Devoted to branding and building and protecting brands

So we're holding a conference next week, May 17, here in Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, to be exact).  The topic: shortening the distance between marketing and sales.  Between the stuff that your marketing people do and the orders taken by the sales folks.   All the stuff that happens between the point at which you have a product to sell --and the moment someone actually buys it. The way I’ve seen it play out, time and again, it goes like this: Astute entrepreneur conceives a really cool product because he looked at the world the way it could be and asked “why not?”  This is a more poetic way of saying that he saw the world as seen by the people that he had already identified as the potential market for his product.  He spotted an opportunity and jumped in with an offering that people couldn’t resist – the kind of offering that always elicits wonderment at why something like it wasn’t available before. 

His company, now a success, starts growing a little too impressed with itself and its ability to attract a market.  Slowly at first, then at a faster pace, the people in the company see their markets through the lens of their products instead of seeing their products through the eyes of the people to whom those products are supposed to be sold.  This may all sound like a meaningless play on words.  In fact, it makes all the difference between products (and subsequent marketing) that people can’t resist, and products people stay away from in droves.