Are you putting all your eggs in one basket?
Several years ago our IT department hired a recent college grad to work on the help desk. I helped interview him and gave him a glowing recommendation to our IT director. He stood out for me because of his ambition and ability to think outside and around the box.
We became friends as well as colleagues. Some of our earliest conversations focused on diversifying our own revenue-generating portfolios. Essentially, we needed to be entrepreneurial for ourselves and our families while keeping our day jobs.
Neither of us really acted on those goals. At least I didn’t until just several years later. It was impeccable timing since the economy lumped me into the ever-growing unemployed statistic. Impeccable because I had just created an LLC for my consulting business and joined the Pampered Chef as a consultant.
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Two ways to promote a product
But as I was checking the reaction, I noticed a marked difference in how the respective business chiefs talked about their products.
For Steve Jobs, the iPad, despite its derided name, drew superlatives from the master of hype. On the other hand, Steve Ballmer seemed a bit afraid to tout his company’s highly anticipated mobile OS upgrade.
Jobs (in the New York Times):
The iPad “is so much more intimate than a laptop, and it’s so much more capable than a smartphone with its gorgeous screen,” he said in presenting the device to a crowd of journalists and Apple employees here. “It’s phenomenal to hold the Internet in your hands.”
Ballmer (in the New York Times):
“There is no question in our minds that we needed and wanted to do some things that were out of the box and clearly differentiated from our past and — hopefully you will agree — clearly differentiated from other things going on in the market,” Mr. Ballmer told the group.
Is either approach more effective in enhancing a product’s launch? How would you launch one of these products?