Manizesto

Ever found yourself trying to market an inferior product? It’s frustrating, and easy to point the finger of blame to your development team, your engineers, or senior management. Don’t do it. Finger pointing accomplishes nothing.

I wrote a post a while ago arguing that if you’re products suck, innovating marketing or a large budget can’t help much, which I still believe is true. But friend and marketing-minded entrepreneur Chris Baggott, founder of Compendium Blogware (a company that helps businesses create and manage corporate blogs) had a pretty solid rebuttal that’s worth mentioning:

“Early in my career I worked for the world’s largest diagnostic equipment company. We developed this chemistry analyzer that was supposed to compete with to top preforming analyzers in the industry. It sucked. It was too slow, reliability was a problem and the average cost per test was just too high to compete. What to do? Of course the answer was to hand the problem to marketing. What we had to do was reposition and find the one competing analyzer that was worse than ours. The IL Monarch (I remember it like yesterday)…..

We built a database of every IL Monarch in the country and sorted by age. (these things are typically leased on three to five year terms) By initiating the conversation with labs before they were shopping we were able to establish our criteria, we could show what the advantages were over what they were currently doing and the net result was that the following year our machine was the number one instrument sold that year…..and because we had specifically targeted the RIGHT customers, they were happy. Win Win.”

In other words, as long as your product is not the absolute worst in the industry (which means most of you), you still have an edge. So quit making excuses about the inferiority of your product, see how you are truly better, and find a way to turn that into a meaningful message. Certainly your product can help someone.

And if you can’t find a reason to stand by your products, find a new company to work for.

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[Photo by *One*]