Solving Problems Consumers Don’t Know They Have

February 27, 2010

About a year ago, Amazon.com’s vice president of electronics, Paul Ryder, told me that some of the most successful consumer electronics newcomers solved problems people didn’t know they had.
The Flip video camera, with its USB plug-and-play feature gets video onto the computer simply and immediately, without cables or additional software.
The Eye-Fi wireless memory card sends [...]

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Required Reading

February 26, 2010

Online product reviews, written by consumers for consumers, are one of the Internet’s greatest influences on consumer electronics.
They help people understand how their peers use the products they’re considering. They allow consumers to tell their stories. They create a flow of communication from peer to peer. Here’s what’s great. This product is a ripoff. Here’s [...]

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Pulling A Meredith

February 25, 2010

The Wall Street Journal writes today that magazine publisher Meredith, whose print advertising has “plunged” 15 percent in the last year, has raised a successful digital ad business. Sold to the same clients that aren’t advertising in its magazines, this unit’s revenue are up 13 percent – to the tune of $175 million, the WSJ [...]

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The Power of Consumer Stories

February 24, 2010

For one of the only times in this long Toyota investigation, a consumer driver’s story was brought to light yesterday during congressional testimony. A driver of a runaway Toyota told her story. It was captivating and terrifying and incredibly powerful.
“I lost all control of the vehicle… I put it into reverse, and it remains in [...]

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How to Price Consumer Electronics

February 23, 2010

This is a compilation and expansion of several previous posts on pricing consumer electronics.
Because they are trained by you, consumers have preconceived notions about an appropriate price range for your products. People expect various categories of consumer electronics to fall within certain price ranges.
A 50-inch LCD HDTV shouldn’t cost $7,500. You can price it [...]

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You Won’t Reach Mainstream Consumers On Twitter

February 22, 2010

The more I use Twitter, the more I realize that mainstream consumers are not there.
They’re on Facebook.
But they’re not on Twitter.
So if you’re a consumer company using Twitter to reach the mainstream — moms and dads, grandmas and grandpas; people with jobs, responsibilities and mortgages — Twitter won’t get you there.
It WILL get you to [...]

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Easy is Missing

February 20, 2010

One of the elements most missing in consumer electronics is EASY.  Just three examples out of an unlimited pool:

Model numbers are horrific in our industry, meaning nothing to anybody except the manufacturers’ engineers.
Digital camcorders in their current form won’t make it in the mainstream because the digital video process is so difficult.  You have to [...]

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Problems with Pricing

February 19, 2010

In the last post, I introduced the Consumer Pricing Expectations Range (CPER).
People have an expectation of how much your kind of product should cost. Whether a netbook or 50-inch LCD, your best chance at success is to price within the CEPR.
If your pricing is above the range, these are the immediate issues:

People have other, more [...]

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The Consumer Pricing Expectation Range

February 18, 2010

In my system for creating consumer electronics evangelists, I state that pricing must be appropriate. Lets discuss appropriate.
Consumers have an expectation range when it comes to pricing. It’s possible to adjust their range upwards through a combination of terrific marketing and evangelists. But you need to have both:

Apple has successfully adjusted the consumer pricing expectations [...]

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Apple’s Pricing

February 17, 2010

When Guy Kawasaki posted my Creating Consumer Electronics process on his Alltop blog, one of the commenters said I “blew it out of the gate” (this is bad, I think) when I wrote that pricing must be appropriate. Too high, and you price yourself outside of consumer comfort (the risk becomes too big to pull [...]

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