Jeff Bennett's Blog

Product marketing and development has evolved so rapidly in the last two decades.  It is amazing to me first how many tools are available to track just about everything…from web traffic, social media, keyword clouds, vast demographic, user engagement tracking and more.  Secondly that many of these services are available for free.

The difference between the successful consumer ventures of today and tomorrow are those that will leverage these tools to track, analyze, iterate and do it all over again.  It is a continual process with the goal of seeking optimization and a great user experience.

I do not claim mastery of this but I know that it is all about the data.  The more and more I work with the data the more and more I learn about how this important process of consumer interaction works or not.

For many it is a game of talking the talk about it but still relying on gut.  Leveraging staged focused groups and leading consumers to a foregone conclusion that has already been established.  This is a lazy approach to this important work.

Mark Zuckerberg is emphatic that “we can not fall in love” with our own ideas/products.  We must leverage our ideation, build and get consumer interaction flowing.  Measure, measure, measure.  Study this data.  Then iterate.  He is so right.

I thought that my friend Tom Fishburne captures this topic pretty well in his recent cartoon.  I am sure we have all encountered this fall back approach.  Surely at least it was not a “gut” reaction..but in this case it is still an elementary response. Those who take this approach have no business building consumer products.