While everyone here at Valkre has been busy diligently putting the final touches on our upcoming book, we still find time to consume other books of interest. Currently, I'm reading through the latest book by Malcolm Gladwell, What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures. The book comprises Gladwell's various contributions to the New Yorker, and the first story focuses on legendary pitchman Ron Popeil.
One passage in particular caught my eye.
"When Michael Jordan pitches McDonald's hamburgers, Michael Jordan is the star. But when Ron Popeil... pitched, say, the Chop-O-Matic, his gift was to make the Chop-O-Matic the star. It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers - not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it's not at all hard to use."
When I read this paragraph, I immediately envisioned Apple's commercials for the iPhone and iPad, where the product is front-and-center the entire time, filling your televison screen. Then I started to wonder if this approach to selling is also applicable to our own software product, Render. We proudly consider Render an innovation, and it no doubt has disruptive benefits to an organization.
That is why Valkre is purchasing numerous infomercial time slots to demonstrate the usage of Render! But seriously, there is a certain approach that needs to be taken when explaining what our software can do for our customers, how it works, and what the return on investment is. This is the challenge. Any software company with a brilliant product needs to be able to explain the innovation to its customers, otherwise, no one is going to understand it, let alone buy it.
To that end, we're always tweaking our marketing materials in order to continuously improve the message we send to our customers. We don't have any plans for a late-night infomercial, but then again, watching the SlapChop guy pitch our software would be a pretty amusing sight.
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