R&D vs. Marketing

 

This Wall Street Journal article by renowned management guru Philip Kotler and two colleagues discusses the conflict that often exists in organizations between R&D and marketing.

Among the authors’ remedies is to listen to the voice of the consumer.  Of course, that is precisely what ZMET is designed to help our clients do.  

The authors state that in companies where these kinds of conflicts occur, R&D and marketing tend to speak different languages.  This probably is literally true.  A ZMET study comparing an R&D team with a marketing team likely would reveal two distinct sets of metaphors that structure how these groups frame their own jobs and the role of the company’s products in consumers’ lives.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204830304574133242651502088.html

Words

 

A California company called Namelab (which creates names for products and companies) has an informative blog called LabNotes in which they discuss news associated with linguistics and branding.

A recent entry discusses an analysis of the most-commonly used nouns in the English language.  The top 25 included time, person, year, way, day, thing, man, world, life, hand, part, child, eye, woman, place, work, week, case, point, government, company, number, group, problem, and fact.

The author muses, “What sort of Type A society is more concerned with time than any other thing?  If there were a discipline called ’social linguistics,’ some enterprising grad student’s thesis would make a case that in a healthier and happier society, apple and kiss would appear in the top 25.

Here is a link to the blog.  Lots of material on here to make you think.

http://www.namelab.com/blog/

Branding the Garbage Man

I recently stumbled upon an article in one of those in-flight magazines about a company called College Hunks Hauling Junk which has become a highly successful and profitable business.

The company employs well-groomed and physically attractive college-age males who will come clean out your home or office and haul away your unwanted detritis.

I found this to be interesting on a couple of levels:

• We often read about the importance of having a unique product benefit.   There is really no unique product benefit with College Hunks Hauling Junk.  They do precisely the same thing that Ralph the Junkman did for my family when I was a kid.  However, unlike Ralph, these guys don’t  chain smoke, swear constantly, or drive around in 20 year-old pickup trucks.   Their selling point is a unique brand image rather than a unique product benefit.

 

• The author argues that College Hunks Hauling Junk has tapped into a big cultural story — the idea that, in America, many of us are looking to simplify our lives and get rid of clutter.  So this company perhaps has come along at the right time.   Using a cultural story as context for positioning and communications can be very powerful.

Below are links to the article and to the company website.

http://www.spiritmag.com/2009_01/click-this/hunks-hauling-junk.php

www.1800junkusa.com