The Five Stages of Marketing
Posted by: admin in marketing, tags: Corel, Designer, Jack Nicholson, Micrografx[Note: this is an expanded that originally appeared on Captain Digital Speaks! from 2005.]
There’s an old saw in show business about the five stages of an actor’s career. It goes something like this:
Marketing is a lot like that. I once worked for Micrografx as their creative director. Out of the blue a company out of Canada started running ads that offered a competitive product to our flagship release (Designer). Our software engineer’s response: “Who is Corel?”
Corel’s product launched and the trade press responded favorably. All of a sudden, it was no longer “Micrografx Designer and it’s competitors,” but Micrografx Designer and newcomer Corel Draw!.
After our design team failed to take Corel seriously, the press started saying “Micrografx Designer and Corel Draw!” and shortly “Corel Draw! and Micrografx Designer.”
As Micrografx Designer showed it’s age – and a new version was slow in coming, we heard “Corel Draw, and other applications like Micrografx Designer.”
Eventually, Corel bought all of Micrografx. Designer lives on – sort of – as an obscure product of Corel’s. Why did this happen? Simple. Micrografx failed to take the competition seriously. They bought off on their own PR, and believed that “nobody knows more about writing Windows graphics apps than we do.” Whoops.
So how can you stop your own market from being taken over by a faster, more energetic competitor? The first thing to note is that there’s no time, especially in this day and age, to rest on your laurels. If you have a static target, it may be easy to hit, but also easy to surpass – which is exactly what your competitors will do. Here are some thoughts:
- If you are the market leader, you must make certain your product is flawless (first, please!) and then innovate, innovate, and innovate some more. Think outside the box – if there’s something obvious you’ve left out, rest assured, your competition is on it. You need to think about how to make your product the best of the best, by several orders of magnitude.
- If you’re the number two product, think about why. Is your competitor bigger? Have more money? Have a better product? Are they more well-known? If the answer to any of these questions is “yes,” then the answer is to out-innovate them. Come up with a feature they don’t have, and market the Hell out of it. Use guerrilla marketing tactics to snipe them where they are weak. Be faster, smarter, more agile.
- If you’re back in the pack, focus on one feature that makes you unique. Frankly, if you’re “Bob’s Cola,” you’re not likely to be more than a gnat in Coca-Cola’s field of view, unless…you exploit one of their weaknesses and do it well enough to score some market share. For instance, Jones Soda did it by emphasizing that they use only pure cane sugar (as opposed to corn syrup) and have a variety of innovative flavors (although I’ve yet to be brave enough to try “Turkey & Dressing Soda”).
Nobody likes to think their product could be caught and surpassed by a competitor. It happens. Don’t like it? Live your marketing life as if the devil’s nipping at your heels and the only way to survive is to act as if your survival depends upon winning. Because it does. Every day.
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The reality is that Micrografx did know better than all the rest how to write Windows graphics software. Maybe your marketing guys did not do their job properly. 8 years after its release, Designer 9 performs much better on my Vista machine (with some creative installation maneuvers) than the most recent release of Designer from Corel (Designer X4). Have your tried pasting from the clipboard into Designer X4? Except for the simplest objects, you will get garbage. After being disappointed greatly by Designer 10, 12, and now X4, I have promised myself that I will no longer support this product from Corel. What is the point? I still revert to Designer 9 and will continue to do so until it completely stops functioning on newer Windows operating systems. It is really too bad; Micrografx Designer truly was a wonderful product. Its intuitive features and functionalities I believe are unmatched by most other graphics programs out there. Sure, now out of date, maybe it does not have the latest cool features, but it still gets plenty of use on my machine. I would do anything to have a true new version of Designer. I would even settle for getting my hands on the source code
but I know that is not going to happen!!!
There's way more to this than you might realize. Designer 1.0 (and it's forerunner, In*A*Vision) were really nothing more than an app that surfaced the Windows Graphic Design Interface (GDI). Starting with Designer 3.0, the app became a much more robust design tool. I was at Micrografx from 87 through 92. I saw Designer go from a relatively crude tool to a then-state of the art design tool.
Internally, there were huge debates over the direction of the application. I ran Creative Services – the in-house ad agency for the company. As such, we were both employees and users. We would go to the developers and say “we want Designer to do ______” and they would usually tell us why we were crazy and why it was impossible to do what we wanted. When we complained that if you took a drawing and stretched and scaled it several times it would lose accuracy, the response was “well…don't do that.” Frustrating. Eventually, Corel released their Corel DRAW! application, and it did all the things Designer didn't (that we'd requested). The response from the developers? They claimed that the Corel code was poorly written kludges – not worth of Micrografx.
The sad part was that Designer WAS a vastly superior tool, with better features (and better code), than Corel. The turning point was when the company pre-announced Designer 4.0 – and then slipped the delivery date. That torpedoed sales and triggered massive layoffs. After I left, the company lost more focus, getting into kids software (Crayola, Hallmark Card Studio, etc.) and eventually sold out to Corel. I'm not sure why Corel bought Micrografx. I expected them to either subsume Designer into Corel, or keep Designer for “technical drawing” and position Corel DRAW as more of a entry-level drawing tool. They did neither.
I've been through this orphaned tool problem twice now – first with Designer, and second with FreeHand. Both of them are superior to their direct competition (Corel and Illustrator, respectively), but both are evidently doomed to play “Betamax” to the competitors “VHS.” Frankly, I wish that both Corel and Adobe would release the orphaned product's source code into the wild, maybe under the Creative Commons license, and see if the open source crowd would be interested in updating the apps. You're right…it will never happen – but a guy can dream…
I very much appreciate you sharing this inside information. Looking from the outside, it is hard to imagine how such a good product can fail. I am sad that this is the case. Like you, I dream of the day that the source code will be released. I am sure the open source people wil be willing to further develop it. Until then, good luck with all of your future endeavors.
The reality is that Micrografx did know better than all the rest how to write Windows graphics software. Maybe your marketing guys did not do their job properly. 8 years after its release, Designer 9 performs much better on my Vista machine (with some creative installation maneuvers) than the most recent release of Designer from Corel (Designer X4). Have your tried pasting from the clipboard into Designer X4? Except for the simplest objects, you will get garbage. After being disappointed greatly by Designer 10, 12, and now X4, I have promised myself that I will no longer support this product from Corel. What is the point? I still revert to Designer 9 and will continue to do so until it completely stops functioning on newer Windows operating systems. It is really too bad; Micrografx Designer truly was a wonderful product. Its intuitive features and functionalities I believe are unmatched by most other graphics programs out there. Sure, now out of date, maybe it does not have the latest cool features, but it still gets plenty of use on my machine. I would do anything to have a true new version of Designer. I would even settle for getting my hands on the source code
but I know that is not going to happen!!!
There's way more to this than you might realize. Designer 1.0 (and it's forerunner, In*A*Vision) were really nothing more than an app that surfaced the Windows Graphic Design Interface (GDI). Starting with Designer 3.0, the app became a much more robust design tool. I was at Micrografx from 87 through 92. I saw Designer go from a relatively crude tool to a then-state of the art design tool.
Internally, there were huge debates over the direction of the application. I ran Creative Services – the in-house ad agency for the company. As such, we were both employees and users. We would go to the developers and say “we want Designer to do ______” and they would usually tell us why we were crazy and why it was impossible to do what we wanted. When we complained that if you took a drawing and stretched and scaled it several times it would lose accuracy, the response was “well…don't do that.” Frustrating. Eventually, Corel released their Corel DRAW! application, and it did all the things Designer didn't (that we'd requested). The response from the developers? They claimed that the Corel code was poorly written kludges – not worth of Micrografx.
The sad part was that Designer WAS a vastly superior tool, with better features (and better code), than Corel. The turning point was when the company pre-announced Designer 4.0 – and then slipped the delivery date. That torpedoed sales and triggered massive layoffs. After I left, the company lost more focus, getting into kids software (Crayola, Hallmark Card Studio, etc.) and eventually sold out to Corel. I'm not sure why Corel bought Micrografx. I expected them to either subsume Designer into Corel, or keep Designer for “technical drawing” and position Corel DRAW as more of a entry-level drawing tool. They did neither.
I've been through this orphaned tool problem twice now – first with Designer, and second with FreeHand. Both of them are superior to their direct competition (Corel and Illustrator, respectively), but both are evidently doomed to play “Betamax” to the competitors “VHS.” Frankly, I wish that both Corel and Adobe would release the orphaned product's source code into the wild, maybe under the Creative Commons license, and see if the open source crowd would be interested in updating the apps. You're right…it will never happen – but a guy can dream…
I very much appreciate you sharing this inside information. Looking from the outside, it is hard to imagine how such a good product can fail. I am sad that this is the case. Like you, I dream of the day that the source code will be released. I am sure the open source people wil be willing to further develop it. Until then, good luck with all of your future endeavors.