Taking Technology to the Market

A Guide to the Critical Success Factors in Marketing Technology

Ian Linton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317046981
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Ventes

With intensifying competitive activity and continuing budget constraints, technology marketing teams are under pressure to be more accountable and deliver measurable results that demonstrate an effective return on investment. To add to the complexity, the market for technology products and services is global, with continuing growth in both developed and developing territories. Taking Technology to the Market provides a practical guide to the critical success factors in marketing technology. It uses a project-based approach, providing comprehensive guidelines for key strategic and tactical marketing programmes. The book will help you improve your chances of developing a winning marketing programme by providing essential steps to success and insight into best practice. Individual chapters provide self-contained guides to planning specific marketing tasks. The range of tasks covers the most common challenges facing marketing teams in technology companies. The book will help you understand the key success factors for overcoming a range of marketing challenges and give you the tools to put specific programmes into action quickly and effectively. The technology sector is a global business characterised by short product cycles, rapid change, longer-term customer relationships, complex decision-making processes, high levels of collaboration and partnership with customers and the supply chain, diverse channels to market and an emphasis on the value of information. These factors make the marketing of technology products and services a distinct discipline within the overall marketing spectrum to which Taking Technology to the Market is the definitive guide.

1
Position the Company

Successful technology companies have a clear view of their position in the market. AT&T sees its role as ‘connecting you to your world, everywhere you live and work’. Cisco supports the ‘human network’. IBM, once the global leader in mainframe computing and a pioneer of personal computing, now positions itself as a services company committed to ‘building a smarter planet’.

What these broad positioning statements do is give your company the freedom to market a wide range of products, services and solutions within that framework. New products, acquisitions and mergers all make sense if they support the broad strategy. Compare that with a company that positions itself as a supplier of network components, security solutions or mobile devices. Those are still broad categories, but they impose boundaries on that company’s market opportunities.

Clear positioning helps you create a sustainable competitive advantage by focusing on strengths that are hard to match and clearly differentiating your company from competitors. Positioning is also important from an internal perspective. It ensures that everyone in your company aligns their activities to the overall strategy. Positioning tells your employees where the company wants to be and how it will get there. That clarity and consistency gives direction and focus to your product development programmes, investments, acquisitions and other critical activities that influence success.

With that focus, you can identify and prioritise the most important market opportunities to pursue and, just as important, recognise activities that don’t fit the strategy and discard them, rather than waste scarce marketing resources.

It’s also essential to communicate your positioning to external stakeholders such as customers, supply chain partners and investors. Customers and supply chain partners incorporate your strategy into their own future plans, particularly where it relates to product development or manufacturing capacity. Investors use the information to make decisions about their future commitment to your company.

Corporate Vision

An important medium for communicating your positioning is the corporate vision. It influences the way customers and prospects perceive your company as a supplier or potential business partner by helping them understand your direction, mission and values and recognise your strengths and achievements. By consistently communicating values of stability, flexibility and innovation, companies like IBM, Dell and Sony have maintained their strength in the marketplace.

A corporate vision sets out the position you seek to achieve in the future. Examples include these: to become the leading provider of healthcare data management solutions, to achieve market leadership in software for the financial services sector or to achieve leadership through innovation in networking. The vision provides a framework for marketing operations that help you achieve the vision, communicate your vision and encourage customers to experience your company’s vision by buying your products or using your services.

Technology event management company RSA Conference organises a series of regular events for information security professionals. The company positions its conferences as events with a collegiate atmosphere that represent an influential, trusted resource. Its marketing communications aim to earn the trust and respect of industry colleagues and customers by demonstrating how its events empower the target audience. Communications demonstrate how the company understands the preoccupations and priorities of its audience, speaking in a conversational tone, addressing audiences directly and speaking on their level as a respected colleague.

The communication strategy positions RSA Conference at executive level, demonstrating how the collegiate atmosphere enables delegates to collaborate informally and network with top industry experts as well as their peers to find new solutions to the most important issues their companies face. Positioning like this is particularly appropriate for conferences, workshops and other customer events. The ideal conference, according to RSA, would have the feel of a reunion, characterised by involvement and a sense of being among old friends. The event would be productive and collaborative, with shared information and involvement by people who are glad to be participating, and who enjoy working together in a spirit of fun and liveliness. The conference should present delegates with the latest products, identify the most important issues, provide ample networking opportunities and allow them to get involved with the industry’s leading innovators in a forum that features a high level of interactive participation.

To establish your vision, you need to examine the marketing environment you operate in and identify the type of company you need to become to succeed in that environment. The vision of the company you need to become drives your business, financial, human resource and marketing objectives and establishes the priorities for those objectives.

If your firm’s vision is to be a market leader in a specific sector, this will drive a number of marketing objectives. These might include increasing market share from x per cent to a market-leading y per cent over a period of three years, building a distribution network that provides comprehensive market coverage, or creating a product portfolio of best-in-class products that offer benefits competitors cannot match.

The marketing objectives that will deliver the vision drive a series of marketing strategies. To achieve the objective of gaining leading market share, the strategies could include winning x major accounts from competitors or strengthening relationships with y existing customers that could possibly move to competitors. To create the best-in-class product portfolio, strategies might include developing a range of new higher-performance products, adding products from other companies through collaboration or acquisition, or upgrading existing products.

Alignment of Vision and Brand

Marketing communication plays an important role in achieving your vision and aligning it with your brand. Your brand is the sum of everything that your customers experience about your company – your products, packaging, delivery, customer service, marketing communications and the attitude of your employees. It’s essential that you align your current branding with your future vision so that you can begin to change customers’ perception of your company over time. The elements of your vision should appear in product communications, advertisements and other communications. By communicating your vision to customers, you can demonstrate that you will continue to be a viable long-term business partner. Customers can use your vision to plan their own future developments, for example by incorporating your new products in their own long-term portfolios.

Here’s an example of the way a network company used its vision to reposition itself.

Network companies provide internal and external infrastructures for customers to run business applications and transport their voice, video and data traffic between different users and locations. They aim to grow by carrying increasing volumes of traffic cost-effectively and stimulating the development of new applications that will generate revenue from additional network traffic. A key objective for network companies is to reposition themselves as strategic business partners rather than equipment suppliers. They do this through thought-leadership programmes aimed at business and financial decision-makers, as well as their traditional target audience of technical decision-makers. White papers and presentations explain how the right network can help other organisations collaborate more effectively, improve customer service, reduce communication costs and streamline business operations throughout the supply chain.

To deliver the strategic services, network companies must first achieve the objective of building an end-to-end network with national or global coverage. An end-to-end network enables their customers to communicate quickly and easily with any other location connected to the network. When a network company has built a single network that reaches locations worldwide, it can offer a single-source service to customers who need to do business on a global scale.

Network companies can achieve their revenue goals by offering a wider range of services over the same network. Service providers originally built separate networks to carry voice or data traffic because of their differing technical requirements. The latest multiservice networks are capable of carrying voice, data and video traffic on the same network. Network companies with multi-service infrastructures can offer customers a single source for all their traffic, increasing revenue and strengthening customer relationships.

As networks grow more complex, many organisations find it difficult to manage the network using their own resources. Network companies can reinforce their position as strategic business partners and take advantage of a new revenue opportunity by developing a range of support services. Network companies can deliver those services using their own staff or work with a quality-controlled service partner.

When customers run more applications on a network, traffic and revenue increases for the network company. An important objective for network companies, therefore, is developing new applications internally or collaborating with independent developers. AT&T, for example, introduced a collaboration program that enabled developers and technology start-ups to partner with the company and accelerate new application development.

Given the rapid changes in technology, network companies must develop a strategy to ensure that their vision stays ahead of change. Cisco’s corporate overview explains how the company aims to capture market transitions, such as the move to a single network for all traffic. This enables network companies to help customers evolve, as their industry and needs evolve.

Strong positioning provides a clear advantage in the marketplace when it creates the impression that your company and its products have few credible substitutes. When your company has established recognition and trust in the marketplace, it is likely to obtain more sales opportunities. You will gain the status of a pre-approved supplier in any purchasing decisions, increasing your chances of success. Corporate positioning also helps to determine the prices you can charge and the resulting profit margins. Analysts believe that people want to buy more from a company with a good image and they will pay more for its products. Developing a positioning strategy forces your company to consider what it needs to do to be successful. Your strategy should define the target market where you compete and the challenges the market faces. It should highlight the solutions your company offers to those challenges and the key benefits that differentiate your company.

To use a corporate positioning strategy effectively, you need to align your products, customer service and your people with the strategy. Simply using the positioning strategy to develop advertising slogans or corporate mission statements is not sufficient. By working with all levels of staff, you can ensure they are aligned with the positioning strategy and understand the part they can play to achieve the position. You should also develop a series of key messages based on the positioning strategy and share them with all customer-facing staff. This will ensure that staff communicate consistently in every customer contact and reinforce the corporate positioning.

Key Messages

You must present your capability in a way that is relevant to your customers. Start by assessing your strengths and weaknesses to identify areas where you may need to improve your own performance. Identify the strengths and benefits you bring to your customers and research what they need to know to evaluate you as a supplier. Your positioning statement should include the following key messages: commitment to your business, your future direction, market experience, technical expertise, management capability, company resources and financial stability.

Customers will feel more confident when you can demonstrate that you have invested in the future growth and development of your business. Describing your long-term plan for the business and including a statement of direction shows how you plan to develop the business over the long term. Timescale is important, so describe your plans for growth and outline your vision for the business in, say, five years’ time. By including information on your future product or service range, you can help customers align their own long-term plans. Outline your plans for expansion so that customers understand how they will be able to take advantage of future facilities or capabilities.

Your track record helps to build credibility. Case studies help to explain why you are capable of understanding your customers’ requirements and show that you have already developed successful solutions in that market. The cases should focus on specialised market knowledge that is of interest to your customers and provide examples of technical innovation or leadership to prove your capability. You can reinforce the innovation message by detailing your annual expenditure on research and development, your record in new product development and your technical and research resources.

Strong management is important to customers. Show that you have the resources to manage your business effectively by outlining the experience of your management team and list the key facts about your company: your size, number of employees, location, turnover and profitability, national or international network and your infrastructure.

Customers want to know that they can rely on your company to continue providing them with the same high standards of service over the long term. That means making sure that your customers have a full understanding of the financial structure and performance of your company. You should describe any major investment programmes that you are carrying out and provide your customers with regular information on your financial performance. You also need to demonstrate that your production resources are capable of handling increasing volumes of business.

Positioning messages provide your company with a clear framework for communication. They set out the facts that differentiate your company from competitors and communicate benefits that are important to the target audience. Positioning messages are crucial to the success of marketing communications.

Repositioning a Company

Key messages like those described above can also help to reposition your company in the marketplace by changing customer perceptions. Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung, for example, moved up the value chain by changing its image from supplier of budget products under various brand names to manufacturer of innovative, high-quality consumer products, grouped under a single powerful brand. Repositioning your company can be important in a number of business scenarios:

• Your company has undergone significant change.

• Research shows that customers are not aware of your company’s key strengths.

• Your company is entering new markets and there is low awareness among potential customers.

• Research shows that the company has a poor reputation in a number of areas important to its success.

• Purchasing decisions are influenced by executives who are not aware of the company.

• Your company is trying to build partnership relationships and customers need to know that you are capable of providing stable supply.

Before you consider repositioning, carry out research to assess how the target audience currently perceives your company. Identify the target perceptions that will persuade the target audience to hold a positive and favourable attitude towards your company and audit existing communications to identify current messaging. Comparing your current position with target perceptions helps you set objectives for developing key messages.

This is the management summary of an audit of customer perceptions:

• Contact with the customer at all levels is less than professional. According to the customer, the company does not understand its business and its products, and does not communicate its future strategies.

• There is a legacy of poor reputation which has largely been overcome by increased product reliability, but the image persists in the minds of the customer’s senior management team.

• The company is perceived as offering lower quality and lower performance than competitors.

• The company is seen as losing ground with important decision-makers.

• The company is identified more clearly than competitors with specific product lines, but is not rated most highly as the potential supplier of those products.

• The company’s major weakness is perceived as its narrow product line and lack of expertise in certain areas.

An audit like that identifies key areas for improving communications performance and it is essential that these messages should be communicated consistently in every form of contact with your customers. Significant developments such as new investment programmes, acquisitions, changes in management, expansion programmes or new product launches are of major interest to your customers. Take the opportunity to update everyone on progress.

If your company has a poor reputation in the market, positioning messages can help to overcome that. It can help to correct wrong perceptions, but, if the perceptions are based on poor performance, the focus should be on improving the performance itself. Trying to mislead the market can be dangerous.

If, on the other hand, your company’s products have an excellent reputation in the market, why should you worry about communicating messages about the company? Success depends on more than a good product range. Your company may have excellent products but a poor delivery record. If demand is grow...