System iNetwork

October 29, 2007

Masterful Marketing in a Jaded Age

It's not news that Baby Boomers have started reaching the retirement age this year. But rather than focus on the strangely pessimistic attitude some people are taking about this "looking forward" (i.e., with regards to such bugaboos as "retiring droves of System i experts" and "swollen Medicare budgets"), this is just as easily a moment to "look backwards" and notice something exciting coming out of this event.

Particularly, I'm talking about marketing. Because of the fact that Boomers are starting to retire, it means that something has become true that never was before. And that is that for the first time in history, the people currently in the work force, IT or otherwise, have spent their entire lives being marketed to by mass media, especially television. What that in turn means is that in order to attract the attention of all those advertising-jaded potential product buyers, companies are going to have to be clever to a new order of magnitude about marketing those products. I think that's something to look forward to, and in fact it's already starting.

Whether your professional focus is on your company selling widgets to the general public, software to IT people, or IT services and value to your enterprise's internal "customers," competing for mindshare is tougher than ever, and those who excel in that today will be tomorrow's winners. BtoB, a "magazine for marketing strategists," recently cited some of the best marketing ideas it has seen for 2007 in BtoB's Best 2007, a special issue. Some of those examples are worth keeping in mind, particularly those from the computer industry.

Let's start with Microsoft and Vista. When you think about it, there are many businesses that really don't need to upgrade from Windows XP. It's a perfectly adequate OS, and the vast majority of users probably only use a quarter or less of the available features. Yes, it has some problems, and yes, there's the big stick of Microsoft probably dropping support for XP down the road. But how do you get people who really don't need to change yet to upgrade before then? Microsoft came up with some carrots. First there was the idea of putting the Microsoft Ribbon, Vista's new toolbar, across the MSN homepage. This let 42 million people try it out and removed one major hesitation in many of those people's minds about adopting Vista. Second, Microsoft ran a kind of "word of mouth" marketing campaign via Windows Live Messenger that let users select a cause or charity to which Microsoft donated some ad revenue whenever someone communicated via Instant Messaging. The outcome was more people getting familiar with IM, seeing how it could improve their lives, and generating more demand for it.

Last spring, Hewlett-Packard offered March Madness, an online promotion in cooperation with Yahoo that worked to provide a higher profile for H-P's Personal Systems Group and Printing and Imaging Group products. The campaign generated 1.2 billion impressions and, according to a followup poll H-P conducted with participants, caused a correlation between visitor frequency and a favorable impression of H-P's products.

BtoB also gave an award to TIBCO Software, a business-integration and process-management software vendor, for its viral marketing campaign on Youtube called "Greg the Architect," a series of videos using dolls that portray a systems architect at a "typical" company who must humorously overcome impossible difficulties with SOA-related software projects.

How about IBM's slightly similar recurring TV and magazine ad campaign featuring a cast of archetypal IT people? The fuddled bossman, the confident nerd, and a host of seemingly clueless end users who are always doing something crazy looking. Maybe they're not making you buy a new server every month, but don't they at least make you stop and see what they're up to this time? It's like a comic strip with an ongoing story line. But the mere fact that the ads attract you, a person who's grown up on steady diet of ten-second spots in your cereal bowl that you've become used to screening out, says something about the thinking behind it.

In the System i market, at least one vendor is trying out viral marketing, somewhat appropriately given the product type. Bytware recently launched its i5virus game to promote its Standguard Antivirus product. The game involves solving a mystery about a virus attack on a financial company and starts out by having participants view a YouTube video that introduces them to some online helper characters.

But promoting ways of having fun on the job isn't the only way to a consumer's heart. For several years, BCD International has pushed its Nexus web portal by giving the product away free (with paid annual maintenance). According to Eric Figura, BCD's sales and marketing manager, this program "has been extremely effective for both clients and BCD. We have well over 700 organizations that have implemented Nexus Portal so far. Nexus has become a very big competitive advantage for us over other web application development solutions."

Even if you're not trying to sell a product in the classic sense, the degree to which we all have to function in an information-overloaded culture is reflected in the personal level by how much we all have to market ourselves as professionals. Even to hang on to our jobs sometimes, and certainly to vie for promotions, it's necessary to not only deliver competence but also to cultivate an image of competence. And for IT departments in general, which have been collectively struggling for a seat at the big table in enterprises for years, much of the advice on how to do that is summed up in the motto "Market Yourself Better."

To make the System i market thrive, in addition to having many great products that run on a great platform, I think we all need to pay a little more attention to the marketing side of things. How can we make the project in front of us a bit more memorable? A bit more entertaining? A bit more useful? Creative and clever marketing ideas can not only make work life a little more fun for all of us but also help keep the engine of our market stay strong.

Posted by at October 29, 2007 4:02 PM