than, what can we learn from "old media"? Printed brochures, advertising, trade shows, collateral for sales support, the work of many, still going on in most places. What about the other fields of marketing, market research, branding, positioning...? Should we emulate or improve on formats, lingo, style, approach, 'content', core & periphery subjects? Or should we go into this with a new approach? Well, this question is a lead-in for how to start transitioning traditional marketing to the "new media". There is a trend in new technology to develop new techniques and organization, and ignore the past. But there are still the core ideas, knowledge and uses that are simply fundamental communication of ideas. These are relevant to the 'new media' of the web.
I started looking at what there is of "old School" marketing and see what can be done, what makes sense to do, and finally, what people are already doing in terms of examples, success and just simple attempts (who seem to fall short). If you have any ideas or examples, please send them to me and I will incorporate them into the writing.
In an article about product marketing in the Yet Another Software Blog Blog, Charles Zedlewski writes on enterprise software product marketing. He writes on the lack of organization, or better put "agreement" of what product marketers need to do for sales. This is not a new concern. The line between sales and marketing is continuously tested and moved. The roles are changing, you can see the changes by titles, some organizations have 'sales and marketing' departments and VPS. Some have only 'marketing', some only 'sales' and some both. Well, this does not help us, but it shows that there is confusion.
The issues that Zedlewski brings up are not at all new or unique. Deciding what marketing and sales will do is only the first step. Then an organization as a whole or in part (i.e. marketing) have to decide on the message and how to deliver it. That includes at least branding, positioning and training / delivery. In a whole, technical organizations seem to have an additional problem. For the most part, they do not hire professional or trained marketing staff. Because of the nature of the products, the marketing is usually done by technical people who have chosen to move from engineering disciplines into the business side. This makes the marketing weaker in terms of the fundamentals. Also, the management is usually very technologically or product driven, which means that the marketing side suffers. Well, enough with the gripes, lets look at each of these issues in turn and see if we can find examples of good results and attempts.
To hunt, analyze and review marketing work from the software is not an easy task. I will start with setting a set of criteria based on what information is available. Then I will look at a few vendors and see what we have in terms of material. Then we will start the analysis. Until next time... /AmiV
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