How to get customers to adopt the new, the novel, the cutting edge.

Lets face it, we crave the new. And we are at a point in time in our society where new ideas and products are brought to market faster than ever. Across the globe, there are more patents filed, resulting in more stuff in our homes than ever before.
Marketers are increasingly asked to not just expand share of existing products and services, but to launch and drive adoption of the new, the novel, the cutting edge.
How can a great marketer cope? What are the activities you should undertake to launch a new product or initiative successfully?
Check out the rest of the article on LinkedIn to discover Sesame Street simple tips to

• Define your product
• Identify your target customers
• Assess your competitor's positioning

Every Successful Product Launch Starts with Defining your Customer

Defining your audience - although seemingly obvious to any good marketer - can be a challenging step for many teams launching a new product or service. It can be especially challenging at Visa, where our products and services ultimately need to appeal to billions of consumers, millions of merchants and thousands of financial, technology, and service partners across our global ecosystem. When the world is your oyster, everyone is a potential customer.

Customer definition is challenging — but it's vital to growth.

When product teams first engage with sales, business development, marketing and/or communications teams, it is quite common that there is a lack of definition and clarity in regards to who a particular product or offering is for. Creating and building a new product is very challenging, and the competitive realities to launch products as fast as possible often result in opportunistic rather than strategic customer acquisition efforts.

As articulated in the Granularity of Growth, “[companies] must either grow or go”, and launching new products and services is critical to find and identify new sources of revenue. To “invest in markets you don’t currently serve”, Viguerie, Smit and Baghai recommend identifying new growth segments “in terms of product categories, consumer segments, geographic markets, or some other dimension.” One of the defining themes in the Granularity of Growth is "the finer the granularity of the analysis, the better the insights for informing the growth direction will be."

To learn more about how to successfully launch, market and drive adoption of new products and services, please read the rest of the article: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/every-successful-product-launch-starts-defining-your-customer-jacoby/ 

Tigers sleep through World Series

The San Frnacisco Giants won the 2012 world series by sweeping the Tigers four games to none.  Many baseball "experts' predicted that the Tigers would win the world series given their dominant combination of pitching and offense.

The Tigers steam rolled the Yankees, sweeping them in four games during the ALCS to get into the world series.  Whereas the Giants seem to create luck, coming back from a 3 wins to 1 loss deficit to beat the Reds 4 games to 3 in the best of seven.

Many believed the additional time off, would give Tigers rest and enable them to set their rotation to ensure its better pitchers, Justin Verlander and Doug Fister for games 1 and 2.  However some in the baseball world wondered whether the Tigers would come into the World Series, potentially losing their edge given the extended time off, putting them at a disadvantage.

Sabermeticians argue that the number of days off have no impact on the performance of a team during the World Series.  However, the data is starting to demonstrate otherwise.  On offense the Tigers looked terrible, getting shutout twice, trailed the giants in 56 straight innings, and as a team batted an abysmal .159, the third worst team batting average in World Series History.

From ESPN: http://scores.espn.go.com/mlb/recap?gameId=321028106

Flat Bats

Hitting .159, the Tigers finished with the third worst batting average by a team in a single World Series all-time. Here's how they compare:

Team	Batting Average
1966 Dodgers	.142
1969 Orioles	.146
2012 Tigers	.159
1905 Athletics	.161
1963 Yankees	.171
-- Each team lost series -- ESPN Stats & Information

Since 1969, there have been four world series featuring a match between a team who swept their opponent in the League Championship Series competing against a team which went all seven in the League Championship Series to get into the World Series.

Year    AL Team                                         NL Team                                             
1988   Oakland A's  (swept Red Sox)           Los Angeles Dodgers (beat Mets in 7)
2006   Detroit Tigers (swept A's)                  St. Louis Cardinals (beat Mets in 7)
2007  Boston Red Sox (beat Yankees in 7)  Colorado Rockies (swept Diamondbacks)
2012  Detroit Tigers (swept Yankees)          San Francisco Giants (beat Reds in 7)

All four teams who swept their opponents in the LCS, lost the World Series.

1. Dodgers beat A's in 1988
2. Cardinals beat Tigers in 2006
3. Red Sox beat Rockies in 2007
4. Giants beat Tigers in 2012

It may be wise to lose game 4, when you are up on your opponent three games to none in the LCS.  Of course, two of the teams were the Tigers.  Maybe, the Tigers should be the first to try it out to see if it alters their World Series fortune.

Phoenix Breweries

A couple weekends ago I went to Phoenix, AZ to visit my moms. Sorry, no work involved on this gig...strictly for fun. But I did take the time to visit a few different breweries on a cool Sunday afternoon, with my mom of all peeps, and we had a great time.

I had full samplers from Santan Brewery and SunUp Brewery. I had pictures to share, but somehow they got deleted from my iphone. Next time I'll blog in a more timely manner, promise.

Santan had a great atmosphere, the head bartender had been there since the beginning, a whole three months and was pumped on talking beer with me. He suggested that we check out SunUp next and so we did.

SunUp has been around for a while, the waitress falsely claimed that they were the largest micro brewery in the US. I tried to dig in a little more on her facts, but she firmly believed in the SunUp Kool-Aid. I gave her a pass since she was kind of cute and got her phone number so that I could properly educate her, since the facts she was spouting were a bit crooked.

Last stop was the Four Peaks Brewery. A quaint little place that was much quieter than the other two establishments, but it had a decent beer selection and some home made root beer for my mom.

Overall, it wasn't the great Northwest, but there is some interesting beers being brewed down in the desert. Looking forward to my Spring Training visit.