Marketing Articles About Manufacturing Search Results

1. Loss of Manufacturing Jobs a Golden Opportunity in Shenzhen. Shenzhen Undercover makes an important point about how losing an essential sector of the economy can actually be of benefit: …as much as this economic downturn in the globalized economy has hurt a lot of export-driven businesses, and its workers in Shenzhen, it’s really helping Shenzhen transform itself to what it wants to become. For [...] (11/06/08 09:00 PM)

2. Home Biz Is Child’s Play. Northside Chronicle: Tapping into the inner child is important for every adult, just ask Florence Forrest. For about four years Ms Forrest has been manufacturing soft designer toys through her home business Flying Star Toys. “I make my products for the inner child in everyone, they are not necessarily for children who want to play with toys,’’ Ms [...]
   (10/31/08 09:00 PM)

3. Woman Carves Biz Niche For Female Bikers. news-journalonline.com: Buying a comfortable motorcycle isn’t easy if you’re a 5-foot tall woman. Most motorcycles are manufactured for men. But a petite pastor, Kathleen Steele Tolleson of Daytona Beach, has created Roar Motorcycles for Women — catering strictly to female riders. From diamond-tufted seats and matching saddlebags to custom colors and artwork on lowered and modified bikes, [...]
   (10/31/08 09:00 PM)

4. Niche Biz: Pee Farming. Fortune Small Business: Sam Collora didn’t set out to become a pee farmer. Collora was working as a plant manager at a steel manufacturing facility and running a taxidermy business on the side. One day his wife, Judi, bought him some deer to use as live models. Owning deer is like keeping two rabbits in a hutch [...]
   (10/29/08 09:00 PM)

5. Delta Crib Recall Underlines the Importance of Buying USA-Made Goods. I often ponder how “Made in the USA” goods can become more marketable. Products made here are often of better quality, but more expensive to buy. To some extent, US-manufactured goods can save our economy. But what could possibly propel tight-fisted consumers to buy pricier nationally-made goods? When I saw the Delta crib recall today, it [...] (10/21/08 09:00 AM)

6. Apple’s new Macbooks are yet another example of the company making incremental changes in order to reinforce the market for its .

   Yesterday, Apple released a new line of laptops that uses a different manufacturing process to its other models. Contrary to expectations, the prices on the new laptops were not markedly changed, with only a $100 drop in price for the 2.1 GHz white plastic MacBook to $999.

   (10/15/08 09:00 AM)

7. Managing Marketing Performance: The Role of Data, Analytics and Metrics. Performance management has been applied to various parts of a business for quite a long time, particularly when it comes to manufacturing, logistics, and product development. Applying the concept to marketing is finally coming of age. (08/26/08 09:01 AM)

8. #1 Lesson from 2007: Using a Sense of Urgency in Marketing. If there's one theme that keeps coming back to me from the past year, it's got the be the proper use (and the ease of misuse, if you're not careful) of a sense of urgency about doing business with you and your company. I'm not talking about the cheezy 'limited time offers' that you see over and over on TV (limited my ass...you mean, limited by your budget for spewing out shitty ads...) but genuine urgency created by inflection points in your business which moves the needle on buyer behavior.

   Keep in mind here that I'm talking mostly about B2B, which, from my perspective, makes this even more exciting. B2C gets all the urgency in the mass media, and sometimes it's a rare day for most B2B organizations to be able to substantiate a genuine sense of urgency within the base of prospects.

   That said, urgency is not for everyone. It's a powerful weapon that's not to be used without forethought and and crisp and clear understanding of not only the immediate implications, but also future consequences of the slippery slope that it can create, as discussed in a concise little bit about urgency in the Marketing Experiments blog.

   So, what's this urgency thing all about and how do you create it?

   I guess that this will be different for everyone, but frankly, the most successful levers that I've found are timing around pricing and production and availability, quotas and caps. I'm keen to hear more about what you think. Again, I'm talking sustainable things here - not just a 50% off sale or something....

   Timing and production to create urgency:

   This is the fun one. A great example is an impending price increase. If you've been doing a great deal of lead nurturing with your base of prospects, this is especially useful because the already know and trust you. On the other hand, if you don't have a base of prospects that you're nurturing, then you're just another average dude with a deal. Seriously, there's a lot of you out there...this type of urgency play almost has to come from a position of trust to be truly effective. Sure, you can impose urgency on a facelist list of prospects, but your conversion will suffer.

   Proper planning improves urgency results:

   Again, you can take this for what it's worth, but like everything I preach about when I talk about thought leadership marketing or 'altruism before capitalism', you can't just wake up one day and say "I need to create a sense of urgency and get more sales." Crap, what's first. Wrong way Charlie. Not going to work. You need to plan this. You need to understand what the next inflection point in your business will be (obsolescence of an old product, price increase across the board, new product design coming out, office move/clearing inventory...something that's almost 'external' to you yet internal at the same time) and work in a sense of urgency into your marketing to coincide with (or, preferably leading up to) the genuine, non "manufactured" inflection point.

   Quotas, caps and limited availability:

   Take a page from event marketers (if any of you are attending sold out football games as we near playoff time, you understand the acute sense of urgency that surrounds ticket prices and the limited availability in stadium seating) and keep an eye on your quota for items, or your geographical territories that are quickly filling up or the number of 'limited edition' items that you can produce in one quarter. From a services perspective, such as social media speaking or marketing consulting (things which I have some familiarity with) the best creator of urgency is the calendar and the limited number of dates you have available.

   This is not the end of the story. There's so much more to this urgency thing (like neuromarketing and buyer behavior) but for now, that's enough.
   
   Action Items:

   What ideas do you have for creating urgency? Please share in comments!

   
   (12/31/07 09:00 PM)

9. It's Time For Open-Source Hardware. Open-source software has proven that users are sometimes the best designers with products like the Linux operating system and the Firefox browser. The next logical step is open-source hardware, a movement that is gaining ground in design circles. For instance, Chuck Messer at Tackle Design in Durham, North Carolina has developed an open-source jaundice light for developing countries using blue LEDs that can be manufactured for $75 (versus $3,000 to $5,000 for a similar piece of hospital equipment). And he is also involved with the Open Prosthetics Project, which is trying to bring back an updated version of the popular World War One-era Trautman Hook. Similarly, there are efforts to create open-source computers, cars, telephones, and 3-D printers. There is even a venture-backed company called Bug Labs trying to apply the concept to the commercial realm with what sounds liek open-source consumer electronics. As Fred Wilson, an investor in Bug Labs, cryptically puts it:The thing about Bug is that it's not anything like the iPhone. It's closer to Ning. It's all about what people will make with a Bug, not what a Bug is when it comes out of the box. The buzz around open-source hardware is just going to keep getting louder because it is an idea whose time has come. Bringing the culture of participation to physical products is a natural evolution of the open-source, DIY world we are now living in. What open-source hardware/products would make the most sense to build a business around? Comments are open.... (07/31/07 09:01 PM)

10. Disruptors Video: An eBay for Manufacturers (MFG.com). Remember all of those B2B exchanges that were supposed to change the industrial landscape before they evaporated at the tail end of the last dotcom boom? Well, at least one of them survived—a small company based in Atlanta called MFG.com. Today, it is a thriving Web marketplace for manufacturers and their suppliers. I talk with CEO Mitch Free in this week’s episode of the New Disruptors. MFG.com is a Website where engineers and purchasing managers from places like Apple or Northrop Grumman can put up CAD diagrams of parts they want manufactured and get bids from suppliers all over the world. In the past twelve months, over $2 billion worth of parts have been sourced over MFG.com. But instead of trying to take a cut of each transaction like eBay does, MFG.com charges a subscription fee of about $6,000 a year to each supplier. Free says the company is on track to pull in $25 million in revenues this year and is running at break-even. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is the largest outside investor (he learned about it from one of the engineers at his spacecraft startup, Blue Origin). Germany’s Samwer brothers—their startup Alando became eBay Germany—also own a stake. Free wants to turn MFG.com into an online platform for the manufacturing industry. Last year, he bought Europe’s SourcingParts (a Salesforce.com for purchasing managers), and launched a manufacturing social network last March called MFGx.com. “We’ve borrowed some of the elements from Craigslist, MySpace, and Wikipedia,” he says. But perhaps the... (07/26/07 09:00 PM)

11. The New Disruptors, Now On iTunes. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you may have noticed that I've been putting out a lot of videos lately. It's all part of a new Web video series I am producing on CNNMoney.com called The New Disruptors. Each week, I will profile a different disruptive startup or entrepreneur in a three-minute video. In the current episode, for instance, I visit Desktop Factory, a company in LA that wants to bring 3D, rapid-prototyping printers to the masses. Future episodes will feature entrepreneurs taking on industries as diverse as the airlines, energy, healthcare, media, manufacturing, and wireless. A new video will go up every Thursday on CNNMoney.com. You can also subscribe to the show for free via an RSS feed or, as of a week ago, get it on iTunes. (When I last checked this morning, it was the No. 15 business podcast on iTunes, neck-and-neck with Wallstrip). If you do download it from iTunes, please write a review there telling me what you think (or in comments below). All you folks who just bought an iPhone need to fill it up with free videos, don't you? For every episode, I will also do a blog post. (Advertisers interested in sponsoring the show, please contact cnnmoneysales@timeinc.com).... (07/10/07 09:01 PM)

Copyright © 2007. Please review the Terms of Usage prior to copying or distributing.