Don’t believe all you hear but trust what you see, says Pavel Potuzak, CEO, Aveco

As all of you, I also receive a flood of newsletters and online magazines. I have no time to read them all thoroughly, so only the most catchy titles win.

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Pavel Potuzak, CEO, Aveco

Recently, I got caught by an article about the year 2020 being the year 4K will be adopted by a majority of providers and consumers. Immediately I got the feeling of being guilty for lagging behind the peloton.

Then I read it again. Who is saying this? To whom and why? Almost all (an exact percentage written in the article) content producers and service providers believe in that statement above.

Come on, guys. You really believe in that? Twenty years after starting the HD process we are still transitioning from SD to HD. Does the article provide any information, or just the primary feel of the duty to invest in 4K myself to keep up with the crowd? Well, there is no crowd. It is just marketing.

A hype told a thousand times has the power to move wheels and create a new reality. It has the power to convince investors to put money into companies that are in the red. It also has the power to mislead customers and have them invest into something what we, manufacturers, want them to buy.

We at Aveco are not good at marketing. We are, however, great at developing new technologies.

We did, though, attempt one marketing strategy just recently. Here is the story: one of our great automation products has, among other features, one truly amazing feature.

Surprisingly, nobody pays much attention to it. So, we removed that feature from the product.

At the same time, we introduced a new brand name that represents the same product with that feature included.

Suddenly, that product and its “new” feature was getting a lot of attention; visitors of our booths were just amazed.

It seems that there are many flavours of marketing. There is the misleading one, trying to confuse people or just lie.

And then there is also another flavour – you can call it The Art to Tell. I hope we all will have the mental strength and wisdom to distinguish between these two in the flood of information streaming from all sources around us.

 

This content was first published at IBC2016

The views expressed are those of the author.