Posts for January 31st, 2004

Been a couple of days — and again, the change in the campaign is indescribable. But, in an interview with a new volunteer, I realized the similarities of this campaign with another situation I was intimately involved in — the dot.com experience. We were fighting in a market that the leading company was generating all of the attention — both in terms of media interest, customer attention, vendor attention, and purchase orders. All without having the product “sold” to a single customer. And then, the first consumer reports came out that were not statistical samples — but the real purchasing patterns emerged. And suddenly, the customers took another look at the other products.

Our little company, in the wake of this domination of the media and mindshare, we took stock of what was happening. Our original efforts were stymied — both from the outside and from within. But we spent time looking, listening and learning — we refocused our efforts, we changed tactics and started to address some of our major issues — and we waited. Because no matter how good our site was, no matter how good our product was — until the customer decided to sample our product and decide to purchase it — we had very little justification for our efforts.

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