Marketing

by Hazem on Marketing, Uncategorized

Start-ups vs. Established Businesses

(Established) Businesses are all about 3 fundamental things:

  1. Production (be it building hardware, software or whatever),
  2. Operations (i.e. administration, human resources, management) and
  3. Marketing and Sales

Money is made in ONLY step 3 (Marketing and Sales). Operations is ONLY about moving (effectively and efficiently) from Stage 1 (production) to Stage 3 (Marketing and sales).

Start-ups are also quite similar but different in ONE key aspect from established businesses:

  1. Production,
  2. Operations, and
  3. Learning & Discovery (of customers & market)

The customers are unknown in start-ups and as Steve Blank in “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” asserts the emphasis for start-ups in early phases MUST be on Learning & Discovery (of your market, your customers, what problems they TRULY value and so on).

Only after a start-up has truly figured this one out, does it transit to Marketing and Sales.

Hazem Awad

www.hazemawad.com

 
by Behzad on Mantra, Marketing

MBA or MFA?

The question is which one helps you better in entrepreneurship, an MBA or MFA?

  • The market for beauties never dies out.
  • Whatever you make, make it beautiful!
  • “Entrepreneurship is about making a meaning, not money“, Guy Kawasaki, watched on IEEE TV
  • Never lose the big picture (to make life easier and more beautiful) — need to train your right brain!
 
by Behzad on Marketing

Two Advertising Lessons

  1. Honest
    There is this ad on TV about [Proactive] face lotion (?), and in one spot they have Jessica Simpson (?) saying “I use [face lotion] to keep my skin clean” — I don’t recall the exact wording , but something in that line– but she never mentions the brand name of the product she uses!!! This is very a misleading and negative advertisement.
  2. Customer oriented
    Enterprise puts a sticker on the bumper of each rental car, indicating that the car is rented from Enterprise. What I hear is that many people do not want to show that the car is actually rental and prefer other car rental companies for that one reason (negative advertising).