The second workshop of the CCTO Summer Workshop Series was all about marketing. Once again the workshop was at WSGR. Some food was provided starting at 6 PM with the session starting around 6:30. A welcome presentation was given by the CCTO co-chair, Marc Gottschalk, who works at WSGR. Dave Weinerth of PARC was up next. He introduced the format for the rest of the evening, then introduced the first presenters.

The first workshop session of the evening was called “Finding & Understanding the Customer”, presented by Christina Allen and Jim Stoneham of Tangibility. Tangibility is a self-proclaimed “start-up team in a box” which helps companies with strategic and tactical marketing. They are also one of the sponsors contributing to the CCTO prize package. Christina and Jim are the co-founders of Tangibility. At the outset of the presentation, they highly recommended a marketing book called “Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind” by Ries and Trout. They touched a bit on how there is very limited space in the consumer’s brain for product associations, so your challenge is to place your products in the proper way to create or displace some space. They also talked a bit about the typical product adoption graph and the “chasm” between the early adopters and the pragmatists. This area is the subject of the book “Crossing the Chasm” by Geoffrey Moore. Some of their key points to crossing the chasm include:

• Focus on a specific niche
• Market a whole product
• Move from product-based values to market-based values
• Focus on positioning - how to get in the customers mind
• Spend time talking to skeptics, not believers

One tool they really pushed is rapid prototyping. This could be as simple as showing story boards or mock-ups to your customers or running beta programs. This gives you a lot of feedback on what customers like and don’t like about your product. The idea is to “fail early and often” so you have a rock-solid product when it really counts. One of the tools for know what customers want is simple searching for your product and adding the key word: wishlist. Finally, relating to position, there are 3 approaches:

1. Functional - solve a problem for or provide a benefit to the customer (Ex: Compact Florescent Lights)
2. Symbolic - improve customer’s self-image, give them a sense of belonging (Ex: Toyota Prius)
3. Experiential -provide sensory or cognitive stimulation (Ex: entertainment appliance for hospital patients)

A the close of their presentation, Jim suggested creating a fist-pass positioning statement using the following template:

For [target_market], product or company is/has [uniqe_differentiator], unlike [competitor] who has [competitor’s_unique_differentiator]

Example: For driving enthusiasts who care about the environment, Tesla offers a no-excuses high-performance electric car - unlike Toyota who offers only family sedans.

After a short break, we started the second session of the night. This session was set up as a panel with the topic being Public Relations. The panel included:

• Dave Weinerth - PARC (moderator)
• Melody Haller - Antenna Group (a CCTO prize sponsor)
• Joanna Rustin - Rustin Communications
• Jeremy Walker - KiteShip, 2006 CCTO Transportation Winner

Each of the panelists gave a short presentation on why public relations and marketing communications is so important to a start-up. There were a lot of pointers on when and how a start up should do PR. Some of the topics included costs for marcom, blogging as a form of PR, and how to market “green” technology. It was a very interesting panel, but we’re still more focused on the strategic marketing aspects of Aptility.