Wichita Marketing Notes: Features, benefits and what people want

I still run with a lot of the old Wichita marketing people I've known since the beginning of my career in the early 1990s, and we frequently return to one of the oldest discussions in all of marketingdom: the difference between features and benefits.

There are a lot of ways to explain it, but it comes down to this: Features are an offshoot of the way we see our products from the seller's side. Our products are like our children; we love them no matter how others feel about them. We think about them constantly, we know them inside and out in all of their beautiful, glorious detail.

Benefits, on the other hand, can only be understood by seeing our products from buyer's point of view. The buyer doesn't care as much about features (what does it do?) as they do about benefits (what does it do for me?).

Wichita Marketing Notes: Great marketing is still on the menu

I used to make fun of consultants.

Like this:
 Definition of a consultant - someone who borrows your watch, tells you the time, then keeps the watch.

Or this:

Q: Why do we call them consultants?
 A: Because first they con you, then they insult you.

But in today's climate, the marketer's role is more consultative than ever. Back in my agency days, every client pretty much read from an established menu when building their marketing strategy:

Main course of yellow pages and print ads
Generous sides of direct mail and radio
A heaping helping of TV for dessert

Video Production Kansas Notes: Part 2 – The ten-minute, three-point lighting guide for business web videos

As promised in Part 1 of the Video Production Kansas Notes series, this article will demonstrate some simple tricks that can make your company's web videos look more professional. These tips apply to everything from webcam interviews to instructional videos shot with a flip cam or camcorder. You won't need to buy any expensive equipment to make this work; a bright window, a desk lamp and a clamp-on work light will do the trick in most shooting environments.

Is it worth the extra trouble? Web viewers, you may argue, have very low production standards, so why bother?

Wichita Marketing Notes: Conversion means more than "buy it now"

You may have heard of the term "brochure ware," a not-too-kind description of a website that lays there and does nothing, from a marketing standpoint. Much more popular--and effective--is a "working website," one that serves a specific purpose in a well oiled marketing chain.

How does it work? The short answer is: it creates online conversion.

Video Production Kansas Notes: Part 1 – Video for the web ain't rocket surgery

As you may know, Ponder:Connect has quite a bit of experience working with large video production and film production teams to produce everything from industrial videos to short films and television shows. But last week, a meeting with a friend and potential client made me realize that many people assume we only do big-budget video work. Not true.