Skip to main content

Discipline in Marketing Communications

When I tell people about Guy Kawasaki's 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint, the reaction is often shock and disbelief. How can anyone possibly adhere to those guidelines, they ask?

Effective marketing communication requires discipline. The temptation is always there to

  • Describe features instead of benefits.
  • Tout too many benefits.
  • Put more on the brochure rather than less.
  • Use different messages and themes in different communications.
  • Appeal to everyone (i.e. no one) instead of a targeted market segment.
The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint is an example of a set of disciplinary guidelines. It counters the temptations of creators of presentations to create too many slides, make presentations too long, and put too much on each slide.

Your product manager can play a constructive role in maintaining discipline in marketing communications. She can provide input to, and provide feedback on, the collateral prepared by marcom folks. She can also suggest disciplinary guidelines to counter the temptations that lead marketing communications astray.

Possible disciplinary guidelines include:

  • Focus on benefits instead of features.
  • Tout no more than three benefits.
  • Place limits on font sizes.
  • Mention certain key messages in every communication.
  • Offend or turn someone off who is not in the target market.
Since these guidelines counter natural instincts, marketing communications folks may balk at them. It's important that you and your product manager educate the organization about the reasons for them.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Why Spreadsheets Suck for Prioritizing

The Goal As a company executive, you want confidence that your product team (which includes all the people, from all departments, responsible for product success) has a sound basis for deciding which items are on the product roadmap. You also want confidence the team is prioritizing the items in a smart way. What Should We Prioritize? The items the team prioritizes could be features, user stories, epics, market problems, themes, or experiments. Melissa Perri  makes an excellent case for a " problem roadmap ", and, in general, I recommend focusing on the latter types of items. However, the topic of what types of items you should prioritize - and in what situations - is interesting and important but beyond the scope of this blog entry. A Sad but Familiar Story If there is significant controversy about priorities, then almost inevitably, a product manager or other member of the team decides to put together The Spreadsheet. I've done it. Some of the mos

5 Ways Companies Make Product Decisions

In the last blog entry, we reviewed the  four problems that companies face, or are trying to overcome, as they make product decisions .  Now we'll look at the ways that most companies make their product decisions. Companies that develop, market, and sell products and solutions make strategic and ongoing tactical decisions.  They decide what features to include in their products, what messages they will use to communicate the value of their products, what marketing tactics they will use, what prospective customers they will target, and many day-to-day choices. Whether or not these decisions are deliberate or ad hoc, most companies use some combination of the following ways of making product decisions. (A downloadable "map" that summarizes the product decision landscape is included at the end of this article.) Customer Wants Product decisions based on feature requests, focus groups, and what prospects and customers say they want. Companies are selling products to

Is Customer Development Pseudoscience?

The “Science” of Lean Startup Lean startup practitioners embrace the scientific method, seeking the "truth" about what business model and strategy will lead to product success. We do so by: Formulating hypotheses Crafting and running experiments to test them Learning from the experiments Iteratively feeding our learnings back into revised hypotheses Sounds pretty scientific, at least in spirit, doesn't it? Yet this process actually neglects a key ingredient in the scientists' mode of operation. To identify what’s missing, let’s examine “customer development”. Customer Development Steve Blank is one of the pioneers of the lean startup movement. He introduced into the lean startup lexicon the term “customer development”. Customer development consists of sessions and interactions with customers to test hypotheses. For example, a product manager might interview a prospect, asking if she agrees with the product manager’s hypotheses about the problem