Marketing Students guilty of negligence?

As a marketing graduate I read with interest David Meerman Scott’s views on how many marketing professors could be guilty of malpractice in the way they teach the subject.

Part of me agreed, I remember in a tutor group session explaining Chasm Theory to my fellow students and the lecturer. But then I thought ‘how come I knew about Chasm Theory and other students didn’t?’

The answer is simple – and this advice holds for students of any subject: read around your subject. Voraciously. Find online discussion groups (this was 1996, I was on Guy Kawasaki’s Rules for Revolutionaries mailing list and the contact with real-life tech-savvy marketers was invaluable and inspiring to me). Nowadays there are many more forums, mailing lists and groups to get involved in. Authors, like David and Seth Godin have blogs so you can keep up with what they’re thinking about in-between books. Not that one has to wait long for something to read these days; it seems there’s a new ‘New Marketing’ or Social Media Marketing book published every week. The biggest problem is keeping on top of all this material.

For this reason I would have to disagree, marketing professors shouldn’t be sued for malpractice – they teach to a course, a curriculum set well in advance and based on a course prospectus. I get that the text books are long in the tooth, I think it’s great that David’s New Rules of Marketing & PR is on the reading list for a number of marketing programmes, it should be on more. So should Purple Cow. And How to Drive the Competition Crazy, because the marketing set texts are dry and stuffy. The practice of marketing on the other hand is not – it’s the lifeblood of an organisation. Books that encourage you to try something new, be remarkable and give recent real-world case studies prove that. Read the rest of this entry »

Good Enough and Chasm Theory

This recent article in Wired, which suggests that now technologies just need to be ‘good enough’ to be a mainstream success. Examples given range from the Flip video camera, Skype and MP3. Another piece in the same issue discusses the Craig’s List phenomenon to which similar logic can be applied.

It reminded me of Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm (wikipedia summary) where he analyses the Technology Adoption Lifecycle and propounds the existence of a chasm between the innovators/early adopters and the early majority – where the real money is made by any technology product.

The reasons given for the chasm’s existence is that whilst the innovators and early adopters will be happy with the rough edges of a disruptively innovative product (citing the Pareto principle or 80/20 rule) the rest of the market want something that offers ‘the whole product’. Apple’s iPod is a perfect example of this in fact. The iPod was a disruptive innovation that keen Mac fans flocked to but very few other people – you could make it work with a PC but it wasn’t easy. At launch it was a standalone product. One of the things that made the iPod a mass-market success was the whole product offering – Apple’s own iTunes and the enormous eco-system that exists around it offering cases and all manner of accessories.

That was the early part of this century. Have things changed so much that ‘good enough’ is fine with more than those on the bleeding edge? Or are the examples in the Wired article successes because they get the the very core of what is important to everybody and not bother with the unnecessary parts that cater purely to the aficionado? Perhaps we could even question whether some of these products have even reached the early majority stage of their lifecycle yet. Plenty of people use Skype but the potential market is many times larger.

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