Every year I take a step back to look at the solutions we’re providing. The goal is to ensure the holistic, “big picture” results DistinctAV is known for are being achieved. In an industry as complex as ours, it’s important to stay one step ahead so we can avoid the rise and fall of all the over-hyped products.
Here’s a summary of my most recent assessment: (more…)
Marketing is the art and science of determining what people want to buy and how to advertise it to appeal to their needs.
Product manufacturers often miss the connection between marketing and product development.
Many OEMs have Product Development and Sales/Advertising teams. When the CEO wants more sales volume, they often add Business Development teams filled with the top sales people they can find.
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The single biggest complaint I hear from really smart custom electronics integrators is: “Every time we try a new system, it looks great at first but then we find its limitations.”
Next thing from their mouth is usually “…and they don’t seem to care about what we are asking for.”
Welcome to NIH Syndrome (Not Invented Here).
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A few months ago I switched all our IT infrastructure to Google Apps and other cloud solutions. The results have been tremendously successful and beneficial in many ways. Maintenance is reduced, quality of service has improved, and more importantly–we can focus on the actual work instead of the computer tools necessary to do the work. Anti-spam systems are still a hindrance but that’s a story for another day.
The Google Model focuses on doing the few things that are most important–and doing them very well. They looked at how people work and realized it’s the collaboration that’s important. Google Docs allows people to share and collaborate on a document’s content in real time meaning the results of the collaboration can be achieved faster with better results. It even stores revisions of your work so you can easily look back at what changed by all the collaborators. Again, important features based on NEED not BLING.
What they didn’t do is add lots of features that aren’t important. You can’t do typesetting-level formatting for example.
But really…do we NEED to make our working documents look presentation-ready? Shouldn’t we be focusing on getting the content right and communicating clearly with our team and our clients?
So how does this apply to home electronics?
There’s a frustrating trend in product development that results in products that do not completely satisfy the consumer.
Product designers strongly consider Sales Features as part of the Functional Requirements. The sale takes a tin fraction of the product’s lifecycle, whereas the product is typically expected to perform its other tasks for many years.
I’m not saying sales should not be considered but it should not be the leading decision factor.