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DP Directory, Inc.
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Subscribe Now to Al Harberg's Software Marketing Newsletter, the best way for software developers to get free, usable marketing information. We'll never use your email address for anything besides sending you this twice-monthly newsletter.
It's All About Marketing
I was channel surfing on cable TV, and I stopped on one of the Spanish-language channels when I saw the ad for an exercise video. There was a picture of an athletic woman wearing a bikini. The name of the product was "Molding Up." If English is your first language, you're probably smiling. Exercise fans can find a lot of "shaping up" videos for sale in the US. Artists mold clay. So "Molding Up" might sound like a reasonable name for a fitness program. Unfortunately, the expression "molding up" has another meaning. If you were to sprinkle water on a slice of bread, and keep it in a warm, moist place for several days, you would look at the turquoise and white growths on the bread, and say that it's "molding up." The lesson, of course, is that your company and product names have to be acceptable in other languages. Before deciding upon a name for your firm or your software, ask people from other cultures if the name is friendly or awful, clear or confusing, easy to remember or capable of being spelled 12 different ways. It's worth the extra effort to avoid a name like Molding Up. In his book "The New Positioning", Jack Trout says, "Shakespeare was wrong. A rose by any other name would not smell as sweet. Not only do you see what you want to see, you also smell what you want to smell. Which is why the single most important decision in the marketing of a perfume is the name you decide to put on the brand." By locking your product name to a benefit or to a selling proposition, your product positioning is reinforced every time somebody sees your name. Conversely, including a date or a price in your product name can cause problems. Windows 98, for example, sounded much more modern seven years ago than it does today. And the Buck-a-Book chain of stores felt that they had to change their name to Wordz. If you're not happy with your product or company name, you can create a new brand, and then emphasize it more than you do your current name. Kimberly-Clark does this. They sell paper towels, but not under the Kimberly-Clark name. In fact, Kimberly-Clark owns the famous and respected "Kleenex" brand. And on every roll of Viva, you'll find the words "Kleenex Brand" in tiny type, and the phrase "Kimberly-Clark" in even smaller type. I don't pretend to understand all of the things that the Viva folks thought about when they made these decisions. But they certainly have given it a lot of thought. A roll of Bounty paper towels is not without surprises, either. Their packaging says, "See What's New! QuickerPickerUpper.com". How many software developers have domain names for their tag lines? I've been wrestling with my own branding issues. Twenty years ago, the name DP Directory was a great name for the data processing reference magazine that I published. Now that data processing is called "information processing," the DP Directory name is much less great. So, I've been publicizing the "Al Harberg" brand on my web site and in my newsletter. My corporation is still DP Directory, Inc., but more and more, my brand is Al Harberg. Jake Steinfeld, the "Body by Jake" guy who uses half-hour late-night television ads to sell exercise and fitness equipment, has written that his brand is his most important asset. He spends an incredible amount of time evaluating toning-up hardware before he'll put his name on it. I certainly don't have all the answers. But as my ideas mold up, I'll be sure to share them with you in my newsletters.
There's an HTML version of this newsletter on http://www.dpdirectory.com/3news031.htm There are 30 back-issues, full of software marketing ideas, on http://www.dpdirectory.com/3newsltr.htm To subscribe, please send me a note - al@dpdirectory.com. If you have software developer friends who would benefit from reading this newsletter, please tell them about it. Thank you!
A lighthearted romp into the past to examine communications milestones When I began writing this newsletter six thousand years ago, it was only logical that I chose to publish it from Erech, a bustling city in southwestern Asia. At that time, Erech was the only civilization that had a written language, and the only city with the electronic infrastructure to support massive distribution of newsletters. Sure, I could have used the limestone tablets that were popular back then, but postal-mailing limestone can be expensive. We had a vocabulary of nearly 1,000 words. People who could write, flourished. Newsletter writers received the same public adulation as sculptors and other rock stars. The Egyptians introduced hieroglyphics around 3700BC, and email suffered. Youngsters point to the problems circa 1975AD, trying to get ASCII-based personal computers to communicate with EBCDIC-based mainframes. These glitches pale by comparison with the cuneiform-to-hieroglyphics data exchanges that we wrestled with every day. Responding to the need for speed, the Egyptians introduced cursive hieroglyphics. We had more variations in word images than Windows 3.1 users had fonts. Five hundred years later, I migrated my newsletter to Sumerian cuneiform. These wedge-shaped indentations in clay tablets were all the rage around 3500BC. Who would have thought that they'd stay in vogue for nearly 3,000 years? Early adopters thrived. People who could make clay wedgies wielded a lot of power. Meanwhile, computer manufacturers discovered that they could combine copper and tin to make bronze. But computers were pretty much still made from rocks and clay. The popularity of computing was on the rise, and my newsletter subscription numbers were growing, too. The Chinese got into the writing game around 3000BC. They toyed with creating symbols to represent words, and within 500 years had a widely accepted set of symbols. By 2700BC, herbal medicine and acupuncture newsletters could be found throughout the region's electronic bandwidth. My newsletter got a lot easier to write and distribute when people got around to creating alphabets. By 2500BC, the Sumerians had created a cuneiform script alphabet with 600-or-so simplified signs. By 1700BC, papyrus had pretty much replaced clay, limestone, and rocks as the printed newsletter medium of choice. With fewer rocks being turned into newsletters, more computers could be built. Later, Europeans built their computing machines from iron, and most Middle Eastern manufacturers used bronze. Innovators in England were using Stonehenge to investigate marketplaces beyond the traditional opportunities on this planet. It was a golden age for newsletters. The alphabet fad ran rampant. In 1700BC, we had a 30-consonant, vowel-free alphabet. Five hundred years later, the Phoenicians were using a 22-letter alphabet. The Greek alphabet became popular around 800BC. The Roman alphabet, which was the foundation for English, was introduced about 700BC. Anglo-Saxon, the earliest form of English, developed as a dialect in England. Modern English arose around 1066AD. Gutenberg helped newsletter editors immensely. No, not Steve Guttenberg, the actor in Ron Howard's 1985AD movie Cocoon. Johann Gutenberg, the Mainz-based printer, was at the forefront of using movable metal type in the mid-1400s. The Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Series II helped a lot, too. At some time between the creation of these early languages, and the present state of civilization, humankind developed nearly 3,000 languages (2,796 according to Charles Berlitz, grandson of the founder of the Berlitz language schools, and author of Native Tongue). That number triples if you include significant dialects. According to Berlitz, today there are 101 languages with one million or more speakers each. The most popular (in order of number of speakers) are Chinese, English, Hindustani, Russian, Spanish, Japanese, German, Indonesian, Portuguese, French, Arabic, Bengali, Malay, and Italian. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED), completed in 1928AD after 71 years of incredible effort, tells us the meaning of everything. At least, The Meaning of Everything is the title of Simon Winchester's best-selling story of the OED. Interestingly, one of the OED's editors, Henry Bradley, had the ability to read books upside down (the books were upside down; presumably, Mr. Bradley was in no danger of having too much blood rush into his head). There are no reports of his having read newsletters upside down. The second edition of the OED, a 20-volume, 21,730-page, 140-pound library published in 1989AD, defines 615,100 words, up from the 200,000-or-so English words that were in use at the end of the Renaissance. During the past few centuries, books and magazines have tended to be well-written. That's because it was expensive to create and distribute a printed, bound volume, and only well-written works got ink. Today, electronic newsletters can be created at near-zero expense, and the vetting process simply doesn't exist in many quarters. This causes problems. In the past, people learned to write well, not by writing a lot, but by reading a lot. Today, much of what we read was hastily and poorly composed on the Internet. We're training the current generation of readers to ignore spelling, grammar, syntax, agreement, sense, and the other basic building blocks that make reading enjoyable and effective. Newsletter publishers need to do it right, not because of some high-minded intellectual goal, but because well-written newsletters are persuasive. And because persuasive writing can sell software. The bottom line: Do it right. Read well-written books and newsletters about business, sales and marketing. Lots. Create a newsletter to promote your business and sell more software. Lots. Throughout time, newsletters have enabled entrepreneurs to get their message out to the buying public. Newsletters rock!
Ideas for Succeeding in Business
Never Wrestle with a Pig - and Ninety Other Ideas to Build Your Business and Career by Mark H. McCormack (published by Penguin Books) The author of "What They Don't Teach You at Harvard Business School" has written a book about using people skills at work. He reflects on his 40-year career in sports and celebrity management, and shares advice that can help businesses, big and small. While many of his ninety chapters deal with thriving in a large company, he presents a lot of lessons that would help independent software developers increase their income, and preserve their sanity. The Big Picture - The book is a collection of ninety separate ideas. It's a little difficult to find a theme that flows through the entire book. Here are examples of his advice: - McCormack describes himself as a fanatic about maximizing his days, hours, minutes, and seconds. While I don't share this particular obsession, I think all of us can increase our productivity by reading fewer Usenet newsgroups and visiting fewer web sites. - When it comes to assessing our own skills, McCormack writes, "Many people don't know what they are good at. That's ignorance. An equal number think they're good at something, but they're really not. That's delusion. Whether you're ignorant or deluded, everyone needs an objective, outside party to help them identify their true talent." - Learn to make decisions, even when you don't have all the facts, and when you haven't developed all of the arguments, pro and con. - "Plow horses tend to overthink things. Racehorses are sometimes guilty of underthinking. Sometimes they go too fast and overshoot their target. But the superstars at a company are mostly racehorses. They're the people on the go, moving places in a positive direction, stirring things up, making things happen." - Learn to say "no." People who can't say "no" are often unorganized, and under-performing. What it Means for Software Developers - While the book isn't about the software industry, there is a lot of good advice here. The title article - "Never wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and only the pig enjoys it." is good advice for anybody who is tempted to enter a newsgroup argument. And it's always great to be reminded that how we use our time isn't something apart from how we live our lives. How we spend our time IS our lives. McCormack believes that the best ideas can't be stolen. In our industry, where software designs are stolen multiple times every day, I found this idea controversial. McCormack also holds the notion that some ideas deserve to be stolen. Don't be paralyzed by fear. Overestimate your competition. Don't be seduced by big ideas. Don't let brainstorming destroy creativity. The chapters on office politics don't pertain to the one- and two-person companies that most of us run. But if we consider our offices to be our workplaces, with interactions with stakeholders that include suppliers, eCommerce companies, download site owners, and other vendors, then McCormack's advice is very useful. The chapters on rule-making are particularly useful for dealing with these stakeholders. The Bottom Line - This 300-page book is an easy read. It's great when somebody with real-life experiences takes the time to share his ideas. I recommend it. To UNSUBSCRIBE from this newsletter, send me a note. I'll remove your name immediately and permanently. To SUBSCRIBE to the email version of this newsletter, send me your name and email address. I'll only use your name and email address for this newsletter. I'll never spam you, or let other people have your name or email address. Please add al@dpdirectory.com to your anti-spam filter's friends-list. To REFER a FRIEND to this newsletter, click your email client's "forward" button. I thank you very much. And your developer friends will thank you, too. To SELL MORE SOFTWARE, bookmark this web site, and visit often. There's a lot of free, useful software marketing information on http://www.dpdirectory.com/.
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