Chicken or egg?

First day into the job and I stare at a blank screen? What happened to all the ideas, the issues and events that I wanted to write about? Suddenly they do not seem worth commenting upon. Or am I caught by the “marketing / sales” bug?

Is the pressure of the thought whether what I am saying is worth anybody’s time to even read in full, forget commenting on it? (No comments on the first article make me think - even my loyal friends, with whom I took the liberty of sending a spam mail, do not find it worth to comment upon! OK there was ONE comment but guess it was a SPAM comment by some geek who had written a niffy program which went on giving same comment to all blogs to promote their services – will comment on these evils later)

So is this a classic case of product being bad or marketing being bad? Was my mail – communication statement not exciting enough for people to go and read? Or did my segmentation go awry? Was it too low (or too high – I wish!) for the consumer to comment upon and they just did not feel it important enough.

Well there were the early adopters – the geeks or should I call them – the ones who will do anything and everything once – who responded back and said that they visited the page, couple of them said yes they will go back again!!!(Humoring me?), some said they will read it later, just glanced at it (they glanced but not excited enough to read more….was my packaging not appealing or the template design fell short on usability factors? Others kept a dignified silence – did not want to hurt my feelings?

So what should I do? Change the packaging, change the marketing statement, the branding, or should I change the product?

My salesman cap will say product is bad, marketing s$%^&ks (want to make this a family blog!).
My boss cap says if all was fine then why do I need sales and marketing team, people will stand outside in line and buy. So forget the excuses and sell.
The CEO cap (now I am hallucinating) will call the meetings of all dignitaries and conduct a finger pointing session:
Production in-charge:- do not dare blame the product it is perfectly as per specifications and I did not give those – they were by the R&D & Product development team.

R&D/PD:- this is what the market told us they wanted.

Boss / CEO:- did they write to you they wanted?

R&D:-.. Well ahem…......not exactly

Boss:-So did you do a market research and talk to cross section of people, identified their needs, do a factoring analysis (do not ask me what it means – some term in market research – bless my MR proff) to arrive at required set of features and functionalities in the product?

R&D/PD:-…um….umm........well not in so many words, but something very scientific and similar. Not this but something similar....

Boss: elaborate.

R&D/PD:- Well you see everyone was doing it, the competition, the non competition and all of them were claiming that they were doing very well. Infact one of our competitor even won the best award in a competition

Boss: …which one….

R&D/PD:-I think it was some Jhumree Talaya Award. The bottomline was that if we did not come out with the product soon enough we will lose all the market share to our competition! (rushing into it as they now see the kill) But do not think we did a rush job, we did a brain storming session (the offsite bill for the same can be reviewed for confirmation), had a series of meeting internally, did extensive research and prepared the functionality matrix (flushing out a colored excel printout) and then we came out with a product that had all the functionalities of our competitors and then some more. I think marketing did not do their job well.

Marketing: Do not pass the buck to us. We have used the most appealing colors as per our corporate policy. Look at the gloss, look at the branding. Look at the punchline, there is no way it cannot succeed.

Boss: well it has not yet shown any sign of crawling, let alone success.

Marketing: we need a bigger advertising splash. It needs to register in the sub consciousness of the conscious mind of the unknowing targeted customer segment with the other set of similar product in his sub conscious so that he gets the urge to buy the product whenever he thinks about the product. Once that is done we will have to trigger the sub conscious mind to tell the conscious mind that the customer has to go to the nearest super market and buy out product.

Boss: I am lost.

[Finance (in the background): And no talks of more budgets, you have already wasted the yearly budget and have nothing to show for it.]

Marketing: Exactly the customer will also be lost in the struggle between the conscious and sub conscious till they become unconscious and then we will charge the product to their card and make them believe that they have already bought it and have a huge need for the product. And to make then unconscious and go for this unwanted stuff our sales team has to think and act smart. They have to think out of the box, paint outside the boundaries, fire the latent needs of the customer, Destroy the competition, Count the chickens before they hatch and it will be a big success!)

Sales: Market has no need for the product

Marketing: If competition can sell, are you sissies that you cannot sell! It is this defeatist attitude which is making you not give your 100% when you are pitching to the customer. Self belief will make believe your customer. Go ahead fearless and kill the competition. Remember the charge of the light brigade – theirs is not to question why, theirs is just to do and die…I mean sell

Boss: Yes this was an excellent poem and NO we cannot let the competition rule. I want you to buckle your belts, time for men to be separated from the boys, go and sell. I do not want to hear excuses, I want higher revenue. You all iron out amongst yourselves what you want to do, I want my numbers!!!

……oops did I get carried away. does it make sense?

Guess the orders are there…go and sell. Selling or marketing, product or research, need or want, chicken or egg….let us not get into all this…need of the hour is to sell…so go and sell.

Afterall if you are hungry whether you will get into a debate about chicken or egg or will you break the egg to make the omlete!

Ahem I feel satiated