Technology Marketing - KeynesYouDigIt/Knowledge GitHub Wiki

• Tech products have a higher rate of failue (>50%) than non-technology products. Therefore, tech must execute basic marketing much better.
• 4-3-3 Rule: For investors, 4 products fail, 4 break even, 3 profit
• High-tech: Cutting-edge, replacing something. They share these characteristics:
  • Market uncertainty (FUD)
  • Technological uncertainty (Delays, support)
  • Competitive volatility (Convergence, product life-cycles)
  • "Unit 1" costs are very high (software, pharmaceuticals)
  • Vendor lock-in increases switching costs
• Crossing the chasm between early adopters and pragmatists is the biggest scaling challenge. Conserve cash early on in anticipation.
• Industry standards help push forward a dominant design (Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD)
• "Getting Amazoned": Sticking to the status quo and letting an unknown adapt
• "Marketing myopia": "That competitor doesn't matter"
• "Innovator's dilemma": Market leaders have a hard time innovating because they risk so much more
• "Creative destruction": Innovative products free up resources
• "Metcalfe's law": The effect of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users (network effects)
• "Base of the pyramid strategies": Targetting the 4 billion poorest people in the world
• "Founder's dillemma": Founders generally have to choose between making money or having power
• Establishing relationships is about trading favors
• The difference between a good and a service is that a service can't be resold
• A purchase is the only thing that actually generates revenue
• All needs have already been solved
• Perception trumps data
• "Tyranny of the served market": An overemphasis on existing customers. Need "bi-focal view" to see current and future customers.
• Organize around markets, not technology
• Bottom-lines ignore long-term
• Link your metrics to your strategy, and build dashboards around them
• "Are you the team that can get this done?"
• Are customers going to pay enough, fast enough to keep you going at poor economies of scale?
• Companies fail over customers, not products
• Customer development in addition to product development:
  • Personas
  • Look out for two-sided markets
  • Who is your beach-head market?
• You need to be 30% better on some attribute.
• "Leap-frogging" (skipping a version)- this can prevent your ability to price skim
• Your supply chain: Supplier -> Manufacturer/OEM -> Channel members -> Customers
• Established companies are all about efficiencies (COGS listed before SARL), while startups are focused on development (SARL listed before COGS)
• Digital convergence is a source of innovation. You can connect standalone devices, create hybrid products, and cross industry boundaries.
• Products are goods and services. Goods are objects and are "sold", services are actions and are "rendered." You can't resell a service.
• Product line: Group of products, same customers, same outlets, similar prices
• Product mix: All product lines in an organization
  • Width: # of lines
  • Length: # of products
  • Depth: # of versions
  • Consistency

Types of Marketing

• Strategic: Proactive, guides efforts in marketplace
• Functional: 4 P's, who will work on it
• Tactical: Advertisement, trade shows

Strategic Market Planning

• Top-down (driven by CEO) or bottom-up (driven by business units)
• The goal is to gain competitive advantage- to have resources and competencies that are valuable, rare, durable, and difficult to imitate. Resources can be physical, intangible (patents, etc.). Competencies are bundles of skills. Your core competencies are those that are part of your competitive advantage.
• Durability - How fast are you obselete? Tech is generally not durable.
• Difficult to imitate - How hard are you to rip off?
• Firms overinvest in R&D, and underinvest in appropriated existing tech
• Strategy sweet spot is the intersection of Who? What Value? and How?
• Value propositions:
  • "All benefits": Easy, not reflective of a particular customer base
  • "Favorable differentiation": We're better than our competitors
  • "Resonating focus": Drive a point home to customers
  • Turn it into a tagline: Name is a type company, and with product, customer gets benefit
  • Should be able to be pitched in 30 seconds

The 4 P's

• Product - Development, partnerships
• Price - Cost, margins
• Promotion - Avertising and sales
• Place - Supply-chain, channels

Innovation

• Can be incremental or break-through, but those are managed differently
• Technology push vs. Market pull
• Can be in the supply-chain: An innovation in manufacturing or delivery

3 Key Marketing Questions

• What customer needs are you addressing?
• Who are your customers and do they really care?
• Are they willing and able to pay your prices again and again?

Treacy and Wiersma Value Disciplines

Discipline	Core Competencies	Model & Strategy	Priority Investments	Notes
Product Leadership	R&D, IP Management	Tech provider	Science, legal	Target early adopters, enables price skimming, High failure rate (47%), Leaders are first to fail, unless you're already an established business
Customer Intimacy	Empathy, whatever it takes, customer culture	Service provider	Customers	Niche, target late adopters, good for services
Operational excellence	Process & continuous improvement	Manufacture goods	Value chain, process	The low-cost defender
Fast Follower	Competitive intelligence, IP workarounds	Dependent on competition	Competitor analysis, speed, legal	Helps to be rich to scale quicker, you can offer a better product, price, advertisement, or strategy

Tech companies often have to blend and innovate strategies. Allow for emergent design from low levels, and combine it with your planned design.

GSOTs

• Goals, which inform
• Strategies, which inform
• Objectives, which inform
• Tactics

Customer-Centric Environment

Customers's needs are affected by

• Your existing competitors
• Potential new entrants
• Substitute products
• Suppliers

Culture & Climate

• Culture: Deep-rooted values and beliefs, norms
• Climate: Behaviors that are expected & rewarded

High-tech needs a culture of innovativeness. R&D needs to be an indispensible line item. No stage-gating. Foster disciplined creativity.

Things that facilitate your culture:

• Top management's attention
• Creative destruction
• Management's willingness to cannabilize their products
• Product champions
• Skunkworks teams
• An orientation toward learning
• Unlearning traditional-but-detrimental practices
• Corporate imagination
• Expeditionary marketing ("Ready, aim, aim, aim, fire!")
• Risk tolerance
• Compensating innovation

Things that block your culture:

• Core rigidities (opposite of core competencies)
• Innovator's dillemma

Markets vs. Industries

Should we be in this business? At what price?

Markets: buyers

• Is a market large enough to allow for multiple competitors?
• What's your short-term growth rate?
• What's your long-term growth rate?

Industries: sellers

• Easy or difficult to enter?
• Do suppliers have the power to set terms and conditions?
• Do buyers have the power to set terms and conditions?
• Easy or difficult for substitute products to steal marketshare?
• How fierce is competition?

Where are you positioned?

• Traditional position map
• Spider
• Matric
• BCG

SWOT analysis

Get to know markets and industries through research, primary and secondary.

Primary research:

• Determining strategy: Ask open-ended questions, use focus groups, walk in their shoes
• Determining tactics: Ask close-ended question, "Which do you prefer?", surveys

Market-Oriented & Cross-Functional Marketing

• Must excel at opportunity identification, product & process improvement, and product commercialization
• Same as customer-focused
• Using market information to guide strategic decision-making
• Intelligence generation -> Intelligence dissemination -> Intelligence integration -> Coordinated action

Intelligence generation

• Purchase secondary market intelligence
• Expressed needs aren't everything
• Marketing myopia, the tyranny of the served market
• Responsive vs. proactive market orientation
  • "Market-driving" is a subset of this
• "Bifocal vision"- Present & future customers

Intelligence dissemination

• Boundary-less organization
• Meetings, conferences, newsletters, databases, hall talk
• Prevent hoarding

Intelligence Integration

• Explicit vs. tacit knowledge
• Knowledge management

Coordinated Action

• If someone was a part of a decision, they're more committed to applying it
• "Coopetition": Competing for scarce resources

Facilitating conditions:

• Prioritize information gathering
• Top management commitment
• Decentralized org. structure
• Market-based compensation

Product Development & Marketing - R&D Interaction

• Marketing is boundary-spanning
• Cross-functional product-dev
• Need communication, use of information, conflict management
• Team-orientation
• Reward systems - Team & group
• Breakthrough vs. incremental innovations
• Know your customer, use to resolve early questions
• "Cooptation": Informal collaboration & consensus-building
• Cooperation- colocate and embed

Teams must have:

• Commitment of senior management
• Clear and stable vision
• Improvisation
• Information exchange
• Collaboration under pressure

Barriers:

• Dominant engineering culture
• Different values, education, personalities
• Different locations
• Rivalry

Business Models

Pick one:

• Consulting
• Content provider
• Installation & maintenance
• Manufacturer
• Research & technology

Revenue Model

• Regular Recurring
• One-time

Decision-making Units

• Who buys, who uses, who might be the champion
  • Champion: Who wants the customer to purchase
  • By an ally to your champion, not a salesperson
• Consumer products vs. commercial products
• National infrastructure
• Primary economic buyer: who controls the budget
• Primary, secondary influencers: Magazines & the dumb buddy
• Who has veto power?
• Purchasing departments
• Learn about the DMUs for your personas

Total Addressable Market

• An estimate of the market size- amount of annual revenue if you got 100% market share
• Find the "beachhead market" to make your way in
• "Count noses," look at trends- how much will each spend per year?
• A $5M TAM is too small, $20M-$100M is good, >$1B is bad

Lifecycle Use Cases

• How, why, when, where your product is used
• How does the customer use, service, and dispose of your product?
• Resistance and barriers to adoption
• Should all be from the customer's view
• Should be a visual

Pain Points

• Are you solving a pain point, or introducing a new one?
• Is your product enough to change customer behavior? If possible, rely on their existing behavior.

Market Research

Gathering information:

• Market research is between 0.1% and 0.8% of revenue and uses between 5 and 50 people
• Standard methods are good for incremental innovation, otherwise intuition drives breakthroughs. In between those, check in with your customers, use prototypes, and tap into your "lead users"

Tools

• Concept testing
• Conjoint analysis (breaking a product into value per feature)
• Customer visits with a cross-functional team
• Empathetic design: getting inside a user's world, finding pain points, offering customizations
• Finding "lead users"
• Quality function deployment
  • Map customer needs into design requirements
  • Kano model
• Prototyping
• Beta testing
• Customer-driven innovation- open source, modding
• Biomimicry

Forecasting

Qualitative tools:

• Delphi Method: Separate experts, look for consensus
• Analagous data

Quantitative tools:

• Bass model (S-curve)

Incremental	Breakthrough
Time-series	Delphi technique
Moving average	Analagous data
Exponential smoothing	Bass model

Understanding High-Tech Customers

The Customer Purchase Decision Process

1. Problem Recognition
2. Information Search
3. Evaluate Alternatives
4. Purchase Decision
5. Post-purchase Evaluation

Design:

• Functional + Aesthetics
• Design thinking: Human + business + technology factors

Factors affecting the adoption of innovation

• Relative advantage
• Compatibility
• Complexity
• Trialability
• Ability to communicate product benefits
• Observability

Tech adopters:

Innovators | Early Adopters | The Chasm | Early Majority | Late Majority | Laggards

To cross the chasm:

1. Choose a "beach head" customer
   • They should have a single "must-have" reason to buy
   • They should be adjacent to related segments:
     • Adjacent areas have word-of-mouth
     • Similar needs
     • Capturable in a short period of time
2. Develop the "whole product"
3. Have competition, and be better than them
4. Enter the "bowling alley" - your beachhead customer should be the lead pin that helps you capture other niche markets. This is easy to skip, but these are the alliances you'll need to go mass-market.
5. Enter the "tornado." The current market leader will propelled into a tornado by the pragmatist buyers who fight to choose a "winner," and companies will show triple-digit growth. There is typically one winner, one smaller player, and everyone else takes scraps. Market leaders here tend to stay the market leaders, unless they do something like fail to keep up with falling price points or forcing the market to adopt an innovation they don't want. This transition is hard because the bowling alley and the tornado require opposite strategies. The bowling alley is won by references, customization, and niche positioning. The tornado is won by mass markets, increased distribution, generic products, attacking the competition, and commoditizing your product.
6. Enter "main street." There are no new customers, so you sell customization and target niches again.

Segmentation, targeting, and positioning

• Divide possible customers into groups
• A "vertical" is an industry
• A "horizontal" is a function
• Profile your customers
• Evaluate and select a target market based on:
  • Size
  • Growth
  • Level of competition
  • Your capability to serve this segment
• Position your product within the segment (based on perception and competition)
• Multi-attribute model: customer ranks importance of performance on attributes
• Perceptual map

The Customer Paradoxical Relationship

Positive benefits of a technology may be outweighed by their negative consequences. Eg. ATMs at banks hurt relationships between customers and tellers.

• Control vs. chaos
• Assimilation vs. isolation
• Intelligence vs. stupidity
• Freedom vs. enslavement
• Engagement vs. disengagement
• Efficiency vs. inefficiency
• Fulfilling needs vs. creating needs
• New vs. obselete

Customer attitudes toward technology:

• Techtopian
• "Work machine"
• Green/luddite
• Techspressive

Venture Metrics

Cash is king!

• Breakeven volume
• Burn rate (rate at which you spend cash)
• Cost of acquiring new customers
• Gross margin
• Lifetime value of a customer
• Net margin
• Next product purchase rate
• Product cost
• Retention rate
• Sales, admin, R&D, and legal (SARL)
• Time to cash out (how soon you will run out of cash)
• Time to cash-flow positive (when investors start getting paid)

Pro-Formas

Model the first 12-24 months, then do quarterly for years 3 and 4. Model for different scenarios.

• P&L, Balance Sheet, and Statement of Cash Flows
• EBITDA approximates cash flow
• Target numbers: Top-down guess, based on experience (+/- 20%)
• Forecast numbers: Supported by analysis (+/- 10%)
• Planning numbers: Bottom-up commitments (+/- 5%)
• Use real numbers, not conservative guesses

Revenue Projections

You need to forecast revenues:

• Per product/service
• Over 3-5 years of time
• Including # of units and average net price/unit

Use net units and prices. Time 0 = when you start the clock.

Target Costing

If you can't cover your costs, you're out of business. The cost is locked in at the design stage, so work backward to establish a target cost.

• Accounting costs
• Societal costs
• Fixed costs
• Variable costs
• Direct vs. indirect costs
• Total costs = fixed + variable costs
• Dock price
• Markup is added to cost to get pricce
• Margin is percentage that price exceeds cost
• Net margin uses total costs
• Gross margin = Revenue - COGS
  • COGS = Direct material + direct labor + manufacturing overhead
  • Tech companies should shoot for >50% gross margin
  • Services use "cost of services rendered"
• Breakeven volume = $0 profit

Steps to target costing:

1. Start w/ price and estimate of sales #s
2. Backtrack through distribution channel to dock price
3. Include required profits
4. Target costs = forecasted revenues - target profits
5. Allocate target costs by department
6. Reality check, reiterate
7. Use these as budgets

Take into account your SARL and SG&A. COGS/COSR needs to be < 50% of the price.

Unit costs = Variable costs + (Fixed costs / Units sold)

30 Sample Policy

• The first 10 samples are about learning
• The second 10 samples are about confirming what you learned
• The third 10 samples are about looking for surprises

Economics

• Economics is the study of scarcity, politics is the process for managing scarce resources
• Demand curves:
  • The lower asymptote is the limit for the benefit you got from a price drop
  • A growing market translates the graph right
  • A higher price means more perceived value
  • Consider the elasticity of the curve
• Supply curves:
  • The lower asymptote means no suppliers
  • The price being above or below the curve indicates a surplus or shortage

Customer Acquisition Process

• What triggers a purchase decision?
• How do they:
  • Know about your product
  • Evaluate
  • Acquire and install
  • Pay

Steps:

1. Lead generation
2. Access to influencers
3. Pre-purchase planning and evaluation
4. Which DMUs? What do you need?
   • Stay below the authority of the DMU's purchasing power
5. Purchasing (including paying)
   • Discretionary? Annual? Seasonality?
6. Installation

Compare the cost of customer acquisition against the lifetime value of the customer.

• COCA = (Σ marketing & sales costs - Σ cost of support) / # of new customers
  • Includes all marketing costs
• LTV = NPV of profits generated by the average customer
  • A one-shot vs. a franchise customer
• COCA can be huge, try to drive it down quickly
• LTV must be 3x the steady-state COCA
• Tools for improving LTV:
  • Recurring sales
  • Upsells
  • Improving margin
  • Retention
  • Next purchase value

Setting Prices

• Acceptable, consistent with strategy, comeptitive, sticky, legal
• Penetration pricing vs. skimming
• Strategies:
  • Value-based
  • Cost-based
  • Competitor-based
  • Value-added
  • Cost-cutter
  • Auction
• Upstream vs. downstream pricing, value chain
• Illegal:
  • Price-fixing
  • Predatory pricing
  • Discriminatory pricing
  • Price maintenance
  • Deceptive pricing
• Pricing laws:
  • Sherman anti-trust (1890)
  • Clayton act (1914)
  • Robinson-Patman act

3 C's of Pricing

• Costs: The floor- the lowest you can charge. Manufacturing experience drives this down- if that's the case with your competitors too, it will also drive down the price.
• Competition: Based on need.
• Customers: The ceiling- the most you can charge. They judge off of:
  • Functional benefits
  • Operational benefits
  • Financial benefits
  • Personal benefits
  • Monetary & non-monetary costs
  • Reference prices
  • Total cost of ownership

Customer-Oriented Pricing

• How will it be used? The verticals are end-use segments.
  • Different verticals pay differently. Service-needs categories:
    • Basic needs customers
    • Risk avoiders - Low response, no big bills
    • Hand-holders - Quick, service, expensive
• Focus on benefits
• Calculate customer costs - can be used to drive a target cost
• Service-Needs Categories
• Basic needs

The Tech Paradox

Businesses can prosper at the same time their prices are falling, if they can grow their volume and/or drive down costs faster than their prices are falling.

Solutions:

• No cost inefficiencies
• Don't be a commodity
• Agility
• New revenue streams
• Build long-term relationships
• Use dynamic pricing
• Mass customizations
• Product bundling
• Price-lining
• Captive-product pricing
• Sale vs. License (dangerous to undervalue)
• Subscription vs. micropayment
• Promotions

Product Management

Technology map: A stream of new products, both breakthrough and incremental.

1. Technology identification: What know-how do we have?
2. What know-how should we add?
   • Make vs. buy
   • "Not invented here" syndrome
3. Decide about commercialization vs. licensing
4. Ongoing management

How to sell your product:

This side of the spectrum is better for if the tech doesn't fit your mission, lacks money, or is hard to make profitiable.

1. Sell/license your knowhow
2. Sell proof-of-concept
3. Sell components to an OEM
4. Sell a final product
5. Sell a complete solution ("with the cables")

This side of the spectrum may encourage standardization.

Tech transfer considerations:

• Federal to private
• Patent protections

Product architecture

• Modularity
• Platforms and derivatives
  • High "first product" costs, can cover lots of market gaps
• Customizations

When you have to kill a product, find a way to pivot, find an "exit champion," and use different managers to kill than the ones who kept it alive.

| --- | --- | | High-Tech Product: Augment with services revenue, training, and maintenance. | High-Tech Service: Offer "pure" services, research, and consultation | | Low-Tech Product: Augment your existing services with tech (eg. ERP system) | Low-Tech Service: Improve traditional services (eg. Self-service, ATMs) |

Intangibility + Inseparability

Intellectual property considerations

• Doctrine of inevitable disclosure
• Actively manage your intellectual property, it has a $ value

Types of protection:

• Patent - Excludes others from making/using/selling. Must have utility, novelty, and be non-obvious.
  • Are public knowledge
  • A business method must be tied to a machine or otherwise make a transformation
• Copyright - Protects the form the idea is expressed in (eg. music, software)
  • DRM
• Trademark - Distinguishing words, names, symbols, devices
• Trade secret

Total Experience

Concentric circles. In the middle is the need being addressed. Outside that is the product. Outside that is the augmented product (service, warranty, delivery).

Needs: Fear, safety, sex, ego, thrill Quality: Performance & conformance Goods: Consumer goods & industrial goods Service: Organizations, persons, places, ideas

Without good aesthetics, a customer won't proceed to analysis.

Project Management Methodologies

• Waterfall
• Stage-Gate
• Spiral
• Design-to-schedule
• Scrum
• Bounding box

Branding

• Consistency
• Usage experience
• "Brand equity"
• Image
• Influence the influencers
• "Social profit"
• Brand hierarchy (eg Microsoft -> Windows -> Vista)
• Use symbols
• Manage all points of contact
• Co-branding
• Roadmap for the future
• Brands are owned by customers
• You can brand your ingredients ("Intel Inside")
• OEMs might opt for "no brand"

Partnerships

Types of partnerships

• Outsourcing / Off-shoring / Global supply chain / Insourcing / OSS
• "Tie-ups"
• Vertical partnerships (buyer-supplier)
  • OEM
  • Channel members, customers
• Horizontal partnerships (same supply-chain function)
  • Complementary alliances/complementors (eg. stereos & iPods)
  • Competitive alliances/coopetition (eg. consortiums, DVDs)

Partnering Strategies

• Emergence-stage
  • Setting industry standards
  • Licensing to a decline-stage company
  • Strategic alliances (a "credible commitment")
• Growth-stage - license your tech to losers
• Maturity-stage - Find new markets and benefit from outsourcing
• Decline-stage - License a new technology

Risks of partnering

• Losing trade secrets
• Anti-trust lawsuits

Factors for success

• Interdependence
• Good governance
• Commitment, trust, communication, perceived buy-in
• Compatible cultures, conflict resolution, contracts
• Success criteria

Outsourcing

• Business process outsourcing (customer service)
• IT outsourcing
• Original design manufacturing
• Off-shoring
  • Captive off-shoring
  • Reverse-Off-Shoring
  • Near-shore outsourcing (same time-zone)
  • Homeshoring (domestic)
  • Farmshoring

Reasons to outsource:

• Cost savings
• Focus on your core competencies
• Outsource provider's capabilities
• Technology (easy)
• Mitigate HR
• Trends

Contingencies:

• How critical is it?
• How simple is the process being outsourced?
• Are there economies of scale?
• What are their capabilities
• Governance

Other kinds of partnerships:

• Open innovation networks ("Use our patents!")
• New product alliances
  • The horizontals have a lot of redundancies
• Industry clusters (geographic)

Customer Relationship Management

• Look for win/wins
• A 1% increase in retention = 3%-7% in profit because of acquisition cost
• Customer equity = Lifetime Value

1. Identify high-potential customers
   • High LTV
   • Cross-buyering, share of the wallet
   • Firing customers (ala Best Buy)
2. Develop a customer acquisition strategy
   • Full-throttle- Low risk / High return
   • Pay-as-you-go- Low risk / low return
   • Slingshot- High risk / low return
   • Divest/restructure- High risk / low return
   • Differentiation
   • Price (capture price butterflies)
3. Develop a portfolio management strategy
   • True friends- Keep things fresh
   • Butterflies- Get big and quick business, don't reacquire them
   • Barnacles- Be careful, maybe terminate with them
   • Strangers- One and done

Distribution Channels

Channels:

• Direct
  • Direct sales- sales and distribution, the sales team
  • Website, disintermediation
  • Bricks + clicks
  • Company-owned outlets
• Indirect
  • Value-added reseller
  • Systems integrators
  • Distributors

Degree of coverage in channels vs. intrabrand conflict (erodes your prices)

Channel structure:

• Direct channel (vertically integrated)
• Intermediaries can be removed, but not the functions they served
• Intermediaries introduce contact efficiencies
• Intrabrand competition: Different channels, same market

Channel Management

• Unilateral vs. bilateral control
• Coercive influence vs. non-coercive influence
• "Tying" purchase of an in-demand product to high-margin add-on
• Exclusive distribution & pricing
• Relational or adversarial?

Steps:

1. Gather market data (no more than 10% revenue conflicted)
2. Work toward harmonization following contingency theory
   • ID target segments
   • Delineate tasks/functions required to sell to them
   • Allocate most efficient channels to those tasks

• Digital markets can have very long tails
• Gray market: unauthorized distribution
  • Caused by bulk discounts, exchange rates, or exclusivity
  • Often used as loss leaders
• Black markets & piracy:
  • Restricted exports
• Base of the pyramid concerns

Supply Chain

• From raw material to customer
• "Bullwhip effect" distorts marketing signals
  • Demand uncertainty
  • Supply uncertainty

Technologies:

• Online platforms
• eProcurement
• Reverse auctions
• ERP
• RFID

Advertising

• "New Media": Search ads, banners, blogging
  • CPM - Impressions, cost per thousand
  • Banner ads are brand building
  • Branded sponsorship
  • SEO
  • CPM vs. Cost-Per-Click
  • Click-stream analysis
  • Affiliates
  • Location-based marketing on mobile
  • Network effects, referrals
  • Analytics:
    • Conversion rate, bounce rate, return on marketing investment

Advertising & promotion pyramid:

1. Personal selling
2. Telemarketing
3. Catalogs & white papers
4. Trade shows
5. Direct mail
6. PR
7. Media ads

Higher on the pyramid has a higher cost per contact and lower reach, and vice-versa.

Pre-Announcements

• Generate hype
• Risks being vaporware
• Gives you a pioneering advantage
• Cues your competitors
• You may run into delays
• May cannibalize your own products

Aesthetics

• Contrast
• White space
• Rhythm/Repetition
• Creative cropping
  • Hide information
  • Find a more interesting picture in the picture
• Sublimation / "Wall Papering"
• Overlapping elements
• Color saturation
  • Stay away from full saturation
  • Pull the color from a photo
  • www.colorlovers.com for pallettes
• Tension
  • Not static
  • Cluster to draw attention
  • Edge of the frame creates tension
  • Off-center, tilt
• Rule of thirds
• No boxes and hairlines
• No trapped space
• No more than 2 typefaces, big contrast
• Have a target
• Logos - Not as important as the product