Acrobat Buzzword as seen by a busy marketer

Long back, when my ex-colleague Benoy showed me a new product of Microsoft- Surface, I was really excited. It was a product that I felt like owning. I have felt the same for many other products, but the fad died too soon to be of any recall value. But this was different. It held my attention for too long. And I became its word-of-mouth agent. I was so thrilled by it, I started going to others' computers, cease their keyboard, type the link and ask them to take a look at it. I saw most of them were excited as well. This all the more motivated me to show it to more people.

I am trying the newly launched acrobat buzzword now. In fact I am writing this very draft on the new buzzword document, the online cousin of MS Word. It is not exactly a similar excitement. But surely its more entertaining than Google Word Docs. Haha...what is this? It doesn't recognize its competitor Google, it is underlining it with a red mark. Surely, the makers of the product don't like it.

Well, coming to the buzzword. The first thing I liked is the interface. The sure, confident and fast interface. The color combination is also a cool departure from the Google Docs. The grey-black and white combination on a flash version has always held my attention for long. Well, it doesn't allow the right click short-cut of the keyboard ( is it because it has a Windows symbol...a competitor again!)

But somehow, I have begun to like this. This is my first draft on this. I am not sure if I will keep coming back to this. I started similarly with Google docs, but never came back. The die-hard habit of writing everything on the desktop applications like MS Office is likely to keep me from using this medium extensively. Unless of course, I start traveling around & require to login to retrieve information.

Nevertheless, I must say that all these are building on a infrastructural legacy that Microsoft has already set up. For example, Ctrl+S is for Saving and so on. Microsoft has created an ever lasting entity on which all future operators ( some of them their fiercest competitors!) will build their empires on.

Its been a long time, I haven't posted a thing on my blog ( Oops! It doesn't recognize the word blog! Some lessons on vocabulary will do!). I also just discovered a new product extension for my blog writing...Product Reviews! An accidental glance on the newspaper made me write all this. Not bad yeah!!

Chao.

Word of Mouth : Lessons from Sony and Google

The first time a walkman was made, the guys at Sony decided to make word-of-mouth the way to propogate the product AB INITIO (right from the beginning !!). A few ladies and guys were asked to plug it in the ear and start jogging in the morning. People around them suddenly discovered a way to engage themselves with music and also disengage with the noise and traffic of the surroundings.

The rest as they say is history. This way of launching can be though argued as quite product specific, it brought an altogether new perspective in the marketing circle. The belief till then was that, word-of-mouth is something that is EARNED over a period of time and cannot be CREATED on purpose. This also described the old approach: the product should be of great quality, the service follow-ups should be prompt enough and all this will eventually lead to favourable opinion about the product/company and this will snowball into word-of-mouth(WOM) resulting in a natural advantage to the company. But Sony displayed (unintentionally I suppose) that WOM can be created right from the beginning and can be used as a unique approach to launch products. Thus a company could create and drive the WOM than being just a passive observer of it. That the product should be competitive enough is something that will remain uncontested though.

Today when I see around, I do not find products or services that have been able to create such WOM ab initio. You have huge hoardings or big budget ads or some other promotions that are just used to have a big-bang launch to create a splash. How much of these turn into sensible WOM that will help the product to break into the market is really questionable. I am yet to notice a powerful WOM induced marketing since the launch of Sony Walkman. The one that came closest and in some ways even crossed the Sony's was Google.

Although internet penetration itself was low at that time, especially in developing countries, the "Search" has been one of the most popular human activity ever. Google encashed it and probably summarised the entire value of Internet. All it did was provide a small bar and say "search". WOM spread out saying you can find anything and everything on the Net and how: just GOOGLE for it.

Came across a product that relied on the WOM induced marketing? Just let me know.