The Killer Feature

The hunt for the killer feature is always on. Especially in mature product categories every company is looking for an edge for their new and improved version.

The killer feature for TVs is picture quality, according to Chris Moseley, a Samsung product manager:

TVs are ultimately about picture quality. Ultimately. How smart they are…great, but let’s face it that’s a secondary consideration. The ultimate is about picture quality and there is no way that anyone, new or old, can come along this year or next year and beat us on picture quality.

Samsung sits comfortably on top of the TV market and is in control of the supply chain for parts that control picture quality. New players will have a hard time beating them at their own game, picture quality:

We’ve not seen what they’ve done but what we can say is that they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category.

With they he refers to Apple, who are expected to launch an HDTV, later this year. 

And Moseley is again right. Apple doesn't have 10,000 researchers dedicated to making TVs better.

Of course it wouldn't make sense for a senior leader to shit his pants when a competitor announces a new product. But if I were Samsung I would expect a flank attack from Apple. Own the conversation and make it about your killer feature. 

Focus on something the 10,000 researchers of your competitor didn't care about.

Something which Steve Ballmer also found out the hard way.

Honesty over trickery

I had put off the mention of stealth marketing as not really cost effective.

Turns out that Martin Lindstrom did a very similar experiment for his new book, Brandwashed. With a budget of $3 million dollars and a professionally casted family they repeated the experiment. I didn't get around to reading his book yet but apparently the family did manage to influence a significant number of friends to buy products. While having no idea of the true objectives of the family.

Martin Lindstrom thinks that we can expect companies applying the stealth marketing strategies from his experiment more and more in the future. But he also argues that brands should become more transparent and honest than ever, if they want to survive in our hyper-connected world where consumers can reveal any dirty marketing that is played on them or broken promise with a simple mouse-click. Authenticity and transparency are key values for companies that want to apply the power of word-of-mouth in their advantage.

Source: Insites blog

Honesty over trickery. Or that's at least what it should be!

Dodge spam filters with a single address

Email campaigns and the spam filters aren't good friends.

If you send a campaign to a fresh list of subscribers, dodging the spam filters is the first hurdle.

Like real people, email providers love good content that is well written, preferably without mentions of Viagra or Nigerian gold mines. A valid From address, and a subject line also help.

The actual deliverability of your email campaign also depends how much trust you have built up with the various email providers. Sending from a dedicated IP address can increase your chances. (If you use services such as Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor you are safe, they will take care of this for you)

If you do get your email campaign past the spam filters and into the inbox of your subscribers, you face the second hurdle: the email client. By default, most clients block the images in your message. They need to explicitly confirm to see your images.

It's a long road with plenty of pitfalls. And you need to go through this process whenever you send from a new email address.

I discovered that Econsultancy uses a neat and very simple trick to make sure they only have to go once through this process. They use only a single email addresses.    

Newsletters, event announcements and CEO chatter were all sent from the same address.

So take a look at how many email addresses you are sending from. Could you use one email campaign address? The less addresses you use the more you'll steer clear from the spam filters.

Got other email campaign tricks? Please share them in the comments!

Rebranding Greece

Greece is in shambles. Greeks are lazy and crooked people.

That's the reputation of the country and it's people for many foreigners. To break this negative spiral, Greece needs a change.

Branding expert Peter Economides blaims it on a lack of storytelling. Although there is plenty of holiday promotion, there is no branding, a real narrative that combines Greece's past, present and future.

An interesting view on how some of Greece's experts are on trying to get out of this mess.

An expensive form of affiliate marketing

I do not make fun of a lot of things on this blog. But recently I crossed paths with a movie called The Joneses. I had to say something about it!

The movie describes an approach they call stealth marketing, which works as follows.

There is a new family in town. They live in an ultra-rich gated community. Mother, father, son and daughter are all beautiful, popular and equipped with the latest gadgets. The idea is to show off as much gear as possible to influence their neighbours to buy the same.

After explaining this concept, the movie takes the love story angle which we will ignore.

Let's see how effective this marketing approach is.

The costs, assuming the family gets all the products on a free loan bases. 

• Five expensive Audi's
• Rental of a luxury house
• All expenses to live a lifestyle like that
• Big salary for the four family members
• Money for document forgeries
• The whole company behind it

Then I ask myself: how many golf clubs, cell phones, new sweaters or even Audi R8's do you need to sell to cover that?

For those that want to laugh for themselves, or just see Demi Moore, check out the trailer.