– The unicorn Barbie
– Sequels v. One-Time Phenomenon v. Fresh New Material
– Bad Ads? Who’s to say?
– Complexity, the book Doug is writing
The OrionX editorial team manages the content on this website.
The Cart (cartoon) of the week is about mis-targeted ads despite all the data that online services have about their users. The challenges of Tupperware, the company that pioneered food storage containers, is next, and we end with a discussion of ethical marketing and a call for examples of successful and ethical marketing, as a counterbalance to too many stories where misbehavior is tolerated and even viewed as clever.
The OrionX editorial team manages the content on this website.
Doug points out a glaring gap in a report on advertising effectiveness, as we look for Product and Place in it! Next is customer references and testimonials in B2B and B2C and how to choreograph and manage them. Join us!
The OrionX editorial team manages the content on this website.
Shahin and Doug discuss the value add of retail stores versus direct-to-consumer options, whether or not personalization works, and the potential traps of using data in marketing. They also examine the use of television advertising by startups, and whether hesitancy to use TV ads is about money or a larger push away from the “old” way of doing things.
The OrionX editorial team manages the content on this website.
Episode 7 of the Marketing Podcast covers topics ranging from the usefulness of gadgets and “mean time to garage sale”, to advertising, marketing mix, and conversion factors in a funnel, and depth of knowledge.
The OrionX editorial team manages the content on this website.
Here at OrionX.net, our research agenda is driven by the latest developments in technology. We are also fortunate to work with many tech leaders in nearly every part of the “stack”, from chips to apps, who are driving the development of such technologies.
In recent years, we have had projects in Cryptocurrencies, IoT, AI, Cybersecurity, HPC, Cloud, Data Center, … and often a combination of them. Doing this for several years has given us a unique perspective. Our clients see value in our work since it helps them connect the dots better, impacts their investment decisions and the options they consider, and assists them in communicating their vision and strategies more effectively.
We wanted to bring that unique perspective and insight directly to you. “Simplifying the big ideas in technology” is how we’d like to think of it.
Thus was born our first podcast/slidecast series: The OrionX Download™
The OrionX Download is both a video slidecast (visuals but no talking heads) and an audio podcast in case you’d like to listen to it.
Every two weeks, co-hosts Dan Olds and Shahin Khan, and other OrionX analysts, discuss some of the latest and most important advances in technology. If our research has a specially interesting finding, we’ll invite guests to probe the subject and add their take.
Please give it a try and let us know what we can do better or if you have a specific question or topic that you’d like us to cover.
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.
“Just how big a market is this?” If you are an entrepreneur raising money or a seasoned product manager, or a CEO planning on an IPO, someone is going to ask you that question and you need to be well prepared with the answer. Market sizing is an important and common requirement. It is an especially challenging task when you are creating a new market or addressing emerging opportunities. This is why we created a packaged solution focused on market sizing.
Market sizing can be defined as the number of buyers of your product, or users of your service, and the price they are willing to pay to get them. Given the number of users and average solution pricing calculating the market size, growth and expected market share is now possible, for example.
The main purpose of market sizing is to inform business or product viability, specifically go/no-go decisions, as well as key marketing decisions, such as pricing of the service, resource planning, or marketing tactics to increase usage, together with an estimate of the level of operational and technological capabilities required to service the expected market.
There are two main market-sizing methods: bottom-up and top-down, each with unique benefits and challenges.
Organizations can draw on several sources for market sizing data. For example:
When doing market analysis, market sizing is frequently referred to as TAM, SAM, and SOM, acronyms that represents different subsets of a market. But what do they mean and why are they useful to investors or product development executives?
Depending on your company’s product or service calculating TAM, SAM and SOM will be very different. A hardware-based company may be constrained by geography because of the service and support requirement. Whereas, today’s software company does not have these same constraints as distribution is via the Internet and by default it is global. Similarly a startup is very different to an established company, XZY Widgets versus IBM for example.
Still confused about TAM SAM SOM? Here is an example.
Let’s say your company is a storage startup and planning to introduce a new storage widget. Your TAM would be the worldwide storage market. If your company had business operations in every country and there was no competition, then your revenue would be equivalent to the TAM, 100% market share — highly unlikely.
As a storage startup organization, it would be more realistic to focus on prospects within your city or state. Geographic proximity is an important consideration at this early stage as you have limited distribution and support capability, close proximity makes sense. This would be your SAM: the demand for your storage products within your reach. If you were the only storage provider in your state, then you would generate 100% of the revenue. Again, highly unlikely.
Realistically, you can hope to capture only part of the SAM. With a new storage product you would attract early adopters of your new widget within your selected geography. This is your SOM.
TAM SAM SOM have different purposes: SOM indicates the short-term sales potential, SOM / SAM the target market share, and TAM the potential at scale. These all play an important role in assessing the investment opportunity and the focus should really be on getting the most accurate numbers rather than the biggest possible numbers.
In-depth industry knowledge, logical analysis, and a command of business processes are some of the necessary ingredients used by OrionX to arrive at reliable market size projections based on available data. The analysis can then be customized for executive updates, due-diligence, the pricing process, market share objectives, or manufacturing capacity planning.
Steve brings a unique blend of expertise to the technology industry. He has held senior VP positions in sales & marketing for HPC and Enterprise vendors including Sun Microsystems and Hitachi. He’s also worked with early stage technology and Internet start-ups helping to raise over $300M for clients.
The TV series Mad Men was a smashing success, and it offered many teachable moments in marketing.
If you have not seen it, here is a quick intro: Mad Men (as in, Madison Ave men) is the story of an ad exec in the 50s-60s. The lead character is Don Draper who is a partner and the creative genius in a small but respected ad agency. His complex past, personality, and evolution form the main story line and are nicely mapped to the actual events of that period. His protege is Peggy Olson, competent and rising through the ranks while dealing with the even-tougher-than-now atmosphere for women in the workforce in those years.
There are 4 scenes throughout the 7 seasons and 92 episodes of the series that stood out for me as brilliant marketing. Each of the clips below offers several marketing lessons – story telling comes through over and over and you can see the absolute importance of mindset, the way success or failure is determined by how you see things – but I have highlighted one main aspect.
Season 1, Episode 1, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”
Client: Lucky Strike cigarettes
Setup: New regulations prevent cigarette makers from making any health claims which has been the focus of their advertising up to that point. The bosses of Lucky Strike, the owner and his son, are coming to hear new ideas. Despite working on all angles and even exploring then-new methods like psychological research, Don has nothing. His boss and the account manager are justifiably nervous. But then he sees it!
This is a great example of coming up with perceived differentiation in a competitive market with similar products.
Season 2, Episode 13, “The Wheel”
Prospect: Kodak
Setup: Kodak is looking for an ad agency for their new slide projection add-on which they call “the wheel” (or doughnut) and are having difficulty making it an exciting product. They are evaluating multiple agencies. This is their stop to hear what Don has to say. They have a meeting with another agency after this scene.
Recognizing the emotional content of the product is what draws the audience in but it requires a different better name for the product.
Season 2, Episode 4, “Three Sundays”
Prospect: American Airlines
Setup: AA had a plane crash in 1962 on the same day John Glenn had a ticker-tape parade in NYC, a few days after becoming the first US astronaut to orbit the Earth. Looking to re-establish their image, American Airlines is open to new ad agencies and Don has to come up with the right pitch. They’ve all been working many days and it is now the weekend before they present to the client. But Don has new clarity on how to see it and what they should do.
This is a very powerful example of formulating the right question and leveraging what else is going on in the world.
[The video doesn’t seem to be available anymore so I include the text of Don’s revelation. Imagine a floor full of people working on a weekend and Don throws open the door to his office, stops at the 1st table and without any introduction launches into this:
“American Airlines is not about the past any more than America is. Ask not about Cuba. Ask not about the bomb. We’re going to the moon. There is no such thing as American history, only a frontier. Let’s pretend we know what 1963 looks like.”
And he goes right back to his office, new direction having been given.
Season 7, Episode 7, “Waterloo”
Prospect: Burger Chef
Setup: The agency is presenting to a new prospect, Burger Chef, after weeks of field research and preparation. The presentation happens to be on the day after the 1st moon landing. Everyone was watching it the night before. Everyone is awed by it and is talking about it. They expect their audience will be distracted. To make matters more interesting, Don wants Peggy, his protege, to give the pitch instead of him. She’s never done the big presentations and is nervous. The scene starts with Peggy’s out-of-body observation of the meeting room. Not only does Peggy eloquently find her way to her pitch, she eases beautifully into the client’s value proposition.
This is a great example of capturing the moment, going back to the basics of your value proposition, and story telling.
Here’s the script for this one:
Don: Every great ad tells a story. Here to tell that story is Peggy Olson.
Peggy: Thank you, Don.
That’s a lot to live up to. Because I certainly can’t tell a better story than the one we saw last night. [moon landing]
I don’t know what was more miraculous– the technological achievement that put our species in a new perspective or the fact that all of us were doing the same thing at the same time. Sitting in this room, we can still feel the pleasure of that connection.
Because, I realize now, we were starved for it.
We really were.
And, yes, we’ll feel it again when they all return safely.
And, yes, the world will never be the same in some ways.
But tonight, I’m going to go back to New York, and I’ll go back to my apartment and find a 10-year-old boy parked in front of my TV, eating dinner.
Now, I don’t need to charge you for a research report that tells you that most television sets are not more than six feet away from the dinner table.
And that dinner table is your battlefield and your prize. This is the home your customers really live in.
This is your dinner table.
Dad likes Sinatra, son likes The Rolling Stones.
The TV’s always on, Vietnam playing in the background. The news wins every night.
And you’re starving.
And not just for dinner.
What if there was another table, where everybody gets what they want when they want it It’s bright and clean, and there’s no laundry, no telephone, and no TV.
And we can have the connection that we’re hungry for.
There may be chaos at home, but there’s family supper at Burger Chef.Client: That’s beautiful.
Peggy: That’s nice to hear because that’s the name of the spot.”
You can’t nail it if you don’t see it, and you don’t see it if you don’t get the essence of it, at a deep level. These are beautiful examples of that.
Leave me a comment and share examples that have influenced you.
ps. If you’d like to see the script for the other ones, there is a site [sadly, this site doesn’t seem to be available any more] that has a very nice compilation for this show and many others.
* Image credit: wallrart.com
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.
Welcome to Orion and OrionX.net!
When we formed Orion Marketing more than 6 years ago, our vision was to offer a technology marketing capability that would cover the entire spectrum from the board room to customer programs. We anticipated that marketing as a function would be transformed in significant ways: more technology, more data, more social, more blending of arts and sciences, more integrated with every other function, and ultimately more critical to the organization.
This required a new model.
If marketing was to be so important, it needed first to have a deeper understanding of global trends, business strategy, services, technologies, sales, human resources, law, finance, operations, and geographies. That is a big task, but it is what it takes to begin to do great marketing.
So from the beginning, our focus has been on the new world of marketing. That means depth, breadth and quality. It means synthesis that must follow analysis to create great content. In short, it means everything that must be in place to “connect products to customers,” as our tagline said.
That was the right focus, and thanks to that and our wonderful customers, Orion Marketing grew, which enabled us to codify and hone our core marketing services. We also started a systematic program to build additional capabilities.
Today, we are ready to launch a significant expansion of our services based on a few years of work.
We have developed, delivered, and are now formally launching two additional services: Strategy, and PR services. This expansion warrants a new brand that recognizes our heritage and points to a future of innovation and customer value in the digital era.
OrionX continues the same unique model: bringing together business acumen, technical depth, insightful industry perspective, high quality work and counsel, and a natural focus on customer success.
Marketing has come a long way in the last decade. Just as companies have a well-practiced understanding of what it takes to build a great product, they now have a growing appreciation of why marketing is essential to their business and what it takes to do great marketing. They recognize that marketing is the glue at the center of the organization, and must have high quality content at its own center. Nearly 25 years after Regis McKenna’s article in Harvard Business Review, finally Marketing is Everything!
As we embark on the next phase of this journey, we strive to continue to deserve your support, advice, participation, and business.
Thank you!
Shahin is a technology analyst and an active CxO, board member, and advisor. He serves on the board of directors of Wizmo (SaaS) and Massively Parallel Technologies (code modernization) and is an advisor to CollabWorks (future of work). He is co-host of the @HPCpodcast, Mktg_Podcast, and OrionX Download podcast.