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Just because you are a boutique doesn't mean the big boys can push your products around…

So there you are, a happy product manager creating and delivering products that meet your customer’s needs. All of a sudden (but you should have seen it coming) a big box competitor with tons of selection and low, low prices shows up in your backyard. Oh, oh – what’s a product manager to do now? It turns out that we can learn some lessons from the world of women’s fashion. Boutiques have been dealing with this very situation for awhile and they have a thing or two to teach us…

How Boutique’s Stand Out From The Crowd

So you’ve got to picture the scene: there you are, a hard working luxury boutique who’s just found out that a much large competitor has moved into town. As though having the extra competition wasn’t bad enough, it turns out that they are going to be able to offer things that you can’t.

What can they do that you can’t? Basically a lot of product related things that are associated with having deep pockets: brand selections and generous return policies. Oops, I almost forgot to mention that both of you have another competitor: online retailers who always seem to be able to sell for less than you can. This is exactly the kind of thing that can cause an account manager or a business development manager to start to tear their hair out. However, product managers need to play it cool.

This brings up the interesting point product manager: how can you make your store / product stand out from the crowd that does a lot of things better than you will ever be able to do? Christina Binkley has been looking into this and she’s found out that some strategic management is called for here. The first thing that you need to learn from the luxury boutiques is that your customers have grown resigned to living in a world where everyone is treated the same. It’s not that your competition is going to treat your customers badly (sorry, nothing is ever that easy), but rather it’s that they are going to treat them like they treat everyone else – just good enough.

This open the door for you. If you can take your customer care up not one, but several notches than all of a sudden doing business with your boutique is going to be an experience, not just a purchase. You’re going to want to offer your customer not only perks that they can only get with your product, but also a level of personal service that they can’t get anywhere else. Now that’s something that you can put on your product manager resume!

How To Attract And Hold Onto Customers

Getting a customer is great, finding ways to hold on to that customer is fantastic! How are you going to do that? One way is to remain in frequent and direct contact with your customers. This allows you to find ways to offer perks that no other supplier can offer your clients.

One way to hold on to your customer is to reshape your product for your customer. If you are running a luxury boutique, then this means custom tailoring garments to fit your customers perfectly. It also means coming to where your customers are located (instead of making them come to you) in order to do the product customization for them.

Ultimately, your ability to hold on to customers once you’ve got them is going to come down to your personal knowledge of your customers. Once you have this level of knowledge, you can always be thinking of your customers and you’ll be able to identify ways to solve their problems that they may not have even thought of. When you’re able to do this, then you’ll have gotten a customer for life!

What All Of This Means For You

In a perfect world, your product would have no competition. The reality that all product managers face (turns out that it was listed in your product manager job description) is that not only does your product face competition, but it can face a competitor that is much bigger and better equipped than you are.

Luxury boutiques have faced this competitive situation for a long time and product managers can learn a great deal from how they have adapted to it. Boutiques work very hard to stand out from the competition. Frequent and constant direct contact with customers is one way to do this. This also allows boutiques to offer perks that larger competitors can’t match. Once they have a customer, boutiques hold on to them by using their personal knowledge to better meet their unique needs.

As the world becomes a more complex place with more and more competition, product managers need to make sure that their products are the ones that customers look for. Luxury boutiques can show us how to do this and not only allow our products to survive, but to grow and thrive.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that there is a limit to the number of customers that you can support using luxury boutique techniques?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

When I was first out living on my own, the arrival of the latest copy of the yellow (and white) pages was a big deal. Since my parents had always received these huge volumes, when I got mine I felt that somehow I was now a “grown up”. Fast forward to the 21st Century and man have things changed. There still are Yellow Pages®, but is it possible that owning this product is the worst product management job ever?

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The Future Is Coming, Are You Ready Product Manager?

Product managers rule the world. That means that we need to show the rest of the company what they need to be doing in order to make sure that our product is going to be a success. Over at BMW they’ve got a bit of a problem on their hands and their product managers are stepping up to deal with it. Perhaps we could all learn a thing or two from the company that makes “the ultimate driving machine”…

The Problem: Your Product Is Going Away

Product managers realize that no product is going to live forever despite what the rest of the company may believe. Since each product has its own individual lifecycle, that means that we always have to be preparing for what comes next. Over at the automobile maker BMW, their product managers are in the process of doing this right now.

BMW makes fantastic high-end cars. Their advertising tag line is “the ultimate driving machine” and their product prices match it. However, all of their current products suffer from the same handicap: they burn gasoline. As the global supply of gasoline starts to decrease and the price per gallon goes up, this is becoming a big deal.

BMW cars are able to command a higher price because they are seen as being able to deliver high performance. Unfortunately one of the ways that they get this high performance is by burning a lot of gasoline. The BMW product managers understand that they have a problem on their hands and they are already starting to take steps to solve it.

The Solution: Not Quite Ready Yet

When it comes to gasoline burning cars, everyone knows what the answer is. The future belongs to cars that will be powered by electricity. This is all well and good; however, there are some problems with that vision of a gasoline-free automotive future.

The problem is that we can’t currently build electric cars that do everything that our gasoline powered cars do. This means that BMW’s potential future customers are going to have to change their driving habits in order to be able to use the electric cars that BMW will produce and sell starting in a couple of years.

This places BMW’s product managers in a bind. They need to start to promote their all electric car now without causing a decrease in sales of the gasoline burning cars that they are currently offering. Sounds like a product manager challenge…

The Plan: Prepare Your Customer For Tomorrow Today

There is no one “silver bullet” way to accomplish what BMW is trying to do. Instead, they are trying multiple approaches at the same time. Exactly which one will work is not clear, but the answer is probably that different efforts will reach different people.

One clever tactic is the creation of an “app” called BMW EVolve. This application for mobile devices allows potential future BMW electric car customers to track how they get around today and then compares that to how they would get around if they had an electric car. The primary purpose is to help customers get over what is called “range anxiety” in which they fear that an electric vehicle’s charge would leave them stranded somewhere. Additionally, the app tells the user how much they would have saved during the day in potential fuel costs.

BMW is taking other steps to build a buzz around its forthcoming i3 all-electric vehicle. These steps include heavy use of social media where they can get in contact with electric car boosters and the creation of videos that allow famous people to talk about the coming revolution in electric cars. Even though the future is not here yet, the BMW product managers are busy trying to prepare their future customers for it today.

What All Of This Means For You

As product managers we need to step up and show the company how to handle difficult situations. When the products that have served the company so well for so long start to be overtaken by a fundamental market shift, it’s up to the product managers to show everyone what to do about it.

BMW makes high quality gasoline powered cars. The problem is that the future will be ruled by electric cars that nobody really understands today. The BMW product managers are starting right now to educate their customers about what that future is going to look like. Additionally, they have created apps and other outreach programs to teach their customers about how their lives are going to change when the future arrives.

Product managers like to talk about “end of life” and “cash cows” when it comes to winding a product line down. What’s much more important is how you launch the next generation of products on the backs of the products that you have today. BMW’s product managers are trying to do that and we can all learn a thing or two by watching how they go about doing it…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that the next generation of your product will mean that you’ll need to drop some of your current customers? How do you tell them to go away?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Have you heard about the Disney product vault? This is the place that they put their products every so often. What this means for their customers is that they had better buy their products now because once they go into the vault you don’t know when they’ll come back out. Is this a technique that we product managers can use to prevent our customers from going with the competition or is it an idea whose time has come and gone?

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Every Product Manager Wants It, And They Want It Right Now…

I’m willing to bet that if you got a bunch of product managers together and had them all sit in comfy chairs, lean back, close their eyes, and then you asked them what one thing in the world they most wanted at that moment, they would all tell you the same thing: real time marketing data. Well, ok, maybe not all of them. But there would probably be one of them who would say this (the rest would have fallen asleep because they are all overworked). Just what the heck is this “real time marketing data” stuff?

What Is Real Time Marketing Data?

Sure we all think that we know what “real-time” means, but what would real-time marketing data really look like? Ultimately, this is the type of data that allows a product manager to make a quick turnaround on customer leads no matter how they show up.

The smart folks over at MIT have recently completed a study that took a look at how quickly customers want a company that they’ve contacted to get back in touch with them. It turns out that a product manager can boost the odds of turning a web-based contact from just being interested into being a potential customer by 21x if they respond to the inquiry within 5 minutes as opposed to taking 30 minutes.

The key here is that it’s not just sending a response back to an interested party – or even picking up the phone to talk to them quickly. Nope, you’ve got to do more. What you have to do is to find ways to actually strike up a conversation with them that they will find meaningful. In person this may be easy to do, via the web or over the phone it can be much more challenging.

How Can Product Managers Use Real Time Marketing Data?

All of this real-time response stuff means that product managers are going to need real-time data in order to pull it off. This means that you are going to have to turn to one of the many real-time data software packages that currently exist.

These types of tools can provide you with a lot of background when someone contacts you via the web. This information can include how they got to your web site, what they looked at while they were there, etc.

The availability of real-time marketing data holds another benefit for product managers also. When you are running a marketing campaign to support a new product launch or promotion, you’d really like to know how things are going.

In the olden days, you’d take the time to try to get everything just “perfect” before starting the campaign and then you’d just have to sit back and keep your fingers crossed and hope that everything went well.

Here in the 21st Century, the availability of real-time marketing data has changed all of this. Now you can monitor what’s going on and get constant feedback from the market as to how your campaign is being received. What this means is that you no longer have to get everything correct before you start a campaign – instead you can make adjustments as the campaign unfolds.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers are busy people; however, they need to realize that their customers are busy people also. When a customer reaches out to you, a product manager needs to have set up a system that allows the company to quickly respond to the customer’s request.

Thankfully modern real-time data software solutions allow a firm to monitor all of the different ways that customers can contact them. This allows product managers to monitor how marketing campaigns are going and even allows them to make real-time adjustments to their product marketing strategy.

The world continues to move faster. This means that product managers not only have to keep up, but we also have to learn how to stay on top of what our customers want. The tools that can provide us with real-time data now allow us to dynamically react to changing market circumstances. “Real-time” has become the two words that every product manager loves to hear…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that the product manager should be responsible to responding to customer questions or should another part of the company do this?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Every product that you are put in charge of developing comes with an unwelcome addition – risk. We all know that risk exists and in fact many of us have developed ways to identify risk, quantify risk, and even manage risk. However it turns out that there is something very important that very few of us have been doing – calculating how much risk a new product has and what it’s going to cost us.

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There Are A Lot Of Colors, Which Ones Should You Use?

Product Managers make decisions about colors all the time. Sometimes it has to do with a product logo, sometimes it has to do with the images that we use in a product brochure. The problem, is that most of us have ever had any training in this whole color thing. What are the colors that we are using telling our customers?

Colors Are A Big Deal

Unless you are a graphics artist, you probably don’t spend much of your time each day thinking about colors. However, most of the company’s that want you to buy their products do. That’s why when you open a magazine, walk by a wall poster, or even when you walk into a department store you get bombarded by a whole array of colors that are designed to communicate a message to you.

Now I’m not saying that there is some sort of secret “color language” going on here. Rather, due to our upbringing both you and your customers have a certain association with colors – different colors have different meaning to you. As Product Managers this means that by picking the right colors, we can make sure that our customers perceive our products the way that we want them to.

What The Colors Really Mean

Cynthia Cornell, a color researcher, at Color Communications points out that certain colors provoke a common response in people. This means that we need to understand what a given color will be telling our customers before we use it. Here is a list of the most common colors and what they mean:

• Blue-Based Reds: These colors are associated with products that are more expensive. Think of raspberry red cars and bed linens.

• Orange: is associated with products that are affordable.

• Yellow: has less of a meaning and is more of communication tool. Because of how we humans are built, yellow is the first color that our eye will pick up. This means that when we use yellow with dark colors (yellow text on a black background), the contrast is powerful and is easily read by your customers.

• Green: is associated with both possibility and hope. Additionally, in recent years green has become associated with environmentally sensitive products.

• Blue: is associated with both safety and confidence. Product managers who are responsible for health care or financial products often associate their products with this color.

• Purple: is another one of those colors that has no clear association with it. Since it has no known association, we see it used with multiple types of products from chocolate to high fashion.

• Black: has always been associated with a concept of power (think of the American Express Black Card that Hollywood types carry with them). If you want to boost the power of black even more, then add a matte or sheen to it when you use it.

• White: tells your customers that your product comes with a higher end price, but also that it is both sophisticated and formal.

What All Of This Means For You

So there you have it, finally you understand just how powerful the colors that you choose to use with your product are. No, this isn’t the same thing as getting an art degree, but at least now you know that all colors are not created equal.

Product managers need to understand that their products do speak to customers. What colors you use with your product messages can have a profound impact on how this conversation goes. Now that you can speak the language of colors, go out there and make sure that your product is saying what you want it to say!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that you can confuse customers if you use too many colors with your product?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

I’m willing to bet that if you got a bunch of product managers together and had them all sit in comfy chairs, lean back, close their eyes, and then you asked them what one thing in the world they most wanted at that moment, they would all tell you the same thing: real time marketing data. Well, ok, maybe not all of them. But there would probably be one of them who would say this (the rest would have fallen asleep because they are all overworked). Just what the heck is this “real time marketing data” stuff?

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Free Sample Anyone?

The secret to true product manager success is to get more people to buy your product. Giving it away for free sure seems like a great way to get this to happen – but you probably won’t keep your job for long. Maybe there’s another way. Could rediscovering the lost art of using free samples be something that product managers should rediscover?

Why Should You Bother With Samples?

In order for your product to be a commercial success, it’s going to need to distinguish itself from the competition somehow. It turns out that if you offer your potential customers free samples, this can make your product hard to ignore.

A company called Opinion Research Corp. recently did a study of how effective free samples were. What they found was that 61% of customers said that free sampling was the most effective way to try a new product. 81% reported that they would try a product after they received a free sample.

Note that the idea of offering a free sample applies to both traditional “hard” goods that you can place in a customer’s hands as well as for services that you can allow them to use at no cost for a period of time.

The best part of this is that if you decide to offer free samples of your product, you won’t have to work that hard to find customers. It turns out that customers have been conditioned to actively seek out samples – they’ll find you!

The Key To Successful Sampling

Of course, just handing out free sample of your product is not enough. You need to make this part of a larger marketing plan. The advertising that is done for your product needs to drive potential customers to a location, such as your product’s web site, where they can request that a sample be sent to them.

Depending on the type of product that you are managing, you may want to provide it to your customers in their homes. When your customers receive a free sample of your product in their home they have an opportunity to experience it in a comfortable and convenient environment.

Not every customer is a good candidate for a free sample. You’ll want to focus on making this offer to that group of consumers who are the best match to actually selecting and using your product.

Finally, giving your product away is a good way to generate interest in your product. However, it’s going to be important that you track the results of your sample program so that you can make adjustments along the way. The ultimate goal is to make as many of your free samples convert into paying customers as possible.

What All Of This Means For You

Product managers are once again rediscovering ways to make their products stand out from all of the other products out there. Giving away free samples of their products turns out to be a highly effective way to make this happen.

Customers have shown that they actively seek out free samples of products. They’ve also shown that a free sample will cause them to try a brand. The key is to make sure that you offer your samples to those customers who are most likely to end up buying your product.

Product managers know that it’s not just enough to have the best product out there. We need to go the extra mile and make it easy for our customers to try our products. Free samples need to once again be an option that we consider in order to connect with the customers that we most want to buy our products.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: For how long do you think that you should offer your customers a chance to try a free sample of your product?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Product Managers make decisions about colors all the time. Sometimes it has to do with a product logo, sometimes it has to do with the images that we use in a product brochure. The problem, is that most of us have ever had any training in this whole color thing. What are the colors that we are using telling our customers?

Colors Are A Big Deal

Unless you are a graphics artist, you probably don’t spend much of your time each day thinking about colors. However, most of the company’s that want you to buy their products do. That’s why when you open a magazine, walk by a wall poster, or even when you walk into a department store you get bombarded by a whole array of colors that are designed to communicate a message to you.

Now I’m not saying that there is some sort of secret “color language” going on here. Rather, due to our upbringing both you and your customers have a certain association with colors – different colors have different meaning to you. As Product Managers this means that by picking the right colors, we can make sure that our customers perceive our products the way that we want them to.

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Hand-To-Hand Combat Can Show Product Managers How To Market Products

Product pricing? How boring. Working with development teams? Yawn. Mixed Martial Arts fighting inside of an 18′ chain-link fence — bring it on! I recently had a chance to watch the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s (UFC) broadcast of UFC 128 – a pay-for-view fight between 10 different men. In the end, I had seen a lot of punches, kicks, blood, and important lessons about product management. Do I have your attention now?

What Is the UFC?

The Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is an organization that stages fights between mixed-martial arts fighters. Two men enter an octagonal ring that is enclosed in chain-link fencing and then proceed to kick and punch each other until either 3 rounds of 3 minutes is up, one of the two fighters “taps out”, or the referee calls the fight.

These fights quickly turn into a bloody mess. Unlike the sport of boxing, UFC matches allow for powerful kicking and that changes everything. A strong kick delivered to the side of an opponent’s head can quickly end a match

The event that I watched, UFC 128, consisted of 5 separate bouts with the final bout of the evening being between two major UFC stars: Shogun vs. Jones.

Advertise Everywhere

The fight fan in me was up for watching some serious physical confrontations. The product manager was just in awe of how well the whole event was being executed. The UFC product managers find themselves in a tricky spot: their product is a one-shot deal (fight night) , they need to make the most of that 3-hour event. They don’t get second chances.

The fight takes place in an octagon shaped ring. What this means is that unlike as in boxing, the fighters don’t really have their own “corner”. Instead, they stand along one side of the fence before the match starts.

What caught my eye was that as the fighter entered the ring, his support team would crawl up the outside of the fence and drape a banner over the inside of the fence. As it unfurled, you could see that the banner was packed with the logos of various products. The end result was that during the 2-5 minutes that each fighter was in the ring before the match started they were almost constantly being filmed and the logos on the poster filled every TV screen in the bar that I was in.

Just to take this idea one step further, the fighters themselves are also walking billboards. You don’t wear a lot of clothes while you are doing this kind of fighting. What you do wear are fighter’s shorts. On the shorts of all of the fighters this evening were logos and brand names for various companies and products. As long as the fight was going on, those brands were out there doing their work.

Always Be Upselling

I said that the UFC product managers had to move quickly because their product only exists for a short time (during the broadcast). One of the things that the product managers needed to do was to sell as much of their next product as they could. In this case, the UFC product managers wanted to sell pay-per-view subscriptions to their next broadcast: UFC 129: St-Pierre vs. Shields.

What this meant for the viewers was that during the evening we were constantly bombarded with ads for the upcoming fight. What caught my eye was that the frequency of these ads picked up as we got further into the evening. Clearly what the UFC product managers wanted to do was to capture the excitement and anticipation that we were feeling and to try to associate that with their next fight.

I don’t think that the expectation was that very many people would sign-up to watch the next fight during this event. Rather, what I think that the UFC product managers were trying to do was to condition the viewers to respond to their advertising message when they started to push it in earnest. We’d take our positive association with it and open our wallets and make a call to sign up for the next broadcast.

Lead Up To The Big Payoff

Whenever you have a broadcast fight like this you need to make sure that your customers feel as though they are getting their money’s worth. To make this happen you can’t just start the show with your main event. Instead you have to work up to it.

Comedians have opening acts and in the case of this UFC broadcast there were 4 bouts before the main event. Each one of these events offered fighters that were just a little bit better known than the ones who came before.

This building of excitement for the final match is done on purpose for the UFC event. A pay-per-view event like this can cost upwards of $200 to watch. It is very important that the people who pay this kind of money end up feeling as though they got their money’s worth. This means that the excitement has to be built up as the final fight approaches.

The nature of this type of fighting is that that final fight might not last that long – somebody might win very quickly. That means that the UFC product managers need to have made sure that the whole event lasted for several hours just so when their customers switch off the set they feel satisfied no matter how long the final event ended up taking.

Know Who Your Customer Is

Finally we come to what might be the most important point of all: the UFC product managers really need to know their customers. I now know this because it turns out that I didn’t know who their customers really were until I saw this fight.

You need to be able to picture the scene: I was in a crowed bar and the UFC fight was on something like 20 screens that were on all around me. The guys in the bar were watching the fights like guys do: somewhat reserved and wincing whenever a fighter got a good shot in. The women, however, were out of control. They were yelling at the screen, standing up on chairs to get a better view and shouting things like “Kick him! Kick him” whenever a fighter fell down.

Would I have guessed that the most rabid UFC fans would have been all of these beautiful, slightly drunk, well-dressed women? Nope. However, it turns out that they are. What this means for the UFC product managers is that they need to tone down the traditional male orientation of their broadcasts and make sure that they appeal to the fairer sex. That’s one of the reasons that things like “ring girls” are only given an occasional quick camera shot – it doesn’t appeal to the UFC’s hard-core customer base: women.

What All Of This Means For You

Where do we learn to be better product managers? I wish that I could say that there was some class, book, or certification that would magically give you all of the product management training that you need. I haven’t rolled my AccPM training out yet so for now no such thing exists.

Instead, we need to look all around us and keep our eyes open in order to learn. The UFC matches are one such place. The UFC product managers understand that they have a very special product that will only exist for a brief moment in time – they have to move fast. While they have your attention, they are always upselling, they are always building to something bigger and better and they have a very clear understanding of who their customer is.

It really doesn’t matter what you think of UFC fighting. What you need to understand is that this sport has shot from relative obscurity to become one of the most popular sports almost overnight. If you’d like your product to experience the same type of popularity, you had better start watching more UFC fights…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: If you were a UFC product manager, what would you do to expand your customer base?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

One of the reasons that we all became product managers is that we were attracted to the field because it is always changing. Part of this change is that new marketing techniques are always showing up. Product managers are always attracted to shiny new ways to reach our customers. However, should we be? What’s the best way to tell potential customers about our products – the tried-and-true ways that we’ve always used or the brand-new ways that have just shown up?

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Why Becoming A Virtual Farmer Is So Important To Product Managers

It’s time for true confessions: you play one of those silly Facebook games don’t you? Pick your poison: Farmville, Fishville, Mafi Wars, etc. The company that makes these games, Zynga, currently boasts that they have over 100M users (and that’s just after 2 years). What can they teach the rest of us product managers?

Can A Product Manager Be Too Successful?

The product managers over at Zynga have a little problem on their hands: they are being overwhelmed with success. The company is well on its way to making $835M in revenue this year (note that that’s just $165M away from making one billion dollars!) and their games have over 211 million users each month.

The company has a very clear goal. It’s founder, Mark Pincus, has stated that he’s in the business of creating an Internet Icon (can you say “Google / Ebay / Amazon / Yahoo”?) but he wants his to be synonymous with fun.

How Do They Make All That Money?

So the big question here is just exactly what is Zynga’s product managers selling? Or maybe a better question is, what aren’t they selling? It turns out that all of their games are available to Facebook users to play for free. Yep, that’s right – they’re pulling in $835M by offering the world free online games.

The way that Zynga makes its money is by having some of its users pay them real money for “virtual goods”. These goods, which vary by game, allow the user to advance a level or can be given to the player’s friends who are also playing the game. Think along the lines of buying that yellow tractor ($3.50) that you’ve always wanted for your farm in Farmville. Oh, and you may as well buy a red one for mom while you are at it since she plays the game also (another $3.50).

Problems In Paradise

Although the products that Zynga’s product managers have rolled out are very successful, there have been issues. One of the secrets to Zynga’s explosive success has to do with the fact that their games were designed to inform all of a player’s friends when the player completed some action. This accomplished two things: it let other Facebook users know that the game existed and it gave the game the apparent stamp of approval from the user who had caused the message to be sent.

You can well imagine just how annoying all of these updates became as more and more people started to play these games. After awhile it became so bad that Facebook had to step in and ended up restricting the messages. The natural effect of this restriction is that Zynga’s traffic fell sharply.

Bad Ads

Another way that Zynga makes money is by allowing advertisers to display ads in their games. They got into trouble awhile back because apparently some of the advertisers who were participating in the program were scam artists who were tricking players into signing up for costly subscription services. Zynga says that they’ve kicked all of these people out of the program now.

When You’re Married, The Wife Is Always Right…

Another challenge that Zynga’s product managers have to deal with is the simple fact that their products live within the world of Facebook. They need to make sure that Facebook continues to be happy with them in order to ensure that their company can continue to survive and grow.

Recent issues such as a new way to pay for things called “Credits” within the Facebook world which allows Facebook to skim 30% of the proceeds off the top have strained the relationship.

What All Of This Means For You

The world that we live in continues to change at a breathtaking rate. Zynga has shown product managers everywhere that you can give your product away and still make a lot of money.

By following the 80/20 rule (or maybe it’s the 99/1 rule) , Zynga has gotten some of their customers to pay for all of their customers to play. Along the way they’ve run into several of the same problems that many startup online companies have encountered.

The product managers at Zynga have to find ways to build on their past successes. Now that other have seen how they’ve done it, competition will be coming quickly. The Zynga product managers had better find a way to create Profitville and do it quickly…!

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: Do you think that Zynga’s product managers should partner with companies besides Facebook?

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What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

Imagine for a moment that you were in the business of building walls. Every day you’d get up go build part of a wall and then go home. What if every day when you returned, all of the work that you had done the previous day had been undone? How would you ever get that wall built?

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Just Because You Have A Big Tail Doesn't Mean You Know How To Use It…

If you want to sell a lot of your product, where is the best place to try to sell it? Would it be better to go to a crowed market where there are lots of people but also lots of other product managers with similar products? Or would it be better to go into a dark alley where there are fewer people, but also fewer competing product managers? If you can answer this question, than you’ve got that “long tail” thing down cold…

The Way That Things Used To Be…

Back in the day (whenever that used to be), product managers used to only have to worry about having one product and then trying to get everyone to buy it. Sorta like Henry Ford and his “You can have your car in any color, as long as it’s black” type of thinking.

Then things started to change. Instead of only being able to buy blue jeans, now customers could get boot cut, stone washed, acid washed, vintage, etc. What’s interesting about this development is that not everyone wants boot cut jeans. However, the folks who do want them are willing to pay more for them…

Enter The Long Tail

A guy by the name of Chris Anderson (no relation) wrote a book called The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More in which he put forth a bold idea: maybe product managers could be more successful if they sold fewer products at higher prices…? At the time it sounded radical, but now it seems like everyone is trying to do it.

However, there are some problems with this approach. Specifically, it turns out that when you allow the market for your product to shrink this much, things can get very expensive very quickly. Additionally, the long tail approach to marketing your product doesn’t work for every product (a commodity really is a commodity).

The Long Tail’s Best Friend: The Internet

If you do have a product that is a good fit for long tail marketing, then you’re going to need a way to get the word out about it. Say hello to your new best friend: Mr. Internet.

Your ultimate goal here is to be able to define a unique spot in the market for your product. You want to make sure that your potential customers view your product as being unique and unavailable from any other vendor.

This is where the Internet comes in. The way that your customers are going to learn about your product is generally by the time-honored method that works the best: word of mouth. This is how they are going to get over the general nervousness about buying your non-mass marketed product.

As long as they can find out about your product online they’ll come to you. If you do a good job of making sure that you have testimonials and that they can find reviews of your product by other people who have bought it, then they will feel confidant in buying it themselves.

What All Of This Means For You

Long tail marketing is here to stay – it’s got a cool name and so of course we’ll be keeping it around. What you need to do as a product manager is to determine if it is the right marketing solution for your product.

If it is, then you’re going to have to find ways to leverage the Internet in order to help your potential customers not only find out about your product, but also become comfortable purchasing it. Since you’ll now be dealing with a much smaller market, word of mouth will become very important to your product’s success.

The long tail can be scary for a product manager – I mean who wants to create a smaller market for their product? However, if you do it correctly, then you’ll discover that your customers are willing to pay top dollar for your product and that’s enough to make any product manager happy…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What types of products do you thing are well situated for long tail marketing?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

If your product is illegal and you do a really good job of marketing it, then you’re going to be going to jail…

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Could Product Shortages Make Your Customers Not Like Your Hot Product?

Way back when you were just a green product manager and you were still learning the marketing ropes, I’m going to bet that someone once upon a time sat you down and told you that sometimes when there is not enough of your hot product to meet customer’s demand, this can be a good thing. Well, it turns out that they were wrong and I’m going to tell you why…

I Love You / I Hate You

We seem to hate what we most desire. Uzma Khan teaches marketing at Stanford and she’s been doing some very interesting research into how our customers behave when they can’t have what they want. The results just might surprise you.

In some very carefully controlled experiments, the researchers set up some situations where people desired a product but couldn’t get it because it was unavailable. Later on they were finally able to get it. What the researchers found out was that there’s a big difference between wanting and liking something.

What’s Wrong With Not Being Available

It turns out that although our customers may be filled with both desire for our hot product and they may think that they like it, these two emotions are completely separate. However, the researchers have found out that they are related: the more that we really want something, the greater the probability that once we get it, we’re not going to like it.

One of the reasons for this is that our very desire for the thing has been artificially pumped up. Simply because we couldn’t get our hands on it, we wanted it more and more. However, the downside to this desire is that the more that we wanted it, then once we had it the less we liked it.

The (Reverse) Power Of A Strategic Shortage

So now we swing back around to the world of product management. I must confess that on more than one occasion I’ve been in a position where I could cause a “strategic shortage” to occur for one of my products and I’ve been tempted to do it. Customer complaints that they really want my product but can’t find it anywhere are like music to a product manager’s ears.

Based on the research that Dr. Khan’s team has done, it’s not pretty clear that this strategic shortage scheme is a dangerous tool. It can quickly and easily backfire on you in the form of increased returns and a drop off in repeat purchases. Are you willing to sacrifice your product’s future for a bit of a sales bump up right now?

What All Of This Means For You

So what’s a product manager to do when you really do have a hot product shortage? You can almost feel your future customer’s product lust increasing and yet even though you know how dangerous this is, there’s nothing that you can do about it.

Good product managers realize the danger of a situation like this for their products and they take action. They set up clear channels of communication to their future customers in order to make sure that they know when the product is going to be available to them. At the same time they look for ways to boost their customer’s satisfaction with the product once they get it. This can include such things as including a free give-away, or even boosting your company’s ability to deliver world-class customer support to new customers.

No matter how you go about doing it, a product manager needs to carefully manage the availability of their product. It’s great to be wanted by your future customers, but you are looking for a long-term relationship, not a one-night stand…

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Skills™

Question For You: What do you think the first thing that you should do if a shortage of your hot product develops?

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P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

What do most product managers do whenever their product sales start to decline? No matter if it’s because customers have lost interest or if it’s because a new competitor has just shown up, we all tend to do the same thing: slash our prices. In the new competitive global marketplace this doesn’t work any more. It’s time for some new thinking on how product managers deal with prices.

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What Will Your Product Marketing Be Wearing This Season?

Every year the global fashion industry rolls out new lines of fashions from famous designers. The world gathers at trendy fashion shows to gasp in amazement as they discover which designers have outdone themselves this year and which ones have gone off into the weeds.

Maybe it’s time for you to take a look at how you are telling the world about your product – are you keeping up with the latest trends or is your product looking like last year’s fashion failures?

Four Trends In Marketing

Just like everything else in this mad, mad world, marketing never stands still. Every company is facing the same set of challenges: everything seems to cost more to do this year, the environment and the role that our product plays in it (for good or for bad) is becoming more important, etc.

The key thing that any time-strapped product manager needs to be able to do is to find the hot areas of marketing that will help their products both grow in sales and be viewed by potential customers as being an innovative product. Here are four marketing areas that both you and your product are going to have to be on top of:

Targeting

All customers are not created equal and so product managers need to stop treating them that way. It turns out that by now we actually have a fair amount of information on our customers: we know what they do for a living, where they live, and what they’ve bought from us in the past.

Given that we know all of this about the people that we want to buy our products, then why do we still have generic product brochures? Why do we send out mass mailings (email and postal) that start out “Dear recipient”?

It’s time that we put all of this information to work. This is the year that we need to take the time to create highly personalized communication with our potential customers.

Measurement & Analysis

As product marketing budgets get tighter and tighter, every product manager is going to be under the gun to show that a marketing campaign is able to boost profits. This means that we’re going to have to start doing a better job of measuring our marketing programs.

It’s all too easy to do a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation and say “this is what the ROI (return on investment) will be”, but that’s not going to cut it any more. Instead product managers are going to have to take the time and figure out how much each step of your product’s marketing effort is going to cost. Then you’re going to have to come up with a way to determine which customers took action based on coming into contract with your marketing message.

Integration

Sure you use email to reach potential customers. You might even use postal mail, videos, and brochures that you hand out at meetings and trade show. But how well do these different channels work together?

With funds for marketing programs being in such short supply, it is now more critical than ever that each of the ways that you get in contact with your customer need to complement your other channels.

This goes farther than just having your company’s web address in small letters at the end of your product’s brochure. Instead, use the brochure to tell customers where they can find videos of your product in action. Use the web site to tell customers how they can order brochures. Make sure that you are telling the world one unified story about why they need your product.

Prospecting

Where will your next batch of customers be coming from? As the demographics of the people who buy our products start to change, we need to make sure that our product’s marketing messages change with them.

The baby boomers are starting to retire and their shoes will be filled by a mix of Gen-X and Gen-Y customers. Will the story that you’ve been telling about your product still resonate with them? Maybe it’s time to go back to the drawing board and create a new story that will work for them.

What All Of This Means For You

It’s all too easy for product managers to create some form of product marketing and then move on to other more pressing things without giving it another thought. The reality is that marketing messages, like fashion, go out of style and need to be refreshed.

When you go to refresh your product’s marketing message, you need to be aware of the four marketing trends that are currently happening: targeting, measurement and analysis, integration, and prospecting.

Product managers who are able to craft a marketing campaign that leverages these four areas and does a good job of telling their product’s story will be the ones who are hailed as the most fashionable product managers out there.

- Dr. Jim Anderson
Blue Elephant Consulting –
Your Source For Real World Product Management Help

Question For You: What do you think the best way to measure a product’s marketing ROI is?

Click here to get automatic updates when
The Accidental Product Manager Blog is updated.

P.S.: Free subscriptions to The Accidental Product Manager Newsletter are now available. It’s your product – it’s your career. Subscribe now: Click Here!

What We’ll Be Talking About Next Time

It’s sorta the Holy Grail of product management – to become so intimate with our customers that we can almost read their minds. Now while that may sound like a great idea, have any of us taken the time to consider what our customers might be thinking about us doing this?

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