As a product marketer specialising in content, I’ve always found it irksome to explain to people just how difficult my craft is, and how much time it takes to do it well. Building a brand isn’t easy; it takes a lot of effort, planning, strategy & execution, and involves as much editing out as it involved creating more. And even then, one misplaced word or misguided blog post can turn around...
“The best way to do something ‘lean’ is to gather a tight group of people, give them very little money, and very little time.” – Bob Klein, chief engineer of the Grumman F-14 program. I first came upon this quote on Paul Graham’s website, and it always intrigued me, the small detail about the money – it could be little or a lot, but money is a factor, and a...
I mean, why should you. Haven’t you seen all this already? If that’s your question, well, no. You haven’t. The #PNCamp is the first Indian product event that brings together product professionals in a bootcamp format, designed to make you take away a wealth of information and actionable insight. Based on the highly successful iSPIRT Product Round Tables, it is also a highly curated, limited...
Exactly a month away from the inaugural #PNCamp and as schedules and attendees are being finalized, we are getting a lot of questions about what exactly is going to happen on D-Days, especially since we have told everyone we are not going to have one-to-many speaking sessions and workshops that have been the norm. I spoke to Pallav Nadhani(FusionCharts) today, who is planning and designing the...
It has been a pretty frenzied two weeks or so for us #PNSummit volunteers, but here we are, and we have something to show you and the world. But first, what went into it. We brainstormed. We chatted. We argued. We used all that, and combined that with actual user feedback gleaned from the dozens of Playbook RoundTables, meetings conducted by iSPIRT. The whole team put their thinking caps on...
Every customer support forum and blog has at least one post talking about the importance of ‘knowing’ the target customer. This is one of those well established cliche-stereotypes that David Foster Wallace points out in Infinite Jest – we talk about them so much because they happen to be true. The only question is, how true? Is ‘knowing’ your customer really enough? Cadbury’s knows that its...
Congratulations, you have just started up. It has taken so long to get here – you’ve worked hard, saved up, staved away every comfort, and your product is out, garnering rave reviews. Now you turn to the other important stuff you need to do – get your product in front of your market. It’s time for the marketing and selling push in a startup. And this is when you know you have to set...
I first read the term ‘Retention Marketing’ in an article in a marketing journal at University and dismissed it immediately as one of the new terms we marketers come up with. It was for an assignment and I did not pay it a second more attention than was needed to write a passable term paper. I heard it next at a meeting in office, about two years later. And was promptly dumbstruck by how...
The best marketer of our time was, inarguably, Steve Jobs. And everything Steve Jobs did was aimed at one thing – marketing his products. His presentations were performances, his product demos were carefully directed and choreographed; there was an air of showmanship about everything going on at Apple leading to a launch. Even their support stories became huge news. Walter Isaacson and...
When Girish Mathrubootham, CEO, Freshdesk) hired yours truly, a complete novice straight out of B-School, I was Freshdesk’s employee no. 8, and we operated out of a nondescript location deep in south Chennai, from two small rooms behind a quaint Catholic church. Painted in our company’s signature teal color and equipped with an internet connection that had a mind of its own, our old office was...
