Marketing your idea: Avoid the feature trap!
Now anyone who has ever been put through the sales training mill at Procter & Gamble will have had drilled into them the difference between ‘features’ and ‘benefits’.
What’s that got to do with me and my business proposition? I don’t sell packaged goods and I don’t have the biggest advertising budget in the world!
Well if you’re looking to market a product or service particularly as an early trading business it’s really hard not to want to brag about every feature going. Let’s face it you want to sing to the world the beauty of your Megatechnoblaster’s through-channel dimensionality and multi-modal interoperability. Why? Because you’re proud of what you’ve designed and built and sweated over.
What if you’ve come up with the greatest thing since sliced bread? No -make that what if you’ve come up with the latest sliced bread – which features a really interesting re-sealable device that creates a vacuum in the bag (hey, that’s not a bad idea!). You’re really tempted to talk to the rooftops about the technological breakthrough, the way the plastic bag is produced and the material it’s made of which is different from its competitors.
The fact is that we’re all so tempted to talk about the features of our product – me included. But that’s not why people buy. They buy because of the benefit of the product i.e. what it does for them. So if you’ve invented this particular version of sliced bread then sell the benefit – ‘it stays fresher for longer so tastes better’.
Features are good, but benefits are better.
So if you’re thinking of launching a new product or service, figure out precisely who is your first target market and what benefit or dare we say, what (using that well-flogged term) USP do you have?
Now sometimes it’s not immediately apparent whether you’re sitting on a feature or a benefit. So ask the ’so what’ question. Try it yourself: ‘automatic transmission’ – so what? – answer: ’smoother ride’ – so what? – answer: well, it’s an end in itself. So ‘automatic’ is a feature and ’smoother ride’ is the benefit.
Clarifying the customer benefit defined in the customer’s language is fundamental. It’s not just for your potential customer but for anyone – investors, suppliers, partners – whom you need to convince on your journey to success.
Want to know more? Find out how to introduce your innovation into the marketplace so that it spreads like a wild fire.
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7 Websites You Must Check Out Before You Enter a New Market
Whether you are lucky enough to be armed with a new product idea or you have yet to crystallize your thoughts, you’d be mad to put any serious money into the project before you had a good understanding of the market. Knowing about your chosen market environment and what makes your customers tick are vital to the innovation process.
But before you launch into costly primary research there is plenty of secondary research you can undertake from the comfort of your desk.
Here’s a guide to some good websites that we regularly use for research as part of our product development process.
Amazon http://www.Amazon.com with its extensive, searchable database of books, products and magazines (on the US site) is a great place to generate ideas for products if you are looking for inspiration and / or to establish how competitive the market is. (Similarly www.magazines.com shows the list of the most popular titles in any chosen field. Generally, the more magazines that exist in any one category, the bigger the market).
Ebay http://www.ebay.com is the largest online marketplace making it a great place to get ideas about what people are searching for and ready to buy. Check out Ebay Pulse http://pulse.ebay.com (or your geographical version) which provides “a daily snapshot of current trends, hot picks, and cool stuff on eBay“.
Alexa http://www.alexa.com/ What’s hot on the web right now. Find out about the most popular websites and gather detailed traffic and rankings stats from your competitors’ sites.
Keyword Research http://www.wordtracker.com/ tells you what people are searching for online by showing you exactly which keywords and phrases they’re using. This can help you identify profitable niches in the first place or to optimize your website.
Article sites What are people writing about in your subject area? There is a wealth of article based websites out there where you can read up on pretty much any topic you dream up. Some good article sites are http://ezinearticles.com/ http://www.articlecity.com/ http://www.articlesbase.com/
Blogs If a subject is worth talking about, you can bet there’s a blog out there already. http://technorati.com/ is the “leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere“. Find out what people are thinking on any virtually any subject via this search engine.
Espacenet http://www.espacenet.com Visit the website for the European Patent Office to establish whether any prior art (existing work in the public domain) exists. Or http://www.wipo.int/patentscope/en/search/national_databases.html for a full list of national office databases.
And a final one thrown in….Google. Need I say anymore……..
Want to know more? Find out how to introduce your innovation into the marketplace so that it spreads like a wild fire.
View the Bush Fire effect for yourself…
Just because you are called Leonardo da Vinci does not make you an entrepreneur
Now here’s a thought. What does it take to turn an idea into a good commercial business? Turn it on its head and wonder if being the greatest scientist and scholar of the century means you’re a successful entrepreneur.
Take Leonardo da Vinci. Described as an Italian polymath, being a scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, painter, sculptor, architect, botanist, musician and writer. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the renaissance man, a man whose unquenchable curiosity was equaled only by his powers of invention.
Leonardo is revered for his technological ingenuity. He conceptualised a helicopter, a tank, concentrated solar power, a calculator, the double hull and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or were even feasible during his lifetime, but some of his smaller inventions, such as an automated bobbin winder and a machine for testing the tensile strength of wire, entered the world of manufacturing unheralded. As a scientist, he greatly advanced the state of knowledge in the fields of anatomy, civil engineering, optics, and hydrodynamics. Or so it says in Wikipedia. What a guy!
But guess what – by 1500 he was so hard up he had to go and earn some pin money painting portraits of the Gioconda family – and in the process gave the world the Mona Lisa.
So what’s the point? We all know that Leonardo was a genius and he’ll still be revered when you and I are probably pushing up daisies. But he wasn’t an entrepreneur. The inventions he came up with did not meet the needs of paying customers at the right price – let alone the capability of building the products in the first place.
Now maybe Leonardo didn’t mind too much being broke. But fact is that if you want to turn your ideas into commercial reality you need to make sure that you:
- Have a clear customer proposition
- Know exactly who represents your first core market segment?
- Can answer the question ‘Is my proposition compelling’
Want to know more? Find out how to introduce your innovation into the marketplace so that it spreads like a wild fire.
View the Bush Fire effect for yourself…
Have you got great a business idea and can’t wait to get started
Have you got great a business idea and can’t wait to get started?
… Well STOP! …
The answers to these 3 simple questions will make the difference between a flier or a flop!
Firstly, congratulations! It’s not always easy to come up with a great idea but you’ve done it.
You are probably raring to get your business plan in place, raise some money and launch your product. But wait!! What you do next can make the difference between success and failure.
The traditional route to evaluating your business idea is to put together a detailed business plan with market evaluation, detailed costings and profit projections. But before you get buried under business plans and funding negotiations, not to mention throwing away your own money, resources and energy for the next 6 months, you need to stop and question whether your idea is compelling in the first place.
Will it fly? Is your big idea market driven? Your business plan won’t tell you if the fish (customers) will bite!
However I’ve learnt from bitter experience what separates a good idea from a non-starter. Really it comes down to just 3 questions.
- Is there a market?
- Is there high value to this market?
- Can you get some kind of exclusivity?
If you can answer yes to all 3 of these then you should be onto a flier. Do your homework, find the answers to these questions and save yourselves months of heartache in pursuing an empty dream. Good luck!
Want to know more? Find out how to introduce your innovation into the marketplace so that it spreads like a wild fire.
View the Bush Fire effect for yourself…
Death by Business Plan
Do you ever get that horrible sinking feeling that goes to the pit of your stomach when you’ve got to do tedious bureaucratic stuff that adds no value to anyone least of all you?
So if you’ve got an exciting business idea that you want to get off the ground fast why not completely kill it by filling out a business plan first?
Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve written more business plans that it’s fair to throw at a convicted criminal (ok, maybe bankers put aside). Do you know how many got read cover to cover? Spot on, absolutely ZERO! Now you may say that’s because I can’t do them and you could be right.
However I’ve done them in start-ups, early-trading companies and working for large corporations such as Amex, Cadbury-Schweppes and Cable & Wireless. And a fair share of the proposals actually got funded – but … it wasn’t down to the business plan.
The fact is that for some dumb reason investors, VC’s, bankers and corporations get a lot of comfort out of seeing business plans – glossy, 80-page, pie-chart-filled carbon-wasting pap.
Why? Because they can touch and feel it and believe that unless you’re prepared to go to such lengths you can’t be committed to your proposition.
So here’s what you do if you’ve got a great business idea that you want to take to market.
Firstly, don’t start with the business plan – only do it when you’ve figured out:
Do I have a clear customer proposition?
Do I know exactly who represents my first core market segment?
Is my proposition compelling?
Some see business plans as road blocks on the runway to commercial success. If you’re the dude having to do it then it’s a pain in the gluteus maximus.
So please, do yourself a favour and do the essential stuff first. Because if the customer proposition’s not great and you’re not clear on your first market ‘beach head’ then even a brilliant business plan crafted by Ernest Hemingway isn’t going to save you.
Want to know more? Find out how to introduce your innovation into the marketplace so that it spreads like a wild fire.
View the Bush Fire effect for yourself…
