John's Music Blog

I ran into one of my acquaintances at Storage Networking World, and as we talked about the marketing needs of one of my clients, he suggested a book called “The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.”  He promised it was a quick read, so, on his recommendation, I ordered it from the local Barnes and Noble.  It’s got a 4-stars reader ranking on Amazon, but in keeping with the theme of “you can’t please all people,” the 100+ comments range from, “If an entrepreneur or sales person reads only one book on marketing, this would be it.” to “…there are a few small pearls to be gathered, but digging through the muck to find them makes them difficult to spot.”  The book was published in 1994, so some of the examples are a bit dated, but it is interesting to see how the authors’ predictions played out.  My favorite was the decline of Sears, which in a bit of irony merged with Kmart.

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My early-October blog entry on market development has sparked a good number of responses, but all through e-mail.  Again, I’m going to pass along an anonymous comment that came in last week, while I was in Dallas at Storage Networking World.  Here it is, unedited… (more…)

Thanks to the miracle of RSS readers, one of my readers was alerted to and then responded to yesterday’s post.  Though it would have been nice to have him post it directly in the comments section, he did give me permission to republish his comments.  So here it is, name withheld, formatted, but otherwise unabridged: (more…)

I’ve been thinking about this question more and more lately.  Who should drive product development?  Personally, I see three possibilities, and, in my opinion, only one is correct:

1. Sales
2. Engineering
3. Marketing

For the most part, I tend to think of these issues for technology companies, since that’s the area where I work. But I could as easily ask this question in the restaurant business, though I would substitute “the chef” for “engineering.”   In fact, let me do that, just in case one of my technology clients, through their own self evaluation, thinks they recognize themselves in the example and mistakenly thinks I’m criticizing them personally.

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