Marketing strategies for product software

Marketing strategies for product software assist software firms to determine the type of market analysis that is needed for decision-making. Two general strategies that are well known in the marketing discipline are:
marketing mix; and
relationship marketing.

"Marketing mix" is the typical strategy for traditional mass marketers of product software in competitive markets. Structured market research, and agility in reacting to sales, are characteristic of their product development process (Alajoutsijarvi et al., 2000). An example would be Electronic Arts, with their various home computer software games, which are advertised on television and sold in many electronic stores.

"Relationship marketing", (closely associated to CRM), is used by product software companies who focus on long-term customer relationships (Alajoutsijarvi et al., 2000). An example of this is SAP, which offers enterprise resource planning systems, along with support (since the software is complicated to install). Maintaining customer relationships helps sell additional modules and future upgrades.

Broethers and van't Kruis explain two other strategies that are important to the growth of software firms:
a service-based strategy; and
a different marketing channels strategy.

Software icon

On computer displays, a computer icon (or simply an icon) is a small pictogram. Icons have been used to supplement the normal alphanumerics of the computer. Modern computers now can handle bitmapped graphics on the display terminal, so the icons are widely used to assist users.

Icons were first developed as a tool for making computer interfaces easier for novices to grasp in the 1970s at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center facility. Icon-driven interfaces were later popularized by the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating environments.

A computer icon usually ranges from 16 by 16 pixels up to 128 by 128 pixels. Some operating systems feature icons up to 512 by 512 pixels. When the graphical output device has a smaller size, the icon size is small. Vision-impaired users (due to such conditions as poor lighting, tired eyes, medical impairments, bright backgrounds, or color blindness) may need to utilize the self-selected icon size options.