A Product Marketer's "Grand Slam"

The ultimate job that a product marketing team can perform (or your reasonable expectation of marketing consultants you bring in) is twofold:

• to identify and alleviate the pain for your customer, and
• to communicate this in a way which compels the sale.

In the automotive industry, some of the greatest advances over the last century were good models for solving customer pain:

Automatic transmission came from the great frustration, inconvenience, and occasional embarrassment of many drivers coordinating the clutch and accelerator controls of manual transmission.

Power windows were more than "not cranking the handle". They allowed any window to be operated (or not) by the driver -- adding control (parents making sure little ones weren't throwing things out the windows) and improving flexibility (driver rolling down passenger window to ask pedestrian for the nearest gas station).

The greatest advance we've seen in this century, recently unveiled by Lexus, looks to be a hit:

Self parking is a feature many people have thought to be science fiction. But Lexus realized they had put enough cameras on board to give the driver the kind of assistance parking requires. Watch their own demo:

http://www.lexus.com/models/LS/features/exterior/advanced_parking_guidance_system.html?demo=ls_parking&s_ocid=30019

No competitors. No price limits. Joe Average drool factor. Probable patent protection. Can you say "Grand Slam"?

You're selling to little Savannah

Like it or not, the general rule for homo sapiens is they buy on emotion and justify with data.

In B2B (as with B2B and B2G) there are the decision makers and the influencers. Kids are one of these constituency in family decisions. Those of you who have contributed to the population growth problem [I'm guilty] know what I'm talking about.

Many B2C transactions are affected by little Gabriel's color preference, or big Savannah's taste buds.

The master of the lesson, as I've written about before, is McDonalds with their happy meal.

Take a look at how local airport parking company, www.airstar.com, implemented the lesson.

After parking our car, we were greeted as usual by the shuttle driver for the ride to the airport. The driver was friendly (almost all are, since tips supplement their hourly income).

But here's the twist. He reached into his "stash" and handed each of my kids a little toy-box. The kids eyes lit up. And then each proceeded to enumerate their loot.

Not 3 minutes after I'd told my wife that we could save $3 per day by parking a few other, this $1-per-kid investment bought them advocates inside our family for the next vacation. Cheaper than any ad campaign!

So how can YOUR business benefit from their decades of "research"?