Launching New Product with Tight Budget Demands Smart Marketing Decisions
The weak global economy has businesses scrambling to find new, cost-conscious approaches to new product launches. But limited marketing budgets don’t necessarily mean limited launch success.
That’s the conclusion reached by sales professionals meeting in Las Vegas recently to plan release of the New Met Lab One™, a innovative new entry into the demanding field of metrology and gas flow calibration. The ML One™, developed by Bios International of Butler, N.J., builds on existing technology to deliver superior gas flow calibration across a much wider spectrum of uses.
It sounds less than exciting to the layperson. But to the semiconductor, pharmaceutical, energy and other fields dependent upon high-precision process controls, such innovations can mean millions and millions of dollars to the bottom line.
“The ML One™ clearly is a breakthrough product,” said Harvey Padden, CEO of Bios. “But it’s very tough sell in an economy like this, and we can’t justify an expensive traditional launch campaign. We had to focus our marketing less on a shotgun approach to getting the word out than a rifle-shot strategy of reaching exactly the right target customers with exactly the right message.”
The product’s marketing plan, developed in conjunction with WestWord Communications, focused on aggressive use of video and other interactive techniques designed to provide a hands-on product experience involving the Bios sales force and individual customers.
“Initial results have been great,” Padden said. “Allowing people to see and touch the product give us a chance to explain the value and payback far more effectively than any ad or brochure. When you’re offering a product this sophisticated and this valuable, it’s the personal touch that makes all the difference.”
See the marketing video produced by WestWord Communications and WalkerTek Interactive Marketing of Fairfield, N.J., at http://vimeo.com/29853666.
Social Media Interest Continues to Grow
Use of social media to reach diverse audiences quickly and effectively remains one of the major areas of interest among an expanding set of communication professionals.
Recent project work completed by WestWord Communications shows the general issue of social media is among the top three issues cited by clients as a “top priority” for 2012. Clients expressed interest in several key aspects of the social media phenomenon, including audience segmentation, consolidation or emergence of preferred social media channels and standardization of the metrics used to measure the effectiveness of social media communications.
MacMillan Calls for Better Food Policies
Cargill Chairman Emeritus Whitney MacMillan recently warned that misguided policies and lack of understanding are contributing to escalating food prices and risk seriously compromising future global food security.
In remarks to the Blake School alumni in Minneapolis, MacMillan cited current ethanol policy as just one example of how well-intentioned but poorly thought-through policies can contribute to run-ups in food prices and distortions in the market economics needed to assure the availability of food needed by a rapidly escalating global population.
Four in ten bushels of corn now produced in the United States now go to production of ethanol, he noted. Such massive diversion of a cornerstone commodity from food to fuel use isn’t the sole factor behind recent run-ups in commodity prices, he acknowledged, but its effects cannot be ignored.
“Bad ag policy is no cure for bad energy policy,” he said.
MacMillan warned that the task of feeding a global population that will increase to over 10 billion by 2050 will require adoption of policies that allow markets to function as freely as possible and trade to expand to exploit comparative advantage wherever it exists.
Feeding the bigger, hungrier world is possible, he said, if nations recognize and embrace the critical role of improved plant genetics and other improving agricultural technologies, especially those related to better crop production and better crop-production management. Adoption of such enlightened policies not only will help expand food production to meet anticipated demand growth but also will do more to protect and sustain the earth’s natural resources, he said.
Palm Beach seminar focuses on personal branding
More than a dozen executive search professionals from across the United States successfully completed an advanced course in personal brand management, which I conducted recently on behalf of Canaan Ridge, The Center for Professional Development, in West Palm Beach, Florida.
The multi-day program helped individual participants to define their own individual brand as a key competitive advantage — and source of higher fees and better clients. The program also enabled each professional to develop a personal brand development program tailored exclusively for their situation and needs.
This and other branding and identity courses I have developed are offered through Canaan Ridge at locations throughout North America and Europe. Future programs are scheduled for Chicago in late September, followed by Frankfurt, Germany. Visit www.canaanridge.com for additional details.
Copies of my opening remarks from the Palm Beach session can be seen here.
MacMillan Optimistic on Food Availability, Environmental Sustainability
We can continue to provide ample, nutritious and affordable food for a dramatically growing world population and still sustain our natural resources, Cargill Chairman Emeritus Whitney MacMillan told the Woods Hole Research Center recently.
In a speech to the prestigious Boston-area research group, MacMillan noted that advances in plant genetics and continuing improvement in better farming practices can spark a second wave of green revolution globally – helping provide food for a world population projected to possibly double within the next half-century.
Turning potential into actuality, however, will depend upon making sound public policy choices on farm, trade and environmental issues, he added. Helping guide intelligent decision-making is the role of respected groups such as Woods Hole, he said, who must step up efforts to assure their work is interpreted and applied objectively in an increasingly polarized debate.
MacMillan argued that sound public policy, backed by the superior ability of the private sector to generate wealth, will hold the key to preserving our planet and the people who live on it.
Contact me at gw@garlandwest.com for more details on the speech.
