RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts

Excerpts

  • Archetypal brands are classless, ageless, and regionless, and their deep meaning must be inviolate. That’s why it matters that the brand’s story (not just its advertising, but the whole myth or legend surrounding the brand) must be congruent with the brand’s core archetype.

    Brands are trusted to the degree that everything they do is consistent. Products seem right when everything about them is aligned with their informing archetype. This obviously includes the product’s logo, tag line, product design, packaging, and placement in stores, as well as the design of the story, the environment surrounding the sale of the product, and the look and story line of all promotional materials, including your Web site. They all should tell your story.

    — The Hero and the Outlaw: Building Extraordinary Brands Through the Power of Archetypes by Margaret Mark, Carol S. Pearson

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Product-Led Growth (PLG)

    Go-to-market strategy that relies on the product to acquire, activate, or retain customers. It is seen as one of the more cost-effective ways to create a customer base, in particular to engender organic growth and evangelism. It’s particularly popular for developer tools, as it’s always presumed developers like to try something before they believe it will work for them, as well as consumer-facing companies.

    In B2B companies, it can mean using product data to drive sales actions. The idea with PLG is that people like the product so much, they use it with others, which grows the number of users organically or vastly simplifies the sales process.

    — Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Martina Lauchengco

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  • Researchers classified the three types of behavior. The first group, termed gamblers, took high risks but exerted no influence on the outcome of events. The second group, termed conservatives, were people who took very little risk. The third group, termed achievers, had to test the limits of what they could do, and with no prompting demonstrated the point of the experiment: namely, that some people simply must test themselves.

    By challenging themselves, these people were likely to miss a peg several times, but when they began to ring the peg consistently, they gained satisfaction and a sense of achievement. The point is that both competence and achievement-oriented people spontaneously try to test the outer limits of their abilities.

    — High Output Management by Andrew S. Grove

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  • It’s not an accident that some products catch on and some don’t. When an ideavirus occurs, it’s often because all the viral pieces work together. How smooth and easy is it to spread your idea? How often will people sneeze it to their friends? How tightly knit is the group you’re targeting — do they talk much? Do they believe each other?

    How reputable are the people most likely to promote your idea? How persistent is it — is it a fad that has to spread fast before it dies, or will the idea have legs (and thus you can invest in spreading it over time)? Put all of your new product developments through this analysis, and you’ll discover which ones are most likely to catch on. Those are the products and ideas worth launching.

    — Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable by Seth Godin

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  • If we define the future as a time that looks different from the present, then most people aren’t expecting any future at all; instead, they expect coming decades to bring more globalization, convergence, and sameness.

    In this scenario, poorer countries will catch up to richer countries, and the world as a whole will reach an economic plateau. But even if a truly globalized plateau were possible, could it last? In the best case, economic competition would be more intense than ever before for every single person and firm on the planet. However, when you add competition to consume scarce resources, it’s hard to see how a global plateau could last indefinitely. Without new technology to relieve competitive pressures, stagnation is likely to erupt into conflict. In case of conflict on a global scale, stagnation collapses into extinction.

    That leaves the fourth scenario, in which we create new technology to make a much better future. The most dramatic version of this outcome is called the Singularity, an attempt to name the imagined result of new technologies so powerful as to transcend the current limits of our understanding.

    — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

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