Crossing the line on creepy: Tuesday’s Daily Brief
Plus product roles in marketing tech acquisition and Toluna's expanded offering.
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Good morning, Marketers, and are you being creepy?
No, I’m sure you’re not, but you know what I mean. Over the last few days, I’ve had one of those personalized marketing experiences which, if it doesn’t cross the line, gets pretty close.
As a journalist covering marketing and technology, I often have cause to look up a vendor or product I’ve not heard of before. One of our contributors filed a story this week containing one brief reference to a vendor with an unusual name. Simply to check the spelling (and whether it was really yet another proper name beginning with a lowercase letter), I did a quick Google search. That’s all. I didn’t explore the vendor’s website, download a white paper, or put on a t-shirt saying “Intent!”
That one Google search generated a steady stream of ads for the vendor — but on my personal social media. My Chrome browser activity triggered Instagram ads. It’s a waste of marketing dollars for the vendor, of course, but it’s also the kind of strategy — take someone who is barely even top of funnel and flood them with messages — that puts buyers off.
Kim Davis
Editorial Director
Understanding different product roles in marketing technology acquisition
The relationship between internal stakeholders and a technology solution under evaluation, deployment or management, is far from simple. Different kinds of product roles are involved and it’s important to understand them, writes marketing operations specialist Steve Petersen in his latest contribution to MarTech.
“There are plenty of different types of product roles out there, and they are certainly confusing at times,” he writes. As with anything in life, there are variations from situation to situation… This explanation pulls from the specific methodologies that I’ve been exposed to and trained in, and hopefully this explanation will help distinguish these closely related roles in a way that helps explain how they fit into the martech space.”
Steve identifies and explains the following roles: product sponsor, product owner and product manager, and examines some of the similarities and differences between owners and managers. “There are rarely pure textbook implementations of these methodologies,” he admits. “A product owner may work with several development teams. A product manager may oversee a portfolio of products while their counterparts at another organization may only deal with one. Theory rarely fits the real world with consistency.”
Toluna expands product insight methodologies
Consumer insights and market research platform Toluna announced the addition of new research-related tools, or methodologies, available within their Toluna Start suite. The new capabilities include needs identification, ideation and claims testing solutions.
With these new tools, marketers can tap vetted consumer panels for marketing strategy as well as product development. They can also add their own customer lists and apply the same methodologies using these existing customers.
For example, Sony wanted to make sure that customers were satisfied with new TVs post-purchase, so they loaded their 4K TV purchasers into the system. This process helped them identify a flaw in the wall mount that could be corrected at scale for their customers.
Why we care. Digital communications bring customers closer to brands in many different ways. It can be difficult, though, to separate product insights, for example, from customer service inquiries, when they’re all coming in through the same chat app or customer hotline.
A solution like Toluna’s puts brands back in the driver’s seat and draws on the biggest advantage gained by instant communication — time. If a company’s development team is in the ideation stage, they can turn around research in a matter of days, and move the product forward to the next step in the lifecycle.
Marketers know that in many cases digital transformation has shortened the buy cycle. It can do the same for product development and research, as well.
Quote of the day
“GTM is not demand generation. A critical component of GTM is identifying the needs of industries, markets, segments and/or accounts and then building solutions around it. Many companies build products and then try to find a market to serve/fit into and wonder why churn, demand or their ‘demand engine’ isn’t working.” Scott Vaughan, CMO and growth accelerator
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About the author
Kim was Associate Editor at a New York Times hyper-local news site, The Local: East Village, and has previously worked as an editor of an academic publication, and as a music journalist. He has written hundreds of New York restaurant reviews for a personal blog, and has been an occasional guest contributor to Eater.