March SVAMA Event – Entrepreneurial Marketing | MarketCulture Blog - Using a Customer Culture for Competitive Advantage

March SVAMA Event – Entrepreneurial Marketing

We had another awesome event last week in San Jose, this time the topic was Entrepreneurial marketing….

A couple of photos…..

: Alex Littlewood – President of the SVAMA and Donna Wells CMO Mint.com

: Lilia Shirman Moderating the Panel

: The Panel of TJ, Donna and Kimber

Thanks to SVASE we had a great turn out of marketers and entrepreneurs interesting in hearing from a panel that was keynoted by Donna Wells from mint.com. Mint.com is a great financial tool that helps you keep track of what your spending on by providing updates and suggestions on how you can save money which is pretty critical in this economy….

Joining Donna were Kimber from Increo Solutions who make two cool products, one called backboard which is a feedback tool that allows users to easily collaborate and provide feedback on documents online and the other is embed it which allows embedding of a large number of documents in websites using flash and TJ a serial entrepreneur with two new businesses at the moment, slice (really cool designer home cutting products) and partybeans which allows you to customize jelly beans and other fun sweets in packages for parties and different life events….

So it was a great panel with lots to share on whats working and what’s not… here were my takeaways:

1. Marketing is changing in a big way, product is more important than ever before because you can’t cover up a crappy product that does not deliver value with lots a marketing spend anymore… word gets out and the product falls over

2. It is possible to get quality customer insight and feedback at a fraction of the cost, online research tools and social networks allow for testing and refinement that was not possible a few years back

3. PR is replacing advertising – we have known for a long time advertising is not trusted by consumers but in the past it was the fastest way to get massive awareness quickly. These days PR can help drive awareness very quickly and influence customers more effectively

4. Using a professional blogger is a very effective strategy for start-ups looking to generate WOM and awareness fast

5. Tireless promotion pays dividends….

I am sure I missed something?