Gelbart Kahana Global Marketing» analysts

A Conversation with Gideon Gartner

Nancy Shapira — Sat, 01 May 2010 08:37:29 +0000

I recently posted a comment on Gideon Gartner’s new blog and ended it with an invitation to let me know if he is ever in Tel Aviv to meet up. The next day I got an email from Gideon that he was in Tel Aviv and would I like to meet him for coffee. Whereas some people would get excited at meeting a rock star–for me–an AR Consultant and pioneer in Israel–Gideon Gartner is my rock star. I met him and his lovely wife Sarah in Tel Aviv and we had an extended chat that included his questions about how I stated my AR business in Israel, the origin of the Magic Quadrant as an internal not an external document and logistics of getting to the local TedEx event. I expressed my opinion that the Gartner model has huge brand value but the real threat to that model will be the new,open models like RedMonk and others and not a competitor like Forrester. Only time will tell and I wait eagerly for Gideon’s book to hear more gossip and tidbits on the creation of one of the best brands in history.

My take on Forrester’s Purchase of Strategic Oxygen

Nancy Shapira — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 10:47:53 +0000

Although this didnt make the splash that Gartner’s of AMR acquisition did- it signals a move towards more go-to-market tools for clients. I believe that this is a move that makes sense to a lot of marketing people who need real tools to quantify their decisions. Unfortunately it will not be a part of Forrester’s membership so it comes at extra cost.. Some answers to your questions on the acquisition by Forrester: http://www.forrester.com/sofaq

Getting the New Product Launch Right

Nancy Shapira — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:27:51 +0000

I found this post on the Frost and Sullivan website with important information and guidelines to use BEFORE launching a new product. This is geared to technology companies and unfortunately is a step that is skipped by too many people. Investing time and money in doing market research first does pay off in the end.

Many new products are launched into the marketplace with little prior planning for targeting the customers, creating a sales strategy, developing a distribution strategy, training the sales force, and integrating the competitive strategy. This mistake significantly reduces or eliminates any potential profit the product may have, and greatly increases the sales development time. These problems must be avoided if a company wants to survive in today’s competitive marketplace.

10 Ways Market Engineering Can Help Make New Product Launches More Successful

Identifying the best customer segments for penetration
Positioning the product successfully against competition
Optimizing impact of sales strategy
Creating a system to maximize sales leads while minimizing marketing expense
Basing sales strategy on customer benefits rather than features
Making the team market-driven rather than technologically-driven
Setting sales goals based on market potential, not staff’s guesses
Reducing sales development time and maximizing profit
Improving market efficiency
Identifying optimal mix of marketing tools and distribution channels to maximize sales

Market Engineering Checklist for Product Launch

Market Engineering cross-functional team training
Determination of Market Engineering Measurements
Completion of customer survey
Focus group performance
Beta sites on product
Selection of distribution channels analyzed
Sales targets based on market size and potential
Design of lead generation programs
Design of market-based pricing strategy
Lead tracking systems
Design of public relations strategy
Design of sales strategy
Design of marketing strategy
Competitive analysis and benchmarking
Design of customer database
Development of customer database
Design of market monitoring system
Buying, reading, and implementing Customer Engineering

Challenge Questions

Into what market will the product be launched?
What customer segments will purchase the product?
For what applications will the customer use the product?
Into what geographic segments will be sold?
What are the benefits for the customers?
What is the price/performance ratio relative to the competition?
Who are the principle competitors?
What will make your product unique in the market?
What percentage market share is targeted at end of year 1 and year 3?
What percentage of the customer base currently uses this product?
From what distribution channels do customers purchase today, by percentage?
What influences the customer’s decision to buy?
How will competitors position themselves against this product?
What is your sales strategy?
What is your marketing strategy?
What Measurement of Performance will you use to track success?

Are Analysts Becoming More Pay for Play?

Nancy Shapira — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:52:43 +0000

I have heard twice in the last week from clients and potential clients that they believe that analysts will only write about you, put you in the Magic Quadrant, Wave, etc. if you are a member. Although I have many examples of clients that were not members of analyst groups and still got great coverage–this opinion still exists out there…What is your opnion on this? Has the economic situation pushed the analysts towards a more agressive selling position?

Do you Know What’s The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers?

Nancy Shapira — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 18:53:30 +0000

Do you Know What’s The Social Technographics Profile Of Your Customers?

Forrester has a VERY cool tool to identify your target customer and determine what kind of relationship you want to build with them.

Forrester’s Social Technographics® classifies consumers into six overlapping levels of participation.

http://www.forrester.com/Groundswell/profile_tool.html
Ready to embed

The Worldwide Blogging Tour

Nancy Shapira — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 08:02:00 +0000

PositioningPower has been chosen as the Israeli representative for the Worldwide Blogging Tour! What is the worldwide bloggers tour?

“Each week in 2009 on Mastercom blog, I will add: a new post presenting a blogger from a new country + its blog> a new spot on the worldwide map> a new flag. So hopefully I will cover 52 countries during 2009.Who can participate?If you are a blogger (about about marketing, advertising, communication, viral marketing, design) and the flag of your country is not in, please feel free to contact me to participate or request to join this group on Facebook.Below you can search a blog about marketing, advertising, communication, viral marketing, design and its blogger just by clicking on the flag you are interested in.You can either click on a flag to see the info about the blog and its blogger or use the the map by clicking the wanted location to see the post or read all the posts here.”

How Analyst Relations Can Boost Your Company’s Sales

Nancy Shapira — Sun, 31 May 2009 12:58:00 +0000

Upcoming Event: Thursday, June 11th, 9:00-12:00
Workshop on How Analyst Relations Can Boost your Sales
Place: Gelbart Kahana Offices, Azrieli Towers, Triangle Tower, 38th Floor, Israel
Agenda: 9:00 – Networking
9:30 -How AR Can Boost Your Company’s Sales
10:00- Case Studies
10:45- Tips and Tools for Effective AR
11:30- Q&A
For: Marketing Managers, Marcom Managers, VP Marketing, VP BizDev and Strategy, PR Managers of technology companies.
Please come with your questions and case studies to share.
Cost: 150 Shekels
Limited to 25 people only: RSVP to: nancy@gk-biz.com or 03-6070588

A Threat to Analyst Groups?

Nancy Shapira — Sun, 31 May 2009 07:51:00 +0000

Tech Crunch has moved into the Analyst/Research Group space with their new venture: Tech Crunch Research offering either single reports at $149 or an annual subscription at $450..
RedMonk was the first opensource analyst firm and their tagline is : Analysis for the people,by the people. They offer their research for free and sell their consulting hours based on the company size, use of research and ability to pay.
I see this as the business model of the future for the big guys also-Forrester and Gartner. The subscription model has a limited lifetime as a business model since everything else in the IT and Marketing world is moving towards transparency. I am guessing that Forrester will be the first to move and Gartner the last–but it will happen.

Free Whitepapers on Analyst Relations

Nancy Shapira — Mon, 11 May 2009 07:05:00 +0000

Check out KCG’s website for free whitepapers on Analyst Relations. We recommend the Guide to Integrating Analyst Relations and Sales. You can send me an email at nancy@gk-biz.com
and I will be glad to send you a free copy.

The Easiest Way to a First Page Ranking on Google

Nancy Shapira — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 08:07:00 +0000

A good article from Forrester that I would like to share with you:
The Easiest Way to a First-Page Ranking on Google. “If you’re not optimizing your videos, you should start. “Blended search,” the practice in which search engines display videos, images, news stories, maps, and other types of results alongside their standard search results, has become increasingly common on major search engines. And optimizing video content to take advantage of blended search is by far the easiest way to get a first-page organic ranking on Google,” says Nate Elliot from Forrester.

Best of all, so few interactive marketers focus on video optimization that most of the videos in Google’s index aren’t very well optimized — so if you optimize your videos well, your chances of success will increase even further.
So how can you optimize your online videos? The agencies and search engines I’ve talked to offer a number of different tips:
*Insert keywords into your video filenames.
*Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
*Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
*Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
*Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.
Clients can read more about this topic, including some examples and further best practices, in our reports SEO for Blended Search (a Europe-focused report) and Video and Image Optimization (which is US-focused).