marketing – StartUpArabia

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

April 19, 2009April 19, 2009 MMM

For years, marketers have talked and continue to talk about the “five Ps” (in fact, there are more than five, but everyone picks their favorite ones): product, pricing, promotion, positioning, publicity, packaging, pass along, permission…etc.

With time these became the components of a basic marketing checklist, a formula that people followed time and again to make sure they’ve done their job, and hopefully create success.

Seth Godin argues that it’s time to add an exceptionally important new P to the list: Purple Cow.

In his book “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable“, he makes the point that cows, after you’ve seen one, or two, or ten, are boring. A Purple Cow, though…now that would be something, that would definitely stand out and grab your attention.

Purple Cow describes something phenomenal, something counterintuitive and exciting and flat out unbelievable. Every day, consumers come face to face with a lot of boring stuff-a lot of brown cows-but you can bet they won’t forget a Purple Cow. And he argues that it’s not a marketing function that you can slap on to your product or service; Purple Cow is inherent, It’s built right into the product from the beginning, or it’s not there.

In Purple Cow, Seth Godin urges everyone to put a Purple Cow into everything they build, and everything they do, to create something truly noticeable, that basically markets itself and makes people want to talk about it and spread it.

Purple Cow is a fun and really interesting book to read for anyone involved in building new products and launching them, offering an exciting way of looking at things and approaching product definition, development and marketing.

[Amazon: Purple Cow (Seth Godin)]

Jeeran Launches Web Statistics & Analysis Tool ‘Jeeran Visitors’

December 22, 2008December 22, 2008 MMM 4 Comments

Jeeran, the Middle East’s largest UGC community, just announced the launch of a new web statistics and marketing tool called Jeeran Visitors that allows bloggers and users to get insights about the traffic on their blogs and content on Jeeran’s different services.

“Visitors”, features statistics and charts of the number of visitors each page/blog receives, with the ability to track number of pageviews, top viewed content, visitors’ countries, and much more .

Jeeran, Arabic for neighbors, is a pioneer Arab online community that offers a variety of web 2.0 services including blogging, photo and video sharing, as well as web hosting, aiding individuals to create their own presence on the internet, with minimum technical knowledge.

The launch of Visitors comes to complement Jeeran’s vision that aims to offer a unique and complete user experience to their users.

Commenting on the new tool, Laith Zraikat, Director of Innovation and Co-Founder of Jeeran.com, said: “We are so excited about Visitors as it puts our users in control, it’s very user-friendly and easy to operate, and it doesn’t need any installation or technical efforts.”

Mr. Zraikat also added: “With the growing popularity of user-generated-content communities such as Jeeran, bloggers and websites owners, as well as photo and video sharing enthusiasts, are in need for a free and reliable tool to evaluate their contribution to the web.”

Over the past few years, the community of Jeeran grew-up to host more than one million active users, in addition to 650,000 websites, and a growing community of bloggers that exceeded 120,000 blogs, the largest blog community in the Arab world.

Omar Kudsi, Jeeran’s President and Co-Founder welcomed the launch of Visitors, and quoted: “Our tracking system is user-friendly and comes in both Arabic and English, which offers a convenient Arabic-language tool to measure visitors and traffic.”

Mr. Zraikat pointed out that Visitors is already available for all users on Jeeran without the need of any installation, he also stressed on the fact that many features will be added to the system soon.

Kudsi concluded: “We strive to offer Arab users a top notch web experience that empowers them to contribute, communicate and interact, and Visitors is just the beginning of a series of features and products in the pipeline.”

The First, The Best, The Only…

June 11, 2008June 11, 2008 MMM 12 Comments

There is a certain mindset that a number of businesses still have and marketing people seem to continue to base their efforts on, even though I think it’s quite a wrong and misleading approach; it’s the idea of claiming that they are the first, the best, the only or whatever other superlative they can come up with.

If you think of it, do these words really mean anything at all?

What does it mean if a company is the first to offer a certain product or service, if the second or third are doing it much better? It’s clear being first doesn’t necessarily mean having the best solution; It does show experience in some cases, but having experience without using it to roll out a quality product adds up to nothing really.

The best? Who said so? It’s definitely not for businesses to claim anyway. Being the best is really relative, and it’s up to the client to decide which solution fits their specific personal needs the best.
Many varying factors come into play that define what any given client views as the perfect solution for their needs, and obviously there isn’t one answer to everyone’s requirements.

And finally is there really anyone doing anything online that they’re the only ones doing? Unless it’s a totally useless or crazy idea, chances are a number of other people have already thought about it too, and have either launched a similar project or will be launching it soon enough. And even if the business does manage to be the first at something, it’s basically only a matter of time before someone rolls out something similar, if not better.

So obviously these superlatives mean nothing at all, and all they do is take the focus off what really matters: building a great product.

What I’d love to hear more businesses honestly saying is: “We’ve listened to your needs, we’ve done our very best to meet them, and here’s how…”

Where Is Your Target Audience?

May 5, 2008May 5, 2008 MMM

A very big and important question that every entrepreneur faces, or that they must ask themselves if it doesn’t come naturally, is: What is their target audience?

In answering that question, entrepreneurs mainly get into details about certain demographics and break down their target market into numerous categories; which is all great, really necessary and very important.

In a web context, it gets even more complicated, because it adds a bigger factor of location into the decisions that have to be taken, and entrepreneurs have to decide how open or closed to the world their new business should be.

If we take the case of Arab entrepreneurs launching their online businesses:

Should they target local internet users in the country they’re based in?
After all, they’re close, they have access to them offline too, they know more or less how they think, or at least it’s easier to get the information they need through local market research and studies, and well they’re part of the market and they know it pretty well; in other words: it just feels safer.

Or should they expand it just a bit to the whole Arab region?
Even if every Arab country has its own different considerations and unique culture, they’re not really all that different, they more or less share the same economic situations, they have the same backgrounds and very close traditions: it just feels quite predictable and controllable.

Or should they just take the jump and try to take it global?
After all, they’re online, they potentially have access to every connected person around the world, it’s an ocean of opportunity, so why limit themselves?

The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell)

May 3, 2008May 3, 2008 MMM

Every entrepreneur’s dream is to see their new product or service catch on, break into the mainstream and reach widespread adoption. Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘The Tipping Point‘, published in 2002, talks about just that: the point where products, services, messages or ideas tip over and become a big success.

The book explores the concept of “epidemics” and how ideas, products, messages and behaviors spread just like viruses do, and what it is that makes them tip over and become an epidemic; starting from the influential kinds of people who can spread the message, to the stickiness of the message itself and the context in which it came to exist.

The book also discusses the three pivotal types of personalities that trigger “word-of-mouth epidemics” and help spread the message: Connectors, sociable personalities who bring people together; Mavens, who like to pass along knowledge; and Salesmen, adept at persuading the unenlightened.

It’s a very interesting read and provides a new way of thinking for how to handle promoting a product, idea or message; and how to eventually make it a success.

The book is very well written, in a really simple style, explaining the different concepts and ideas and giving a number of examples to illustrate everything, making the discussed points even clearer.

This book is recommended to every entrepreneur looking to build an effective marketing strategy for their new business; it really gives you a new perspective and line of thought that is very interesting and could help enormously in generating the required buzz around your ideas and creating a hype around your products, which should eventually result in more sales and success.

# The Tipping Point – Malcolm Gladwell