Tech Marketing Is Dead. Long Live Tech Marketing.

25 Nov 2009 by Paul Rutherford

Sergio Zyman, the former Marketing SVP of Coca Cola tells a salutary tale in his book The End of Marketing as We Know It. Coke had a new, feel-good Christmas ad featuring a kid, Santa and a grizzled old baseball player.

Everybody loved it.

The CEO of the company loved it; his wife loved it; Zyman’s neighbour loved; the security guard at the front desk loved it. It was going to win awards.

After two days, Zyman pulled the ad. It was having no impact on sales.

B2B OR NOT B2B?

I often mention this story when  interviewing Marketing candidates or discussing Marketing strategies with Clients. It’s the kind of decision that true Marketers dream of making – where creativity, strategy, metrics and market performance meet, to directly impact the revenues of the company and ultimately the share price.

After more than 20 years in  the Tech sector, I’ve come across no more than a couple of examples that really make that kind of  link between ‘Marketing’ and business results.

B2B Tech Marketing has lost its way. The reason is part geographic, part the mind of the customer, part structural:

Geography: In The Hands of the Gods

Like it or not, the vast majority of tech companies are either American or Asian. So that’s where the big, strategic decisions are taken. The current buzz about the Apple Tablet – a wonderful piece of market destabilization – is a strategic play driven by California.

And that means that an entire company is dependent on the person at the top ‘getting it’. Steve Jobs certainly gets it: that’s why he’s Fortunes’ CEO of the Decade. When you think of great marketing in Tech, it’s always Apple – from design and user interface, through pricing and channel, to communications and impact.

Lou Gestner at IBM is the other great Tech marketer. Who’d have thought that boring Big Blue would create  the most memorable campaigns to support its strategic play into services? But Gerstner – dismissed by some  as  a  ‘biscuit salesman’ – brought insight from Nabisco  about the importance of communicating during times of great change.

The company is still reaping the benefits of that today, some 7 years after his departure.

The Customer: Just the Facts, Ma’am

B2B customers tend to be better informed than individual consumers. They are specialists in their niches, with a clear grasp of their subject, and the requirement to justify their decisions to their superiors, so facts are imperative. They rarely buy on impulse.

Account managers may have a vital role to play – and even in the ruthlessly logical world of the corporation, relationships do matter – but the imperative is to provide facts to help support a decision, and that’s the role of the Product Manager.

There’s also the issue of credibility. Tech has a sorry history of over-promising and under-delivering, to the point where the trust agreement may have been damaged beyond repair. Vendors want to be cautious because they think that equals credibility.

Structure: Make It and Sell It

In the Tech sector, Philip Kotler’s classical 4P Marketing bundle has divided into two main camps: Product and Place.

All that goes with Product – product management, product development, product marketing – tends to sit in a separate function, reporting along its own line. This is especially true in the software sector, where – in the apocryphal words of Larry Ellison of Oracle- if you not selling it or not making it, what are you doing in my company?

For ‘Place’ read ‘Channel’ which is usually run by the sales function. Channel isn’t a marketing decision; it’s all about sales execution. And no amount of dressing up of the Channel Marketing function can hide the fact that it gets driven as a tactical sales support role, providing sweeteners to distributors, VARS or retailers to shift more units.

(Interestingly, Kotler’s own website has a section on Tech Industries, in which two out of three service offerings are specifically related to the sales function).

MARKETING LITE?

So that leaves Promotion, or, as it’s now known in most Tech circles, Marketing.

Marketing in Tech B2B is about messaging and communicating. It’s about putting tech people on platforms, and about getting column inches in the trade press or tweets in the mediasphere. It is about enabling conversation.

It could be – should be – energising and challenging and setting the agenda. Not just for technical debate, but social, economic, artistic and educational issues. Indeed, there aren’t many aspects of public and private life that technology doesn’t touch.

So why is so much of B2B Tech Marketing so underwhelming?

Because B2B Tech companies are risk averse. Hence, every marketing program from every Tech company is exactly the same. There may be nuances of audience or twists on the Channel programme theme. But at heart, all B2B Tech marketing is a copy of all other Tech marketing. Because it is what is known.

But when everyone is reasonably competent, the playing field is very level, and the view across to the horizon is very bland.

No one puts their head above the parapet, and no one takes a risk.

The role will always be needed – someone has to run the PR agency and create the lead generation programs – but this isn’t big, brave Marketing with big, brave ideas.

LONG LIVE TECH MARKETING

So is this the end of the road for Tech Marketers – to be consigned to a backroom, writing press releases and sending out invitations to seminars?

Only if Marketers let that happen.

The truth is that Marketing has an infinite opportunity to take the reigns and change the game. Because they sit at the heart of a central paradox: the people who run Tech companies don’t understand the beast they have unleashed.

Many senior Tech execs don’t really understand the Web.

Sure, the company has a website, maybe some e-commerce, perhaps the CEO even has a personal LinkedIn account (although not a fair number of  the SVPs and CEOs I know). But many still seem to regard it as just a Comms channel -  a cheap way of issuing press releases and cutting down on sales collaterals.

So if you’re a Marketing professional in the Tech sector (or anywhere else for that matter), your opportunity is to fill that knowledge gap. We have only scraped the surface of how the websphere impacts our relationship with customers, partners and influencers. What it means to your company and its business model.

Dive deep and drink long. Now is the time for Marketing to reclaim its seat around the table.