Guest blog post by Greg Strosaker As the Lean Startups blog grows, I want to start bringing in other subject matter experts to help better serve my readers. Therefore, I am very excited to introduce Greg Strosaker as my first guest contributor. Greg, who previously worked for 13 years with General Electric as an engineer, has spent the past four years heading up marketing at several small- to mid-size material and industrial equipment firms. Greg also runs the Constant Cogitation blog, where he discusses marketing, strategy, and leadership topics.
Since my last post drew some attention from the marketing folks (and struck a nerve of those who refuse to grow and evolve), I wanted to bring in the perspective of someone in a different industry who makes a living from marketing.
I wasn’t able to make it to LaunchCamp Boston today, but was still able to virtually participate via the live video and Twitter streams. During a discussion on Twitter with two great marketing folks, Bobbie Carlton and Rachel Levy, I made several remarks…
A problem we’ve all seen too often is when a product or service is dreamed up, and no one wants to buy it. Most of us can list four or five examples of this right away. These duds should have been abandoned before too much time and money was invested.
One of the biggest branding/marketing failures I have seen in my career was due to decisions made in a vacuum. The founders were all fired up about the new strategy, but they failed to market it to the staff. They were the only people in the company who were involved in the process. Worse yet, since founders never really sold the service, they had no idea how customers perceived the brand. Staff refused to use new marketing materials and new terminology. It took a while, but founders had to go back to the drawing board after dumping all that money. Unfortunately, money was not the only resource wasted. Morale took a huge hit too.
Apolinaras is a business operations leader with 12-year track record of building scalable and capital-efficient operations for technology and professional services companies.