Forget Products! Marketing Should Deliver Benefits Directly to Customers Instead!

My April Fools startup idea…

One of the growing trends coming out of the Silicon Valley start up frenzy is the concept of “Growth Hacking” where developers can “disrupt” the need to have a marketing department by essentially baking in awareness and demand generation as features of a product.

Add in elegant work from your product designers, and you essentially have no need for a marketing department at all since the products will position and message themselves, as well as create and follow up on leads simply through their use.

At first, marketers such as  myself were shocked – you mean companies will no longer need power point, logo design, or spam emails because the products can essentially market themselves??? Then we understood the actual reality: “Wow, developers are finally becoming aware of the market and their users!” At last, we can have the data we need about our customers and prospects usage of a product to do an effective job in the marketing department!

Then some enterprising marketers got together and thought, “Hmmm, how can we reduce expenses in R&D, speed up product cycles, and maybe turn marketing into a direct profit-center?”  Their solution: “Market2Benefit” the new “direct benefit to customer platform.”

Now companies no longer need a pesky unreliable product development process in order to deliver benefits to their customers. Market2Benefit is a multi-channel benefit application technology that allows end-customers to experience the benefits of using a product without having to actually use a product. The OEM simply decides what kinds of benefits they want their customer to enjoy, brands the experience accordingly, and deploys it to their customers.

By directly delivering benefits to customers, marketing departments can avoid the need of complicated product development and increase potential revenue.
[SOURCE: used according to creative commons license]

“Our goal is to help our customers get closer to their customers,” said Greg Chase, President of Market2Benefit. “Hopefully directly into the pleasure centers of their customers’ brains.”

Overcoming Writer’s Block in Blogging with Poetry.

I’m at one of those points where I’m not allowed to write about the stuff that inspires me (yet), but what I can write about isn’t inspiring a new angle. So instead, here’s a lighthearted little blog on the subject of overcoming writer’s block…

What do you do if you want to write, but can’t seem to get the words out? Try writing about a different subject in a different format, such as poetry. Here’s my attempt to get past a recent case of writer’s block with three different kinds of silly poems and a rap song…

Pictures of dried up fountains make great metaphors for blocked creativity.
[SOURCE] (c) Kyknoord – used according to Creative Commons License.

Nevada Readies for Straight Marriage Refugees from California As a Result of Supreme Court Ruling on Prop 8

In an amazing display of judicial restraint, showing again that putting 9 people on the job of one person does in fact not make a project complete any faster, the Supreme Court refused to rule on the merit of California’s Prop 8 case. Instead, the Supreme Court preferred to go down with a meek, “just kidding” statement by only ruling on the standing of the plaintiffs.

The most severe effect on this inaction by the US Supreme Court will be felt in California among straight people hoping to get married. As a result of gay marriage once again becoming legal in the state, it can be expected that demand for experienced gay wedding planners suddenly spike due to large numbers of gay couples wanting to plan their own fabulous weddings.