Effectivus Product Management

Pricing

Chris — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:20:21 +0000

A friend and client was kind enough to point out a deficiency in my web site the other day.

“What about pricing, Chris? I can’t find anything about it on your site.”

Sigh.

All of us wise students of marketing know that Price is just one of the 4P’s (or 7P’s, or 47peas in a pod), and that it is the offering that our customers buy into. We know that the whole product is so much more than just the price, but we also have to set a price. At some point, we have to pin our colours to the mast and give a price; no vagueness, not a variable, but a definitive number. That is tough.

I thought I had better refer to one of the “great men” of modern management theory: Michael Porter. I duly looked up “price” in the index of Competitive Strategy and found a section entitled “Correct Pricing”. Only a “great man” could simplify the topic to the binary opinion that there is “correct” and “incorrect” pricing. Pah!

Your average management books (and maybe the less than average ones too) cover pricing with a number of different strategies. It is telling that you find it covered in Economics, Marketing, Strategy, Finance. Each approach tells us something about your Product Management and Marketing team.

So, for the first, and probably last time, here is the Effectivus guide to pricing strategies…

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Post tags: marketing, MBA, pricing, product, theory

Remember Parallax Software?

Chris — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 09:04:23 +0000

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Post tags: fun, Matador, projects

Barriers to adoption

Chris — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:58:12 +0000

Ever get the feeling that you are working in a mental asylum? Of course, I’m not talking about any of my client companies. They are all completely sane and sensible. I’ll skip over the fact that the defining experience of working in one of their offices is being pelted with Nerf gun pellets at regular intervals.

Ten years ago I had the interesting experience of moving from what had been a start-up to a big corporate. Not only was Kodak huge, it had a lot of history, it was based on the other side of the continent and it was an old time manufacturing company that was going down the tube but had yet to face up to the fact. You can still see it struggling with this in recent advertisements in American Cinematographer: “Film No Compromise”. Wake up and smell the coffee Kodak, film was dead 10 years ago.

One of the wackier things I discovered there (and it was a year packed full of wacky stuff) was George Eastman’s devotion to the International Fixed Calendar. In 1926, George wrote about “The Importance of Calendar Reform to the Business World”. In this short article, he explains how the variations in the length of the calendar month cause all sorts of problems with the proper management of a modern business. I’m sure you are aware of this and have frequently stumbled over the 11% difference between the length of March and February or the shocking 17% difference in the number of working days in those months. And, that’s not even mentioning the vexations of a “wandering Easter”.

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Post tags: film, management, marketing, users

What the Dog Saw

Chris — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 12:21:57 +0000

I can find almost any topic interesting if presented well. In fact, I love being given a glimpse into the normally hidden world of a new specialty. Not only do you learn about stuff you would never normally encounter, but you invariably get a view of the alien culture of those who inhabit this strange new realm. As I learn about a new topic my mind is constantly searching for analogies between it and topics I understand or experiences I have, and then, “POW!” I get a revealing insight into something completely different. I wish this inquisitive habit mean that I was a Polymath or a Renaissance Man, but sadly I’m more of a butterfly generalists, flitting from one subject to another.

As I write this, I have my media player in random mode and am delighted by it switching from Stéphane Grappelli to Indigo Girls.

I do have a deep respect for those who combine my interest with real knowledge and Malcolm Gladwell never fails to impress. In “Open Secrets” in his collection of essays, he touches on Enron, Al Qaeda, Nazi Propaganda, Prostate Cancer, and the Cold War, all in search of a clear differentiation between “Puzzles” and “Mysteries”.

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Post tags: Book review, marketing, MBA, writing

Researching new product markets

Chris — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 17:21:51 +0000

Business plans rely on estimates of the size of your target market, but how and when to approach this?

In a recent lecture to students on the Technology Venturing elective of the MSc in Entrepreneurship at Royal Holloway University of London, School of Management, I explored opportunity evaluation, market research and commercial feasibility. The lecture, based upon practical experience, cited four real life examples of new products for the film and television production market, describing the process and the outcomes.

The process he described is an iterative one involving going out into the market to seek inspiration for ideas, then confirming that the ideas are valid within the organisation. Forays into the market help to ensure that the product continues to address real unmet needs throughout its development. Alternating these forays with work within the organisation ensures that products are realistic within the confines of the organisations abilities, resources and values. As the activity cycles between organisation and market, the project progresses through the stages of product definition, development and delivery.

Each example covered one of the stages of desk research, industry interviews, preliminary product pitching and recognising new opportunities. The examples were described in detail and the results and conclusions shared. These real world examples helped to illustrate how contrary research can be and how new product development can be full of highs and lows.

Using stories from his experience in the film and television industry, Chris brought what can be a dry subject to life. With humour, enthusiasm and dynamism Chris entertained and informed.

“Chris has a wealth of insights and experiences to share. He definitely captured the students’ interest”, Dr Harveen Chugh, Lecturer in Strategy & Entrepreneurship, School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Related posts:
lectures

What is a product specification?

There is a hole in my product

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Sketching User Experiences

Chris — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 10:31:34 +0000

In the late ’80s when I first began contributing to commercial products at Spaceward I came across a book which opened my eyes to the issue of how we interact with products and particularly software products. It was “Readings in Human-Computer Interaction” edited by Baecker and Buxton and changed the way I thought about my products in a fundamental way. Bill Buxton’s latest book has had a similar effect.

Reading “Sketching User Experiences: Getting the Design Right and the Right Design” feels like leafing through a designer’s sketchbook, a sketchbook of a lifetime of contributing to designing high tech products. Ideas come at you from all angles and then drill down into incredible detail before spinning off in another direction.

Bill Buxton has worked at both EuroPARC and Xerox PARC, Silicon Graphics, Alias Wavefront and most recently Microsoft Research. He has been lecturing and writing on the human computer interaction for 30 years.

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Post tags: Book review, design, UI, users

Apple differentiates the iPad

Chris — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 17:36:22 +0000

Regular readers will know that I tend to rant until blue in the face about differentiating technology products, targeting user needs and not going overboard with your one key differentiating feature.

I’m also really keen on clear names and clear concepts about what a product does. In the film industry they talk about “high-concept pitches” for films. Legend has it that the high-concept pitch for Aliens was “Jaws in space”.

So I was gratified when I heard a high-concept pitch for the Apple iPad as “like and iPhone but bigger” – I got it (or at least some of it) immediately. Then I came across this picture and became a little worried that Steve may have over done it a tad and that he was destined to go the same was as the captain of the Vasa.

Behind you Steve!

Related posts:
Rotten to the core?

Product Vision and Corporate Culture

Barnacle, Billow or Barnard’s Star

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Post tags: design, product

The future of 3D TV

Chris — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 09:00:07 +0000

I am a geek. Well, I was. But I’m starting to doubt it now. You see part of being a geek is adopting new technologies way ahead of the sensible majority of the population. Not only am I a geek, but I’m a geek who has spent 25 years in the film and television business creating and delivering the coolest new products to help put fantastic images on your screens, but now I feel like I’m losing my way. Why? 3D TV.

First out let’s just clear something up, because geekiness is also about pedantry. It’s not 3D. I’ve got to call it that because everyone else does and if I don’t you won’t know what I’m talking about. The point is that it is an optical illusion that gives us just two of the cues we use to perceive the 3D world in which we live to make us think that what we are looking at is (a bit) three dimensional.

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Post tags: 3D, commercial, film, television

Samsung Tic Toc

Chris — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:28:01 +0000

What were they thinking about? What can possibly have got into the Samsung engineers’ minds, let alone the marketing guys, to make them think that the Tic Toc was a good idea?

Announced at CES, the Tic Toc is an incredibly small MP3 player which has but one button. You control it by turning this way or that, or shaking it quickly or slowly. As the power says: “Easily shift through a choice of four play modes with a simple shake of the wrist”…”through the force of gravity”.

You can just imagine the thought process:

We could make an MP3 player much smaller if it did not have to have buttons or a screen on it (a bit like saying a car could be much more efficient if only it did not have to carry passengers).

I know, we play the Wii by shaking the controller, we could do the same with our MP3 player.

Oh, wow, now we’d need to watsit, a thingy and a 9v power supply…

Meanwhile in the marketing department… “an MP3 player with no buttons, no one has ever done that before, we’ve got to show it at CES”.

Read the rest of Samsung Tic Toc

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Post tags: fun, product, specification

Make the tough stuff look simple

Chris — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 09:54:58 +0000

On one of my regular visits to our customer Industrial Light and Magic in the early ‘90s I was talking to one of the matte painters I love to watch users (whether artists or technical whiz kids) as they work. You learn so much from them. Only that way do you get a real understanding for their pains and needs. Sandy was drawing around the blue stockings on an actor, frame by frame, with amazing care and precision. She explained that they were going to have to remove the lower legs so that it looked as if the actor had had them amputated. The first stage was to isolate them.

Now usually you can hope to draw one frame and then move forward several frames, draw another, and then have the software generate the in-between shapes. If the motion is relatively simple, they match, or nearly match, the image, leaving the artist to do some simple fine-tuning. This is called “in-betweening” and we had written that functionality into Matador for just this purpose. Sandy knew all about this as she had helped us specify the functionality, so I asked her why she was not using it. In answer, she zoomed out so that I could see that the actor was sitting on a swing, hung from a mast, on a boat rocking on the ocean, shot by a camera on another boat. Simple the motion was not. In fact it was so complex that no amount of clever in-betweening was going to help her. I shook my head in disbelief at the skill and dedication required even to consider attempting this shot, never mind to bring it off convincingly.

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Post tags: design, FX, Matador, product

Effectivus Product Management

Pricing

Read the rest of Pricing © Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us Post tags: marketing, MBA, pricing, product, theory

Remember Parallax Software?

Barriers to adoption

What the Dog Saw

Researching new product markets

Sketching User Experiences

Apple differentiates the iPad

The future of 3D TV

Samsung Tic Toc

Make the tough stuff look simple

Read the rest of Pricing

© Chris for Effectivus Product Management, 2010. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: marketing, MBA, pricing, product, theory