Top officials at MovieBeam Entertainment and Sirius Satellite Radio warned cable marketers to keep their messages simple, since consumers are interested in the entertainment and convenience value of new products, not the technology.
During the CTAM Summit’s opening session, keynote speakers Philipp Klein, vice president of marketing and product development for Buena Vista Datacasting, which operates MovieBeam, and Mary Pat Ryan, Sirius’s executive vice president of marketing, echoed the same strategy in terms of how to approach the launches of new products.
“Most consumers aren’t really interested in how it works,” Klein told the audience. “Our target user is a movie lover, not a technophile, so keep it simple, simple, simple.”
In its marketing effort MovieBeam — a subscription service that offers consumers a choice of 100 satellite-beamed movies that are stored in a special receiver — took the tack of emphasizing the service’s edge over going to a video-rental store. MovieBeam’s research, not surprisingly, showed that consumers hated the inconvenience of going to video stores and finding that movies were out of stock or paying late fees, according to Klein.
Ryan said that for Sirius and its marketing, the goal was to “demystify the category, to really simplify [it],” since many consumers don’t understand what satellite radio is and how they can go about getting it.
