The Marketing Profs, a great website which puts out bite-sized tips on marketing your business, put out a good article reminding us not to let ourselves think the job is done when the product is on the boat and will soon be in customers’ hands.  The article, Launching Your Product: Seven Marketing ‘Musts’, gives some great ideas and inspiration for the ever-critical marketing aspects of launching your product.  The steps are (my comments in parenthesis):

1) Secure a great name
2) Nail down the "what is it?" description (especially all you former NASA engineers out there)
3) Establish a strong visual identity
4) Insist on effective creative (codeword for: an attention-grabbing promotion strategy)
5) Promote in multiple channels
6) Tier your message
7) Collaborate from the get-go

Most articles out there focus on the marketing aspects of a new product launch.  That’s because marketing is so hard to get right.  Between Engineering, Manufacturing, Marketing, Sales, Product Support, and Field Serivce, there’s a lot to keep track of.  Most of these steps will occur before your product actually touches down in your market.  This is just a reminder to make sure you plan for marketing to lead up to GOING BIG when it will.

Squidoo?  It’s a website that allows people to create a "lens", or aggregate web resources on a particular topic.  Websites that break down the web into more navigable, useful sources of information like this are becoming increasingly important in the ever-expanding internet.  Tatsuya Nakagawa, president and CEO of Atomica Creative, a product marketing firm, has put together this lens on product marketing.  It has quite a few helpful resources on this issue.