By Aaron Goldberg, Technology Marketing
September 01, 2002
One of the Top 10 Stupid Tricks made by the management teams of IT vendors is how they continue to structure and run their companies the same way they did 20 years ago. And among the most inappropriate anachronisms is the notion that marketing needs to be driven by a "product" focus.
Now, I don't hate "Product Marketing" staffs. I know many fine and really smart people that do fine work in this function. Rather, we can't afford to put product first in developing our marketing strategies and tactics. As we watch our business go down in a swirly, we must face the fact that customers evaluate many IT products and services for the solution they offer, not their speeds and feeds.
The idea that the widget you're selling has a meaningful differentiation or value based on its speeds and feeds, and that this value should drive your marketing activities is now often a foolish and hopelessly antiquated notion. The result is that "Product Marketing" is no longer a viable orientation or even an appropriate word combination.
The problem is simple: "Product Marketing" views value proposition, competitive set and communications requirements through a product-first vision. In contrast, however, customers have often changed to focus on ownership experience as their key for making decisions.
You see, customers have found that, in the majority of situations, the relative performance of the many different products they can buy is no longer different or compelling enough to drive their purchase. Instead, as customers strive to run their IT operations more efficiently, they view non-product issues as much more important.
So customers concern themselves with issues such as those posed by the following questions: Can you hire people who can easily run the products in question; and, are they reasonably priced? What are the comparative on-going operating costs of the different products? If one is far less than the other, that's compelling!
Another big issue is how easy it is to deploy and integrate a given product. You may have a blazing fast SAN, but if it's a nightmare to integrate with existing application systems, don't expect a lot of sales. Simply put, the days are over when customers salivated over the next generation of product, because they couldn't run their applications or systems on the current one.
What key value propositions, then, work today? Those value propositions that answer issues or problems that customers already have. Consider the consumer PC market. Most of the big PC sellers focus on the latest Pentium 4, yet research shows that those fast CPUs will only drive 5 percent to 6 percent of buyers to act.
In contrast, well over half the respondents in the same study said that they'd buy a new PC in 30 days if a company introduced a PC that insured that a buyer's kids wouldn't see porn! Now, has anyone ever seen a PC company with a solution manager who is focused on a porn-proof PC? Of course not. Yet we are overrun with product management teams on the new P4 desktop.
Unfortunately, too many management teams are groups of gutless wimps that won't risk abandoning their product-focused world. Worse, as company's continue to drive their P&Ls by product, they continue to reinforce a massive disconnect from customers.
Why do tech companies continue along this doomed path? A big reason is that they have no company to emulate, no paragon of a new approach. Still, one very large and dominant vendor, it seems, has already moved considerably in this direction. Rather than tell all of us, they tend to keep it quiet. My sense is that they won't go public with it until it's way too late for their current competitors to catch up. I'll respect their tack by not naming this vendor publicly.
Like anything else, some product management is a good thing, but taking a totally product-centric view of your approach to market is likely to insure that your "downturn" lasts longer than your competitors', who actually take a customer-driven view of going to market.
This shift is driven by the incredible improvement in technology capabilities, which shot past customer requirements in recent years, as well as by customers' change of focus to long-term benefits of owning and using products from the largest performance numbers. And it's a very huge and fundamental change in the marketing equation.
Oh, and if you want to know which unnamed vendor is leading the charge, send an email!
Aaron Goldberg is vice president and principal analyst for Ziff Davis Media. Reach him via email at aaron_goldberg@ziffdavis.com.
