Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 42, by Joe Podolsky:
From: uunet!HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com!JOE_PODOLSKY
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 95 17:06:49 -0700
Subject: Some Thoughts on Marketing
My first job out of college was as an IBM sales trainee. I usually managed to make my quota, but I really didn't like making cold sales calls, so I soon switched to a job as a systems engineer. But I did gain a fine appreciation of marketing strategy and tactics and for the sales people who implemented those plans on the front lines, improvising as needed to satisfy the customer and to make the sale. I came out of that early experience believing that marketing is an important role in everything we do in our careers but especially in the work we do in internal information systems. I was, therefore, drawn to an article in the September 15, 1995 issue of _CIO_ magazine entitled, "A Matter of Marketing." It was written by Daniel E. Klinger, Vice President of R&D Information Systems at Hoffmann-LaRoche, Inc., a healthcare company in Nutley, NJ. Klinger feels that "...information systems budgets today are under siege ...(because of) a perceived lack of added value." He suggests that we must "do the right things for the right customer, and do those things right." Nothing to it. :-) What _is_ interesting, though, is that Klinger says that, not only must the IS department add value for the customer, but that "the customer must _perceive_ that IS is adding value...People don't buy IS; they buy the _expectations_ of the benefits of IS" (emphasis added). I heard a similar message at a seminar I went to on "Product Differentiation and Brand Development Through Customer Focus." The seminar was arranged by Corporate Marketing Training and featured Lisa Fortini-Campbell, a marketing professor at Northwestern and a consultant who works extensively with our inkjet business units. Fortini-Campbell said that the key to successful, long term marketing relationships, the kind we in IS want to build, is _not_ to kill the competition but to satisfy the customer. She prefers thinking of marketing as "romance" rather using the more common "warfare" model. As she says, we want to win the affections of the ones we love, and "just" beating the competition isn't (usually) the way to do it. Klinger suggests four fundamental marketing strategies that an internal IS organization might use: 1. IS-driven alignment. Take our current product inventory and sell it as best we can. Klinger calls this "denial marketing" because the customers may not want to buy what we are trying to sell, and we are "in-denial" about their right to refuse. 2. Customer-driven alignment. Do open-ended market research and deliver what the customer wants. Klinger calls this the "just-do-it" model, and it's based on the premise that the customer is always right. The problem is that the customers may not be able to communicate what they want, and they may change their minds. Also, we may not be good at producing and delivering what they want. 3. Customer-driven transformation. The business visionaries drive the process, and we in IS ride along as part of the ultimate solution. According to Klinger, this is a great model for those few projects that will get this kind of business treatment but that the everyday mail still has to be delivered. And, for the few visionary projects that are launched, we have to earn our place at the table by high credibility in routine tasks and by "substantial business acumen." 4. IT-driven transformation. Here, we come up with a great ideas and technology and convince the business customers to adopt them. As Klinger says, this is an extremely difficult sell, appropriate for only a few circumstances, and, even then, requires even more business acumen and customer credibility. While all of these four might be appropriate in any given situation, Klinger says that option 2, the customer-driven alignment, should be the one to use and get good at. And success with this approach will give us a firm base to take advantage of option 3 and 4 opportunities when they appear. Fortini-Campbell, then, gives us some structure on how to do option 2. She suggests that there are six key "marketing fundamentals": 1. Know (specifically, by name) who our best (or highest potential) customers are. This is a focusing and segmentation exercise. All customers are not created equal. "Best" can be tough to define. In the external world, it usually means which customers will generate the most profit for us. In the internal world, "best" may have strategic or political definitions. 2. Put yourself in their shoes. Go out and visit them often in their surroundings. See how they are actually using our systems. 3. Find the insights into their motivations. How do they feel about us as a vendor? What do they feel are our strengths and weaknesses? What are their priorities? This information comes from well-built relationships between the IT managers and the customer managers. Formal surveys usually only hint at the issues. 4. Understand how they process information. Understand how they meet the needs of _their_ customers. Understand what metrics they use to evaluate our services to them. 5. Develop a whole product or service strategy. As Geoff Moore (_Crossing the Chasm_) points out, this usually means creating an alliance of organizations to so that the customer sees our products and services as part of a seamless solution-set. 6. Integrate every "brand contact." This is an obvious point, but it was an "ah-ha" for me, and something that I have never seen an internal IS department do consciously. Fortini-Campbell stresses that we must understand what kind of message we want to send to our customers and then be completely consistent, transmitting that message _every_ time the customer comes in contact with us. Although she didn't refer to it, I think that the "messages" could be formed based around Treacy/Wiersema value disciplines (see Jottings #21), operational excellence, product leadership, and customer intimacy. I see marketing as a core competency in our information systems functions. Do you agree? If so, how good do you think we are at it? What can we do to improve? How do you feel about the models mentioned above? What other models are you using or have you seen? If you have any good IS marketing stories, I'd love to hear them and to share them with everyone. Regards, Joe