Erich Stauffer

Tag: Market Research

  • Market Sophistication Levels

    Market Sophistication Levels are about selling differently based on competition level and the degree of public sophistication about your product and market. They are based on a book called Breakthrough Advertising by a copywriter named Eugene Schwartz. Vishen Lakhiani popularized it in his video (below).

    Market Sophistication Level

    Market Sophistication has 5 levels. To get people to buy or use your product, you need to get a gauge of what level of sophistication your market is at. You do this by looking at the messaging your competitors are using, like PPC ads, home pages, TV commercials, radio commercials, and landing pages.

    Market Sophistication Level 1

    You are just introducing a new thing to the world. There is no need to differentiate your solution. The public is unaware of anything close to your product because it is a radically new invention. You simply lead with the declaration that your product exists (ie. “The World’s First Car vs. A Mechanical Horse”)

    Market Sophistication Level 2

    Once you have competitors, your job is to outbid them by making outstanding claims about how your product or service is different and better. They are aware of several of your competitor’s products, then emphasize the most powerful benefits of your product (ie. “The Fastest, Safest Car Ever Created”)

    Market Sophistication Level 3

    They’ve seen many competitor products, then emphasize the mechanism that makes your product unique from the others (ie. “The New Engine That Makes X The Best Car In The World” Emphasize different sections of your marketing copy to best capture their interest and desire in your product or service.

    Market Sophistication Level 4

    Keep elaborating the features, not the product. Focus on the mechanism behind the product or service. They’ve already seen several competitor products that use your same mechanism, then emphasize the most powerful benefits of your mechanism (ie. “The Quietest Engine Luxury Can Buy”).

    Market Sophistication Level 5

    Finally everyone has a new feature and the audience becomes jaded of all of the advertising and are familiar with all of your competitors’ claims. Instead, emphasize identification with your prospect. (ie. “The Only Luxury Car Exclusively Driven By The World’s Best Business Leaders”).

    Marketing Strategy for Great Marketing Plans

    When you’re doing initial market research into how to market your product or business, it can pay to start off figuring out your market sophistication level before making your marketing strategy or marketing plans. But it’s not only about products or services – any page from a job posting to an About page to a Contact page can be optimized using market sophistication levels. “To sell is human“, and you should always be closing.

  • The eReader Revolution

    How eReaders (also written e-Readers), which are digital readers for eBooks (also written e-Books) have taken over the tech news and gadget landscape? From Amazon’s Kindle™ which was first released on November 19, 2007 to Barnes and Noble’s nook™ which was first released November 30, 2009 to Apple’s iPad which was released April 3, 2010, there clearly is a revolution going on in how books are read, purchased, stored, and shared.

    The first chart shows the dramatic rise in news articles related to ereaders starting in 2009. This chart also highlights the differences in spelling of the different terms for ebook readers. While there is no official way of spelling it (both ereader and e-reader are acceptable), Google Trends clearly shows that “ereader” is used more often or is more popular. In general I think that if hyphens can be avoided, they will be, just as in “e-mail” is more often written as “email.”

    The second chart shows the steady rise of Amazon’s Kindle, followed by the nearly identical rise of Barnes and Noble’s Nook an Sony’s Reader. Other ebook readers like the Que and Alex don’t yet register in comparison to the traffic of these other major players, but if you compare Apple’s iPad against this chart, it makes the Kindle look pathetic in comparison.

    Now these are mostly news trends and not necessarily a reflection of popularity or quality, but it does highlight a tipping point in the use of ebook readers that happened at the end of 2009, about a year after the market crash in 2008. Despite a recession and a bad world-wide economic situation, consumers have still went out and purchased not just ebooks and ereaders, but e-reader accessories, which can sometimes equal or cost more than the ereader itself. Nook covers, for example, average around $25 each.

    How about you? Do you own an ereader or plan on purchasing one in 2010? Answer in the comments below.

  • Analyzing Actions

    youtube-diggI decided to do a little research on how this blog was doing.  I went to Google Analytics, which records data on what keywords visitors use to find this site and exported the data into Microsoft Excel.  Data has a funny way of changing your realities from what your gut thinks to actual reality.  What we intended this blog to be about can be summed up in one sentence:

    Thoughts lead to actions and actions lead to results, so to change your results, you must first change your thoughts.

    This meant that Zac and I wrote mostly about thoughts, actions, analyzing the way you feel and think – basically changing the insides in order to affect the outsides, the results, in order to achieve success.  What the analysis told me is that even though we are writing about all that, most visitors only care about one of two things, “How to Delete a Digg Submission,” and “Youtube Query String Parameters.”

    Both of these subjects, or posts, are in the “Programming” category, which, out of all the categories (Actions, Economics, Entrepreneurship, Job Hunting, Life, LOST, Management, Marketing, Pop Culture, Small Business, Startups, Success, and Technology), Technology is probably the only one that is remotely close to being like it.  All the others, besides LOST, are mostly homogeneous.  So what we really have here is a kind of identity crises.  It’s a question of who we are.  It’s also an opportunity to innovate and make some changes.

    Blog Analysis

    Most popular posts and keywords are just one metric of the success or current state of a blog.  For each keyword there are, “Pages per Visit, Average Time on Site, Percent New Visits, and Bounce Rate.”  For example, the keyword which resulted in the most page views was, “youtube embed querystring parameters,” at 17 pages, whereas the keyword resulting in the lowest bounce rate, “creative avoidance,”at 42% also had 3 more page views per visit.  This tells me that out of all Managing Actions blog posts, the most popular post that also captures the essence of this blog, “manage your thoughts in order to manage your actions”, is “Creative Avoidance,” by Zac.

    I recommend breaking the “Programming” category off into its own blog and focusing on “Creative Avoidance“-type subjects along with the other popular trends in this category, “Purpose,” “Actions,” and “Confidence.” [Update: I have since started blogging about query string parameters (1,2) and how to stay alert. 9/15/2009]

    If you would like an analysis done on your blog or help with Internet marketing, please use the comment box below to leave your name and email address and we will contact you shortly.  Thank you for visiting Managing Actions – and may your thoughts lead to action!

  • Television Re-Defined

    Snuffaluffagus ProofThe lines between television and the Internet have been blurring so long I hereby no longer define television as a device which sits in your living room, but as a medium that can be played anywhere. I can play television on any device I choose. I have come not to be thankful that the shows I see on traditional television networks are available online, but to expect it – and when they are not, I am shocked, then angry.

    I can view television on my LG cellphone, my Apple iPhone, my HP netbook, my Dell Desktop. I can play TV on the Internet through a network’s website such as ABC.com, NBC.com, or CBS.com, or through aggregate networks like Hulu.com. My favorite, by far though is on Netflix using their instant viewing feature. My wife now watches more shows on Netflix than on our XP Media Center PC, which saves shows from cable television.

    Wired Magazine ran an article April 2007 entitled, “The TV Is Dead. Long Live the TV”. The gist is that, “TV is evolving into something new and hardly recognizable to generations raised on its earlier incarnations.” This evolution is more of a time-and-space separation. Where and what we watch is no longer coupled with a specific device, location, or time of day. But what does this do to the previous culture we had whereby office cooler or dinner table talk revolved around the happenings of a popular show? The term “popular” is now somewhat irrelevant. You might even go as far to say that going forward, markets won’t exist, only niches and micro-niches.

    In the photo you can see me pointing out “proof” that Snuffaluffagus exists.  This is a sort of inside-joke between peers of my generation who grew up watching Sesame Street back when Big Bird was the only one who could see “Snuffy.”  This was also back when the Cookie Monster actually was allowed to eat cookies, but both have changed.  Nowadays, are there enough children watching Sesame Street to allow for such inside-jokes? This isn’t a problem, per se, but just a reflection of our times.  You might even say, “The Market is Dead. Long Live the Market.”

  • 10 Ways Twitter Will Change American Small Business Forever

    1. Ultra-Local Marketing – direct communication between business owners and their local markets allows for business large and small to add a personal touch and an heir of transparency to give them a human edge in an increasingly no-touch technology world awash with noise.
    2. Networking Old-World Advertising – the still-successful outdoor advertising and television commercials are now being used in conjunction with Twitter to give businesses more ROI and feedback on ad placements and their effectiveness. Even without tie-ins, searches for responses on Twitter can sometimes be just as revealing.
    3. Uprooting Wall Street – think of the “Mad Money Effect” on steroids.  When people start talking about a stock and that it should be bought, it gets bought, and conversely, talk about selling leads to selling.  This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, but nevertheless is an effect of Twitter on business stocks.
    4. Making Blogs Relevant – blogs entered the scene in a huge way a few years back, but have since become mainstream and a bit of a victim of their own success.  Because of the ease of making blogs, their overall saturation is high and readership has suffered.  Enter Twitter: hyper-focused followings with links to blog posts of interests have made blogs more powerful than ever before.  Call it the SEO effect or not – Twitter is shaping how blogs are viewed as a resource around the world.
    5. New Ways to Gather Data – never before has there been a literal tap into the stream of consciousness as there is on Twitter.  A quick search on Twitter’s real-time search engine at http://search.twitter.com reveals whatever anyone was last thinking.  Businesses have an amazingly powerful research tool like never before.
    6. Helps TV, Radio, and Print Interact – when you see CNN co-anchoring Twitter side-by-side with the host of the show, you know Twitter has hit mainstream.  Twitter allows live television shows,  radio stations, and magazines get feedback on what they are doing, know what people think, and how they feel.
    7. Channeling Micropayments – Twitpay and services like it facilitate small loans or payments to companies or between individuals  and will extend the reach of operations like eBay’s (EBAY) PayPal. eBay, Amazon (AMZN) and other e-commerce companies will get a financial benefit from real-time micropayments.
    8. Changing Telecommunications – Telecom companies have chosen to manage user behavior by forcing customers to transfer voice, video and data on platforms that they can track. Twitter will force telecoms into a position similar to the one cable companies find themselves in.
    9. Government Interaction – Large government agencies will quickly realize that Twitter may be one of the single best ways to communicate with the public and may even mandate that Twitter participate in some programs to distribute emergency notices to citizens quickly like with the Emergency Broadcast System that was used to reach the public over radio and TV starting in 1963.
    10. Enhancing Charity – The Internet and the major products set up to use it are changing at a remarkable speed, permanently altering the way we live. Twitter could have as large a role in this transformation as Google and Facebook have had in the past decade.

  • Marketing Research for New Business Ideas Using Twitter

    I’m going to use Twitter as a marketing tool. I’m going to search for “wish there was a way to” “i would pay for” “i want but” and see what I come up with for possible products or services for a business.

    “wish there was a way to”

    twitter feature: stop following people for certain parts of the day
    wish there was a way to send one casting to all my model friends
    wish there was a way to download the “Dont stop believin” version from Glee!
    wish there was a way to connect my Flickr with my Twitter
    wish there was a way to pump gas without getting out of the car
    Wish there was a way to send you some of the heat here
    wish there was a way to “detect” the tweets of people near you.
     I like the Picnik editor on flickr, just wish there was a way to do a whole set at once
    Wish there was a way to convince people that we just need to keep offices at a normal temp when it’s hot. Not at absolute zero
    wish there was a way to mute the commentators without the background noise
    wish there was a way to create ‘groups’ of people to follow on twitter
    wish there was a way to order Showtime and HBO and nothing else.
    wish there was a way to really be as indestructable as i felt last week
    wish there was a way to sleep longer.
    wish there was a way to transfer a custom Google map you created (pins and all) to the iPhone Google map app
    WISH there was a way to permanently hide any news feed info relating to those “What kind of blah blah are you” quizzes on facebook.
    wish there was a way to download iTunes Pass content onto the iPhone.
    Wish there was a way to remote into a computer to enable vnc remote management
    wish there was a way to opt out of getting messages from some people in facebook. Seems like whey need a spam filter.
    wish there was a way to convert guitar tabs to ukulele tabs!
    wish there was a way to transport my Pandora stations to my car. Bump “the networks” lol
    wish there was a way to turn device updates off except for @ replies
    Wish there was a way to make that txt face with a fat lip 😉
    wish there was a way to post PDFs in #Facebook messages…
    wish there was a way to store up my morning energy and use it when Jude has his nap in the afternoon. So tired and so much to do.

    “i would pay for”

    I would pay for the NYT and did.
    @JetBlue, I would pay for WiFi! (As long as you also have outlets.)
    I would LOVE for a man to do that for me! I would pay for it lol Romance is dead in these dudes eyes because no many women are
    I would pay for some of them to come home and do nothing. Just to get them out of office
     #ubertwitter is best bb app I’ve used twitberry bbtweet yatca and tinytweet. I would pay for uber and will when beta is over
    i think i’m ready to start paying something for #twitter not alot, yet, but who wants to spend for fun? I would pay for technical support
    I would pay for an audio copy of the conversation that accompanied these actions. =D http://tise.io/7a60c2
    I would pay for 8 hours of uninterrupted snoozy times.
     @hodgman I wouldn’t pay for a song, but I would pay for you to record the message on my answering machine.
     @TweetDeck I so wish my settings/groups were Global and updated the app no matter where I signed in… I would pay for that
    might let the s15 go the insurance/repayments on it is about the same as what I would pay for a wrx with a secured loan
    I would pay for the data plan.
    is there anyway to win backstage passes? cos i really wanna see enrique so bad, or i would pay for them?
    You know, I just had that same thought! I would PAY for a better Twitter to stamp out spam & crap! lol!
    I would pay for my college
     I love my xm! Never thought I would pay for radio but boy do I love it!:)
    lol true but i don’t know if I would pay for twitter though…
    it’s days like this i would pay for someone to bath me.
     I would pay for content online. Frankly, I’m surprised that it has been “free” this long! Make it easy and really QUICK to pay.
    It is free, and really good, so can’t complain. They have to monetize somehow. I would pay for no ads TwitterFon.
     i would pay for a megavideo subscription if i wasn’t 10000% sure that they’d spam my inbox & usps mailbox with crap.
    tanning rocks..i would pay for it but i like the sun..cheaper ahah
     I take it back – TwittedFon app update starts with last 20 tweets and stores everything from there. Ads still blow. I would pay for pro ver

    “I want but”

    Working on my book list…so many I want but how many do I need?
    Buy all the T-Shirt Hell shirts I want but can afford and then spend the rest on a strippers and booze.
    I know what i want but dont know how to get it.
    Thinking about things I want but cant have… Because life is just that way?
    Dont know what i want but i know its not you. I know in my heart its not.     <<<—-OUCH!