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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