“The Mom Test”

I read an interesting article by Ian Yarett published in recent Newsweek Magazine. Ian pointed to the importance of Customer (consumer) behaviour resulting in acceptance or rejection of a new product, in this case Apple’s iPad.

Ian’s mom, a phyical therapist, in her mid-50’s A lady with no interest in new technologies. She uses a slow first-generation MacBook, primarily for basic wordprocessing, emails and web browsing. And how experiencing iPad excited her. When she tried out its email and web browsing, and watched the display reorient automatically as she turned it sideways, she wanted one immidiately!

My learning from this article is very simple, Experiencing increases the customer (consumer’s) confidence and makes marketing simple.

What is a Lifetime Opportunity?

“This was a lifetime opportunity”, is an statement heard by many. The statement explains a rare chance that can bring some extraordinary benefits for us, be it making money, career growth, buying a car, finding a life partner, etc.

I agree that certain and extremely rare opportunities may apprear only once in lifetime, but that does not mean there will not be other and better opportunities coming our way. Hence my argument is when our future is a secret thing, how can we call an opportunity a “lifetime or rare”?

In my opinion, lost opportunities are those that have never come our way, these were never meant for us. But those that are intended to be ours, will not only be easy to grab, I would say “These will fall into our laps”, and without much efforts.

Please see how many such opportunities fell into your lap during your lifetime and did you grab them or else?

Challenge “Redefining US Image” - Obama moves to de-link terrorism from Islam

In a recent report, US administration says that, President Barack Obama has ordered a revision of America’s National Security Strategy with the aim to remove terms that link Islam to terrorism. The officials said the change would remove terms like “Islamic radicalism” from the National Security Strategy.

Bush administration described the war against terrorists as “the struggle against militant Islamic radicalism. This caused US a lot of Image issue amongst Muslims within the US and around the globe.

The report suggests that in 2008, the US National Counter-Terrorism Centre produced a document, called “Words that Work and Words that Don’t: A Guide for Counter-Terrorism Communication,” which encouraged government agencies and officials to avoid characterizing terrorist groups as “Islamic” or “Muslim,” as that could “unintentionally legitimize” their tactics.

Super! Words will have impact and this move will certainly help change the IMAGE but the question is how much efforts will be required to ensure regularly communicating this NEW Message to the larger audience around the globe and how long it will take to actually see the impact?

Any comments Brand Management guys?