Product Extension for Growing Your Business by Kevin Dwinnell

The background

To get to the point about product extension, I have to set the groundwork, so bear with me a moment. Brand Thunder’s core business is helping brands talk to their online consumer through our interactive browser themes. It’s an affinity marketing tool where we leverage the powerful connection an audience has to a particular brand.

That connection was vital in helping us solve part of the distribution puzzle. Most online businesses need to drive an audience to your product. If you require the download and installation of software like we do, that’s an additional hurdle. Affinity to a brand can help overcome that.

For any business looking to grow, it considers natural extension to its product lines and for us that direction was to look beyond the brand affinity and see what else fit.

When to Extend

The idea originated when we were analyzing user adoption and the sales cycle. We were seeing great market response from end users with each product launch bringing a spike of new users. There was also great response from our business development efforts as well, but getting an executed agreement always seemed to take longer than a young company would like. Those two were the pain points we were trying to eliminate – shorten the time to market for new releases.

Solving for X

Brand affinity helped build our business, but affinity isn’t related to brands. Since our early success was with sports teams, it made sense to look to more broad offerings in the same category. Naturally, we went for the general fans of baseball, football and basketball. Then we branched into holidays. What both categories did was provide us with themes that had strong following plus a high rate of search and discovery. We knew these topic would be sought out and balance the distribution we were losing from not having a supporting brand.

This decision to create a product extension has been a good one for us, and we continue to build out the offering to this date. This week we just released the Pro Wrestling theme, Golf theme and the recently released Movie Premiere theme. All combine the solid visual elements of our product with the interactive components that keep them engaging over the long term. They are also evergreen in their popularity with their audiences, which gives each a great deal of promise.

These topical themes have been a big win for us. What product extensions have worked for you?

Posted in Commentary | Tags: Affinity, affinity marketing, browser theme, business, Consumer, marketing, Marketing and Advertising, Relationship Marketing | No Comments »

Trust – The Unwritten Agreement Between Brand and Consumer by Kevin Dwinnell

Trust is a powerful tool in the business arsenal. It’s the enabler to the value exchange that a business seeks with its consumer. With trust, businesses can weather some pretty bad situations. Without it, you’re in a very bad situation. Fortunately, we live in an optimistic society and most companies are given a fair chance to prove themselves.

The Internet has leveraged this trust with its beta releases. It’s a way to test a product in the production environment prior to being production ready. There’s an inherent trust for a user to try a beta product that by its beta name admits will have issues. The expectation is that those issues will not be serious to the user. Because of that trust, the user gets a first look at something new and cool, and the company gets to see its product perform in a real-world environment. That’s the value exchange that trust enabled.

Advertising works not because consumers love it, but because the value exchange of free content for viewing ads is apparent. If the message becomes too much about the advertising, the consumer moves on to a different choice. I’ve canceled magazine subscriptions when I couldn’t find the table of content for the sheer number of ads. Digital is even less forgiving.

You’ll find this mantra in social media guidance. You can’t just sell. It’s boring, offensive and you’ll wind up social all by yourself. If you’re interesting and relevant, people will want to hear what you say and hang around more. You’ve earned their trust.

So, how do you earn and maintain trust?

Be True to Your Word

Wal-Mart offers Always. Low Prices. You can always go into a Wal-Mart and get a very good price. Not always the lowest, but consistently in that vacinity so most consumers are forgiving if they’re not.

Admit When Your Wrong

Facebook continues to test the boundaries of their privacy policy. They’ve made some missteps and retracted the changes – keeping the trust of their consumers. The fact that they continue to stumble in this area, based on consumer reactions, will show the strength of that trust overtime.

Be Open and Honest

If you’re open with your customers, that’s an easy way to gain trust and respect – even if you can’t meet their needs.

These are pretty standard things for any relationship. But that’s what builds trust is that ongoing relationship. So, each touchpoint between you and the consumer is an opportunity to build on that trust. The more trust you have, the better the position for the rest of your business.

Posted in Commentary | Tags: advertising, business, Consumer, online marketing, web apps | No Comments »