will let us tilt the PR playing field in our favor ("old versus new") as well as sell upgrades
to older customers no longer on contract. In particular, we should be able to take share
away from BigCo based on their clumsy pricing and slow development cycles.
Since we will not yet have filled some holes in our own product line (especially safety
testing for transport of people and live cargo), we will de-emphasize this in our materials
and use cases. All marketing and advertising will picture transporting of physical (no-
living) goods. In addition, Corporate Marketing will provide delivery insurance to cover
any losses from mis-directed shipments.
1.5 External Positioning
{A pithy summary of what's new and different enough that press/analysts will listen}
At launch, we will position this with the broad non-technical press as…
and focus technical reviewers/readers on…
Our comparison with existing competitors will focus on…
For existing customers, our top-line message will be…
1.6 Microsoft
This is in potential competition with several long-term Microsoft initiatives, such as
"Penfield-Jackson" and "R2D2". Our plan must be either to [a] make this an attractive
partnering opportunity for Microsoft, with hopes for free bundling or acquisition, or [b]
position it as complementary to Microsoft's incomplete lower-level offering, which we
assume will be bundled at no charge in all of the following products and suites:
Office2006, MoonExplorer, and "USBeam".
Any discussion with press or analysts will include a designated PR / Product Marketing
representative to cover Microsoft questions.
2.0 Business Model
An explicit description of this product (service) and "how it makes money" is important
to careful planning . While the business model may change with competitive shifts or
learning during the development cycle, assumptions about marketplaces and pricing will
drive many decisions and define how we win against existing offerings.
2.1 Value Proposition
Clear description of the value created for users by the product/service, including reasons
why current offerings are insufficient.
Example: database stored procedures (a.k.a. triggers) allow program trading of securities
driven by real-time market price data. Pre-existing solutions required manual
intervention or batch price scans, which were too slow to catch real-time market moves.
This technology created a new class of traders able to arbitrage tiny market inefficiencies,
and made millions for early Wall Street adopters.
2.2 Market Segment
Who are the users (IT, line of business, roaming execs, home surfers…)? What are the
details of the application?
Example: a global Internet dial-up service is targeted at roaming business users with
Windows laptops who cross national boundaries. They dial in for email and corporate IP
applications (on average) twice per business day and infrequently on weekends. They are
non-technical, so cannot be counted on to configure any local settings or understand the
subtleties of local telephone services.
2.3 Value Chain Structure
How will this be distributed? What are necessary complementary products? What
prerequisites will customers require (and that can be used as marketing screens)?
Example: a real-time alerting system for corporate back-office applications requires
deployed, working corporate applications (e.g. ERP or finance) and browsers installed on
all end user systems. It is a complement to these large apps, adding value to triggering or
error status features, since end users often fail to see urgent alerts. As a stand-alone
offering, it lacks high-value content. Can Marketing create a simple targeting screen for
early location/qualification of prospects?
2.4 Cost Structure
Is this a service or a product? Are costs driven by one-time R&D or ongoing support and
provisioning? What is the profit potential given the customer proposition and value
chain?
Example: a transaction-based service has high fixed (start-up) costs and low per-
transaction costs. A 24*7*365 support team is expensive to maintain, but can manage a
large number of cases without expanding. Company needs to get a minimum revenue per
month (day, year) to cover support costs and amortize R&D, but needs relatively little per
additional transaction to generate profitability. Subscription model and per-transaction
fees are possible pricing solutions.
The Preparation
You need to prepare all the slides in advance of the meeting. You will
want to schedule some time with engineering to review the slides
before they are finalized. This is necessary for the following reasons:
For the meeting you will want to have the room set up in a round table
format to encourage discussion. Have copies of the slides and back-up
documentation for everyone involved. New products are controversial
and anything you can do to make the meeting run smoother is
important to the overall objective of the company working on projects
with the best return on investment.
Outline of Presentation
I recommend using only one or two slides per product. You can hand
out any back-up material. A simple standard format will allow anyone
to look back at the slides and recommendations without becoming lost.
Sample Presentation
Project Name- Come up with a name for the project that is easy to
identify, but don't spend a lot of time on it, this isn't the final product
name.
The Decision
Hold for future - If the product fits into the company strategy, but the
resources are unavailable to work on it, it may be a good idea to put it
on hold until some determined future time.
• Does the project fit into the company's long term strategy?
• Does the target market for the project align with the company
strategy?
• Will there be sufficient revenue from the product to justify the
work required?
• If there is not sufficient revenue, are there other highly
compelling reasons to justify the work?
• Are the resources available to do the work?
• If the resources are not available, should this project take
precedence over another?
References
http://www.followtopia.com/?query=Produc