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Marketing Preparation.

This piece describes the evolution of ideas I had while deciding how to market Datawasp and the conclusions I eventually came to and the actions I took and am taking.

Together with my account of the development of Datawasp this document is a contextual precursor to my blog which tracks all aspects of Datawasp since its launch.

The account of the development of Datawasp application can be found here. If you go and look at it you will see that it is a lot longer than this account. That is because I have put a lot more effort into making Datawasp than selling it - so far.

When I first conceived of Datawasp (it wasn't called that then ) I wanted to create not just an application but a business.

I come from the games industry and products have a very short shelf life. I was always in approving awe of the non game applications which went on for years gradually improving and expanding. That was the business model for me.

The developer part of me believed then and still believes today that all I had to do was produce a really useful tool and people would some how find out about it buy it and tell their friends who would try it buy it and tell their friends.....

The sales men and marketers amongst you must be having a wry chuckle at that thought and I can understand why - but here is why I have faith in product.

Whilst I was developing games for a living I had plenty of contact with salesmen and marketers and I noticed that mostly what marketers and salesman want is good product. Every time something didn't sell it was because it lacked a certain feature or was too late to market or bad quality etc... Marketers may talk about the importance of marketing but in the end the product is the ultimate marketing tool and the only one that really matters.

Whilst I have always believed that product is the biggest part of marketing. What has happened more recently is that now I also think that marketing is a big part of the product.

I expect its an internet thing but the distinction between market, product and audience (development and marketing) seems very blurry indeed. The act of 'advertising' your product is the provision of an information service for free in the hope of delivering another service for cost. When somebody 'buys' your product they provide the direct service of giving you money and the indirect service of telling you are doing something useful - then the supplier provides ongoing support and the user provides ongoing information about their needs. Its a big melting pot of services with a dribble of cash to lubricate the process.

All very Zen but right now I need to get people to download Datawasp and then buy it so what do I do.

Datawasp was always conceived of as Trial-ware. I don't want to just find a publisher and spend my life trying to get royalties out of them. That's not a business. I want direct interaction with the end user. I want to be involved in all aspects of the relationship and process.

The nice thing about Trialware - or so I believed - was that it is free marketing. There are literally hundreds - over a thousands sites which host trial-ware for 'free'. All I had to do was put the product up on these and sit back and wait right? Well were I am two weeks after launch, a total of zero sales, and I am not so sure.

I am starting to get impatient. I am starting to have doubts, I want to take action. I expect the theme for the blog, for which, this is a precursor - to be my attempt to market Datawasp for quite some time.

I have not actually said much about the marketing of Datawasp so far except that I am using the Trialware model and I want to build Datawasp into a long term business.
Here are the marketing actions I have taken so far to 'Market' data wasp prior to starting the Datawasp blog.

I created a positioning statement

Whilst doing all the testing for Datawasp I cast around for some legitimate excuse for getting a few hours surcease from it. I lit on the idea of producing some kind of marketing plan for my product. To this end I bought a load of books on marketing and read them. It was a great way to take a break from testing and I also learned a few things about the received wisdom for marketing.

I read vanilla marketing books which talk about primary distribution and secondary distribution and sales forecasts and budgeting etc.

I also read books about marketing on a shoe string, PR. Lots of these I didn't actually read so much as flick thru at the book shop. A few of them I took home and read cover to cover . One of these was on 'positioning' which suggested that you have to find some unoccupied plot in the buyers mind and then put your products name in that spot. The most important principle was that once a product occupies a slot in the buyers mind it is almost impossible for it to be displaced by a new comer.

I liked the sound of 'positioning' it made a lot of sense and the book was wittily written which always impresses me. As well as making sense it gave a lot of practical suggestions for competing in this psychological land grab. One idea was that you can create your own mental real estate relative to existing real estate. I guess the 'land' metaphor breaks down here because there is a limited supply of land and it is a key feature of positioning that the right actions can generate some mind space out of nothing. For Datawasp I decided the products I should relate myself to were spread sheets and data bases.

The instant I wrote this down it made sense.

Ever since then if anybody asks me what Datawasp is I tell them it is what you use when a database is too much trouble and a spreadsheet is not up to the job. In positioning speak I am creating a new piece of real estate relative to those well fought over locations. Instead of competing with the giants for the database and spread sheet real estate I am suggesting their is another place to be and I am there. Now of course I am not strictly speaking first there. Other products try to achieve a similar thing but as the book pointed out it is not a case of who is first to market but who is first to occupy the psychological real estate so here I am..

Deciding on this positioning statement was an example of a breakthrough where I had all but given up but I kept on researching even though the effort seemed wasted. Research always pays!

I have got a name and a logo
Never before has so much effort gone into an arrangement of so few letters - 8 that is.

The name Datawasp is kinda cool. It has the word Data in it and suggests a compact power which is inline with my positioning statement.

It took about 4 years to find.

The instant it was suggested I felt it was great and so did everyone else.

Right from the very first day of the project I started hunting around for a good name. Right from the start I felt it had to follow the following criteria.

Of these requirements the biggest problems came from the last. Anybody who has tried to find an available domain name with a money word like 'data' in it will know what I mean. I spent hours a day over a period of years using thesauruses and dictionaries to try out words. By the end the need to have a meaningful url with an unambiguous spelling over road all the other requirements.

I bugged my friends endlessly actually sitting them down and forcing them to come up with ideas whilst I typed them into 123.com and Google. In the end it was my girlfriend's brother William Darling who came up with the winning entry.

When he said it I actually rejected it on the basis that I had tried loads of other combinations of 'data' and the name of an animal .datahound databear datamule etc.. and they had all been taken.

But bingo I typed it into 123.com and it was available. I typed it into my trademark research site and got zero hits. I typed it into google and got denada, zip nothing.

I bagged it at 123 on the spot. By some freak co-incidence my graphic artist brother in law was sitting next to Will when we suggested Datawasp and agreed to do a free logo for me - for which I am eternally grateful. With name and logo the web site was quickly commissioned and executed tying

I have a web site

For the web site my guiding principles were

- that it had to be all about the product not the company. I presumed that visitors had one question 'What is Datawasp?' and then "Wwll it solve my problems?" There had to be a clear signal that the site was there to answer those questions.

- that the whole site had to be consistent. The site uses four majorly different technologies but I wanted it to look like one continuous entity.

- the site had to reflect my long term commitment to the product.

- the site had to be easy to use- very easy to use my whole positioning system was based on 'easy to use' the web site was my chance to show that I believe in easy to use and was capable of delivering it.

It is at this point that the blog takes up the story. I hope I will see you there.