Phil McKinney's Podcast on Killer Innovations

If you are into product management and innovation you will want to check out Phil McKinney's podcasts (you can also subscribe from iTunes). Phil is the VP/CTO for Personal Systems Group in HP and well known speaker in the field of innovation and creativity.

SCAMMPER technique

Used for idea generation, take any words, attributes, features, problems or ideas and:
S - substitute, simplify
C - change, combine
A - adapt, adopt
M - magnify, minify
M - modify, multiply
P - package, purloin
E - elevate, eliminate
R - reverse, rearrange

The 16 Hot Buttons of Marketing and Sales

Today I learned about the 16 hot buttons that drive all purchase behavior from Mr. Barry Feig.
Here's the list

1. The desire to control - over one's destiny, finances, health, relationship and even food and shelter.
2. I'm better than you - the need to have status and feel significant.
3. Joy of discovery - joy of discovering is uncovering the unexpected joy.
4. Revaluing - as baby boomers enjoy a new phase in life, they are going back to the things they loved as kids.. but with a new twist.
5. Family values - quality time with families are still of utmost importance to many societies.
6. The desire to belong - people want to be associated with people like themselves, they show products like badges.
7. Fun is its own rewards - people want to have fun.
8. Poverty of time - nobody has enough time (but you can't substitute convenience for quality).
9. The desire to get the best that can be got - assert your product leadership position.
10. Self achievement - "be the best that you can be" is a strong motivating factor; intrinsic rewards are as important as extrinsic rewards.
11. Love of cosmo - sex sells, so does love and romance.
12. The Nurturing response - people like to nurture even more than being nurtured, make your customers the hero with your product.
13. Reinventing oneself - give them a chance to start over.
14. Make me smarter - people want to FEEL that they are smart for buying your product.
15. Power and dominance - aspiration to be more than in control of your environment.
16. Wish fulfillment - give the consumer to power to fly, market to aspirations.

Isolate and combine them, Push them!
You can read Barry's own description here.

Other wisdoms I've learned today:
"Perception is reality."
"There are no features - there are only benefits. Customer buy benefits, not features."
"Focus on delivering outcomes, not products."

And a note on measuring success (and all the talk about KPIs):
"Simplicity applies to measurement also. Too often we measure everything and understand nothing." ~ Jack Welch.

Valuable day indeed.