Peep Laja on LinkedIn: I used to believe that great marketing would be the deciding factor for a… | 198 comments

marketing professor asked his students, “If you were going to open a hotdog stand, and you could only have one advantage over your competitors . . . which would it be . . . ?” “Location! ….Quality! …. Low prices! ….Best taste!” The students kept going until eventually they had run out of answers. They looked at each other waiting for the professor

For example, if you develop “Facebook for senior citizens,” you and your techy friends, as well as tech savvy pundits will see that you have segmented the social networking market for the senior citizens’ market niche. All well and good, but if the senior citizens have never heard of Facebook, what good does the comparison do you? Try a landing pag

When I first went to work at Microsoft, there was a person on my team who decided it would be useful—it would get him some notoriety internally—if he wrote a weekly email summarizing Microsoft's competitors. We were the Excel team, so it was really the spreadsheet competitors, Lotus and Borland—what they were doing and what was new and what feature

One of the biggest possible wastes of time and effort, and the reason for countless failed startups, is when a team designs and builds a product, yet, when they finally release the product, they find that people won't buy it.