Edging closer…edging closer….

Over the last few months we have been madly finalising the remaining Trickytix functionality to be included for launch.  At the same time, we have been thinking about our sales and marketing processes, our market, our customer development, and how each of these contributes to future success.

There are three core areas which go a long way to determining the success of any startup company.

1. Product
2. Team
3. Market

Which aspect is more important?  Personally, I’m a market guy.  The writings of Marc Andreessen on this issue are persuasive, although unfortunately Marc seems to have removed his archival blog content.  Essentially what he argues is that market characteristics are the biggest influence on success.

Let me explain via Lolcats.

Great product
+
Great team
+
Small or slowly growing market
=
Fail

Average product
+
Average team
+
Massive market screaming out for your product
=
Success

We have a great product (we hope!).  We have a great team (aw shucks!).  We have picked what we believe to be a great market (more on that in future posts).  So how do we maximise our success in our chosen market?

One way to assist with growth and “cut through” is through brand positioning.  Positioning our brand to be seen as the number one place to go for our service, while ensuring our messaging is consistent and targeted to our overall market strategy.  Having thought long and hard about our in-house expertise and skills in this area, we came to a conclusion.  We have none!

So we tapped our network and arranged a meet up with a retired advertising executive to get advice on our branding strategy.  You can always tell when someone is experienced, as they answer your questions with anecdotes from their past.  Roger entertained us over coffee for about 45 minutes with a series of persuasive stories about brand, positioning and naming strategies.  During the meeting we asked:

“What do you think of our name?”.

His reply?  “I think it’s a problem”.

Ouch.

Deep down we always knew this to be the case, having received similar feedback from almost everyone we have met in the last 18 months.  Our strategy and feature set have come a long way from when we first came up with the name, and it no longer seems a good fit.  So we are going to explore a change.  We are going to make this change before we launch, which is going to set us back a few more weeks.  It’s unfortunate, but necessary.

Having already experienced the pain of one attempt at naming our business, we  have decided to take a different approach.  In a few days time we will be running a day long workshop (facilitated by Roger), exploring naming, positioning, messaging and overall strategy.  The agenda is detailed below:

0900 – 1000
Introductions and agreement of “what business we are in” plus forward plan objectives: “What we want to achieve , for what reason and by what time frame”

1000 – 1100
Identify strategies that will deliver the agreed objective:  ”What we will do specifically and how we will measure progress against what KPI’s?”

1100 – 1230
Identify demographics and psychographics of key prospects. Prospect definition.

1230 – 1300
Sandwiches and juice and keep going.

1300 – 1400
Communication strategy options and benefit gap against competitive offers. This session will also identify key barriers to adoption (assumed) and what we say/do to overcome those barriers.

1400 – 1500
Naming the product to reflect prospect wants and product benefit. Some blood sugar boost at the same time via juice and coffee and a biscuit or two.

1500 – 1600
Create a brand personality for the new product. This document will act as the litmus test for tone and content in all communications and marketing efforts.

1600 to 1700
Write the key proposition for the product that will change human behaviour and move it in favour of the product. The proposition will be the genesis for a strap line for the product and may in fact be the strap line for the product, but not necessarily.

1700
We review and wrap.

Personally I am really looking forward to this session and the outcomes from it, but mostly I am just hoping we can decide upon a name!