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What's New
Announcement of Chris Morgan
Chris Morgan joins the
Silicon Valley Research Group Team as On-line Community Manager. Chris
will spearhead our new initiatives to build powerful communities and
on-line research panels of technology and business decision makers.
Please join us in welcoming Chris to the Silicon Valley Research Group
Team.
Innovation Inside!
I'm sure you're all aware of our recent name change to Silicon Valley
Research Group from EQUS Group. More than a name change, this is also
our deep commitment, not only to service the technology sector, but also
to use technology innovation as a source of excellent client responsive
research products and services. To this end the following will be
research innovations we plan to bring to market in 2010:
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Opinion Bridge™
- Our on-line asynchronous focus group offering which we announced
earlier this year. The offering combines the best of the internet as
a data collection tool with best practice focus group moderation
skills to yield useful data for our clients without the hassle of
travel and facilities costs. We have been pioneering these
innovative concepts over the last several months; expect to see
major announcements early in 2010 on this.
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e361®
- Our content rich marketing dashboards. We announced this late
last year when the USPTO awarded us a trademark for this. We have
recently become a Microsoft partner and are planning to launch this
service on a hosted share point platform to provide maximum
flexibility and accessibility to our clients. The product offering
is tailored to Fortune 500 companies who wish to make customer
research and other market research information available across the
entire enterprise.
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Silicon Valley
Research Group Dialogue Communities - Our on-line community and
research panel building efforts, formerly announced at Equs
Communities under our old brand name. Chris Morgan has recently been
hired to spearhead this effort and we are proceeding rapidly to
build robust communities of decision makers for our clients to be
able to mine for data collection on items ranging from campaign
testing to uncovering obstacles and barriers to sales adoption.
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Al's Corner
I wanted to talk a
little bit this month about some very fundamental marketing positioning
concepts. The classic book by Ries and Trout titled Positioning: The
Battle For The Consumer Mind, talks about several brand building
methods. It occurs to me that in the work we've done with our technology
clients, technology companies often lag in adoption of these powerful
methods, which provide great opportunities for market differentiation.
The following three items come to mind:
1.
Attribution - Technology companies are slow to make efforts to
own attributes in consumer's minds. We're not talking about category
leadership; certain companies clearly come to dominate categories such
as Google and search, eBay and on-line auctions, etc. We’re talking
about concerted efforts to actually create and own an attribute in the
customer's mind. Example: Volvo and Safety
2. How the Product is Made -
Classic examples of this are in the beer industry (Olympia, Coors).
Technology companies do not make enough noise about this, in relation to
a new product or an upgrade of an existing product.
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What was the reasoning behind the
creation of new features?
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What type of usability research with
real customers went into creating these?
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How many hours of testing led to the
creation of these features?
We hear a lot in our work about resistance
to change in the way a product performs or the way a product's features
are provisioned. Attempts to explain how a product is made can go a long
way towards alleviating some of these barriers to change among
customers.
3. Social
Proof - Social Proof is an often underused positioning technique
with technology products and services. People do want to feel part of
the herd, there is comfort in doing what others are doing and seeking
products that others find utility in. We hear over and over again in
our research that consumers want to see proof of products from their
peers. Small businesses want to hear about other small businesses using
the product, likewise consumers want to hear about other in similar
demographic segments using these products. It's a question of making
this product available, and companies that do it well find enormous
success in placing their products.
Transformations for the New Selling
Economy - While the economy is settling into a slow recovery, and
there are positive signs, it remains clear form our research data that
growth projections and plans within information technology in 2010 are
not likely to ramp up dramatically. Based on this and based on our
research findings, the following transformations are warranted in
selling approaches to IT departments globally:
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From applicant based to aspiration
based.
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From improvements to breakthrough
transformations.
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From customer satisfaction to customer
success.
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From mass broadcast to warm, personal
tone.
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From "letter shop" to individually
selected.
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From single call-to-action to opening
gambit to a series of customer conversations.
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From broad outreach, to know where I
live, know my industry.
For more insights or to arrange a briefing
by one of our analyst staff, please contact us Meadow Braly (meadow@siliconvalleyrg.com)
Al
Nazarelli is President & CEO of Silicon Valley Research Group Inc. He
divides his time between our San Jose and Seattle offices and can be
reached at
aln@siliconvalleyrg or
408-920-0361 ex 701. |
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