Simplified Traditional Technical Marketing

Apple's iPod used dancing silhouettes which is a big campaign. This is a product that needs marketing as much as anything...

Learning a bit of traditional marketing is useful for technologists. From the side it's not always clear what marketing is all about. The traditional definition is: "definition and management of the Price, Place, and Promotion of a product". In the technical world this also means defining the product (essentially telling engineering what the "package" will contain). It also means defining the three P's by understanding the market and the competition. This is true with more traditional consumer products but in the technology world it turns out a little different and crucial to understand.

This sounds simple enough but as a famous advertising executive once said: "learning marketing takes a year, practicing marketing takes a lifetime". This is because our work is highly competitive and the market conditions shift daily. The most important function of practicing technology marketing is bridging between the internal world of the technologist and the external world of the consumer (or market). This is more of a role and an attitude than just skills and experience. Marketers need to play the "devil's advocate" in front of the technologist when making a case for a more user friendly design. In front of a customer the marketer plays the "technologist". This puts the technical marketer in the middle ground and he/she needs to know both worlds well enough to influence them both. A big part of the work is translating from the "use model" to the "technical model".

Technical marketing can be views as the "story" about the product. To tell a story about how a product works means building a model of some sort. It also means knowing who will hear the story (customers) and what other stories the audience hears (competition). I use the "story" analogy just to illustrate the more abstract ideas quickly. The story is actually called a few different names as the marketing "process" moves from before a product is designed all the way to end-of-life.

The first part of a product's marketing "story" is planning and definition. Here a marketer defines the product in enough detail for engineering to design and manufacture a product. Basic product definition starts out with the description from a user perspective than engineering adds their core technology functions. These are algorithms, data structures, physical components (such are hardware, circuits, etc.) At this point of a product definition there is still no customer or competing product information. Once the basic product definition is done and engineering buys into the product the marketing team starts a customer and competitive work. The definition bridges the core technical specification with the main uses of the product. One of the best ways to define a product is by using "mock ups" or "demos" in front of perspective customers. Software products start out as screen shots and demo screens. It is very hard to demonstrate a software product's functionality, but sometimes it may be useful to do some engineering and get a "dummy mock up" which actually shows some function. Hardware products like ICs (integrated circuits) are tested in front of customers mostly through preliminary specifications. A customer that sees a specification of the "next big thing" usually will give the marketer good information about how he/she would use the product in his own design. This also includes the drawbacks and missing functions which will make the product usable as it comes out the first time.

Blackberry personal communicator is marketed mostly through "channels", these are the carriers which provide the phone service.


Once the product is well designed and tested in front of customers the engineers can get to work. At this point the marketer needs to start preparing the "channels" and the "market" for the product's introduction. Channels are a sales term for the distributors, representatives, and direct sales force. I will talk more about the sales process in another article, but need to talk about marketing's role here. This is a combination of the "promotion" and "price" aspect of the work. Most technology products are not promoted with advertising and public display the way consumer products are marketed. They use channels of distribution to promote products. New products usually need extensive support and training to get users started. This is the role of the channel. Sometimes technology marketers will have technical people who are called "application engineers". These technical marketers develop demos and training material to help early adopters start out with the new product.

The final part of this article is an introduction to a product launch. This is about one third (1/3) of the way in the marketing process (of a technology product). In the "marketing mix: price, place, and promotion" an introduction of the product to the market all the pieces have to be ready. The price is usually set by a competing product's price, the ability of the market to sustain a price over time, and the need to recoup the engineering cost of development.
The place is the "channels" and means of getting the product out to the end customer. In traditional consumer marketing a place sometimes is the most crucial part of the marketing mix. In technology companies that usually means who the first and than the end target is. For example, Intuit the producer of Quicken (a personal accounting package) marketed their product heavily to stock brokers in the early stage of their promotion. The idea was to hook them and use them as a "reference" to get to the end consumer. Stock brokers were a relatively small market, but highly influential with their customers. Once the stock brokers started keeping their client's accounting on Quicken they could influence their customers to use the application as well.
Finally the promotion is how a new product will be introduced to the consumer. When you buy a new computer from HP or Dell you will get a bunch of "free trial" programs like virus protection, Quicken (personal accounting), and maybe a trial to Microsoft Office or a graphic processing program for your photos (Photoshop by Adobe). This is one form of promotion which is relatively low cost. The only cost to the marketer is the management of a relationship with Dell and HP. Microsoft does this with their higher end Office suites. When you buy a low end package they let you try more applications (like Access database and Visio charting).

This article used the traditional "marketing mix" model. For the most part, technology companies use this model initially to get started. Once I explore the other functions of the marketing "process" (I will also refer to this at the "marketing flow" ), we will go into more into specific areas of technical marketing which are unique to the field. But it's always good to know the very basic traditional techniques.

Think bigger: learning from Amazon to market with Web2.0

Fring is a new service which gathers all your phone contacts and adds VoIP to your cell (with WiFi)

With all the talk about Web2.0 technology not many product developers have developed the "marketing side". It seems that in the new era of technology innovation, marketers are lagging behind (this is not new). By this I mean that the work on popularizing and dissemination Web2.0 technologies is far behind 'what the technology can do'. There are almost no examples, case studies, tutorials, possible use ideas... all the "stuff" that accelerates the use of new technology products in the world of Web2.0. This situation is actually a huge opportunity for us marketers. Not just in marketing, but in marketer's ability to move business forward (connecting products, vertical uses, corporate "behind the fire wall" use, etc.). This is what I see when speaking with technologists every week. They are extremely focused on the "bits and bytes" / "features and benefits" the stuff they read about in old marketing books. There are so many things to develop using new technologies that technicians must focus hard. But in the focus on 'how to do it' they miss 'what to do with it'! This is not a new phenomena, this happens every time we get a technology shift which changes all the rules. Lots of people see the big picture, this is what Tim O'Reilly called Web2.0.

As marketer I first zoom in to look at the technology. Than I try to develop very specific product ideas and figure out what to do next. The first step is "who is wants this? How are they going to use this?" O'Reilly's Web2.0 covers too many specific technologies to use as examples. Let's look just at the popularizing of user contribution. The most common technology which is changing the way we work is called by the developers "user content". This is contributed articles, comments, links, video and audio clips, and now even chat and phone conversations (see the
Fring service and Google phone service). Blogging started this whole trend when 'Blogger' became a hot application. At about the same time, Amazon has started to develop reader's reviews in a big way. The page for a book became more than a catalog, now readers have newspaper and magazine reviews, comments from readers, comments from people in the area of interest. Eventually Amazon even created a forum for discussion about books which did not exist in a popular form on the Internet. Today this does not seem like such an innovation, this phenomena of innovation which quickly become part of the daily convention. If you look carefully at your expertise and the markets you know, you could probably see similar opportunities of turning old services into Internet services.


A translation of The Koran on Amazon, an example of user contributed content.

In explaining the ability of use of user comments take a look at Amazon. One of the best ways to see how technology is used is by picking a simple example. Search for 'the Koran' on Amazon. While this might be a slightly charged topic it is a simple example of what information one will find on Amazon. Go half way down to the 'Most Helpful Customer Reviews' section. Today (October 12, 2008) the following was displayed: "144 of 153 people found the following review helpful: // An Important Read, July 14, 2003 // By Benjamin (USA) - See all my reviews..." with a 6 paragraph review. Than there was another review "97 of 121 people found the following review helpful: // Not Bad, but there are Better, October 4, 2001" with suggestion to go to another translation. Finally there was a third customer review. Notice that Amazon did not participate and seemingly did not even pick the reviews. They seem to come via popularity "voting" by readers. Here is excellent information which would take a great deal of editorial writing to gather and would not be as wide audience. Also notice that Amazon let's anyone "vote" on the review which makes it easier to put the most popular review right at the first page. If you want to see all 77 reviews there is a link at the end of the three on the main page. Here you will find lots of people who write in detail about the differences in translation and even sources where you can get more information. Also, lots of opinions. This is even better than a newspaper's op-ed section. It gives a potential reader the ability to see what readers think about the book. I would suggest the you dig further into how Amazon organizes reviews and ratings of reviews and think about ways to make your own information useful to your audience. While selling books is not what most technology marketers do, we need to be just as good in our own information organization and presentation. We don't have any more excuses when a site like Amazon is so good at it.

Not to beat a dead horse, take a look at a different book all together: Ernest Hemingway's 'To Whom The Bell's Toll'. Here there is an additional section with 'Editorial Reviews'. This is pure marketing and even in this classic book comes directly from sources who are simply interested in selling you the book. But, this is also a bridge to the pre-Internet (certainly pre-Web2.0) days where newspaper and magazine reviews were the source of information about a book. Amazon at least takes the position of showing just a small part of the editorial review on the main page. If you go to the page dedicated for the editorial review there is much more information and even the first chapter of the book. I don't think that Amazon needs to work that hard selling Hemingway to Americans, but still this is an excellent resource for readers. Finally at the bottom are the three "Most Helpful Customer Reviews" which one is from an author with some background on how this story affected him during the Vietnam era. The other reviews are also good and I presume that American high school students could use these reviews to develop their own ideas on how to describe the book and the ideas in the story. In this book you will find 263 reviews. Imagine as a technology marketer if you can get 263 opinions or reviews for anything you market. OK, this is Hemingway's most monumental piece of work, but I would still put this as an example of what we can strive for in our own work. No piece of software needs 263 reviews but a dozen would be great. No chip needs even a dozen but five would be excellent.

Well, I hope Amazon can help you and many others understand that simple function of user contribution. In the case of books its reviews. There are other excellent examples like Red Hat's knowledge base. But that will have to wait for a future article.