Marketing isn't what you think it is
Marketing isn't what you think it is
Folks-
It's fun to be a user, it's fun to experiment, and as members of this forum, I guarantee that you are providing input that SD values.
But as a technology marketing professional (including a spell as marketing director for a DAW manufacturer), I can speak to some points that Evan probably can't...even considering his very candid input.
You are familiar with the place (channels), price, and promotion aspects of the marketing mix from marketing 101 and you run into them every day in retail/CPG land. These are the visable aspects of marketing, and most assume this is what we do most of the time.
In reality, we live and die for an a wicked master known as the business plan and it's evil twin sister the marketing requirements doc (MRD)-
So how do the cutting edge products of the future make it into these documents so that executives will fund R&D and so that R&D doesn't just build whatever it feels like?
If you think we sit around and brainstorm, you've got the wrong half of marketing- My brethren in advertising do this all of the time, but you don't fund the product this way.
Instead we do research..lots and lots, and lots of research- The mantra we repeat is "Ideas are nice, but everybody's got one" and what we do is parse through all the sources of info to build a business case that has a greater chance of success than anything else on the docket- and to craft an MRD that gets the best bang for the investment. We hate to think of this from the artist POV, but successful businesses have to be good at making money. Or if they are really really good, and they can stay very, very small boutiques.
So where do we get this input? I spend most of my time with industry analysts who work with every client imaginable every day. We sponsor studies, we read reports, and we use focus groups for reality checks. We get feedback from a whole branch of analytics known as CRM (customer relationship management), we run algorithms to mine data to find relationship that no one ever guessed existed, and tech support sends us a report every week.
But, here's the part you aren't going to like... most of the time we do not build the products our power users want the most. After all, as early adopters they represent one of the smallest segments of the product lifecycle, and their behavior doesn't really predic the mainstream. And the money is in the early and late mainstream phases-
So think about it, are the things that YOU want really the things that will sell the most pups in the long run? You are the cutting edge, you are the early adopters..we can talk about digital guitars or whatever, but Evan and company have to be careful to consider us as just one of many sources of info.
Sorry about the diatribe, but wanted to point out you will probably get more out of the forum if you concentrate on learning the things that interest you and letting SD marketing do what it does best
