Eager Sellers and Stony Buyers

This was one of the better articles on the marriage between business to consumer marketing, consumer behavior and product placement that I have read. As someone who is not in the marketing profession this article was written perfectly, it was easy to understand, easy to apply and not too esoteric or academic. Everything about it was easy to apply to almost any product.

The one thing that I found most interesting was the part on how a companies biases and a consumer’s bias can lead to a products ultimate failure in the marketplace. The article also offers many good ideas for getting around these biases. First they suggest that a company gauge the potential for consumer resistance by honestly assessing what type of product they have and the amount of change is required to use your product. The author offers four options: an easy sell, a sure failure, long hauls and smash hits. Once this has been determined the author then offers ways of minimizing and managing the consumer resistance.

In all, I think the advice is very practical. It takes common sense and lays it out in a readable manner. For instance, the suggestion that companies producing products that require behavior change should brace for slow adoption seems like obvious advice, however many startups do not do this and therefore their products fail because they aren’t the instant successes they were expected to be. Another example of this is to find believers in the product. This would seem to be something that is obvious but I think that he makes some excellent points about exactly how important this is to aid in the adoption of products.

I would absolutely suggest using this article in future classes, not just for consumer behavior but I think it would be an excellent article for the marketing management class. From someone with a Finance background and a Finance