From the Desk of John Kumpunen

Authentic marketing is not the art of selling what you make but knowing what to make. It is the art of identifying and understanding customer needs and creating solutions that deliver satisfaction to the customers, profits to the producers and benefits for the stakeholders. — Philip Kotler

2. As an inventor/designer myself with umpteen prototypes per project, it takes a big boy to say: “My product sucks, I need to improve it, and make it so good it sells itself” . We tend to become so wrapped our own designs, it’s very difficult to step back and rethink from scratch.

It takes even a bigger boy to admit your service sucks because people aren’t raving about it. Because your inbox isn’t filled with Thank-You notes. Because they don’t send you tons of unsolicited testimonials.

… but, in these days of choking super-competition, it is an extremely healthy operational baseline. Assume failure (and statistically you’re right) and figure out what you would have done differently. What would have made you the new Google?

Start from there. If it is a good B-list product or service (you get a few unsolicited testimonials), make it into an A-list product by improving it, by educating your target audience, and by communicating your USP better, and by simply asking a million questions from our buyers. Just one of these tactics increased one website sales 10x in 6 months.

assume that you are going to fail (not necessarily because you suck, but) simply because your target audience is being choked by the same-old-same-old

now think what would have made a difference — more education, more face-to-face, more grab, more honesty, less greed … what would have made you the talk of the town and created a line-up of life-time customers?

WOM-selling: what would have made your customers rave about your service or products?

There is no magic formula… but if you ask 50 of your customers what they think, you have an idea of trends; if you ask 1000 of your customers, you have a pretty good gauge on millions of people.

You need to smoke the peace-pipe with your customers, ask them a million questions and somewhere between their lies, their trying to please you, and their honest answers is the the Product, the Mind-share Positioning, and the Tested Selling Sentence that rock their world.

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