Joe's Jottings
Jottings Number 60, by Joe Podolsky:
From: JOE_PODOLSKY@HP-PaloAlto-om4.om.hp.com
Date: Tue, 20 Aug 96 15:16:06 -0700
Subject: Branding the HP-IT Infrastructure
The notion of brands is foreign to HP, in general. We tend to think of our products as standalone stars that make it or fail in the marketplace based on their individual intrinsic contributions. For most of our company life, we were well-known in engineering circles, but relatively invisible to consumers. But, thanks mostly to our printer business, we are out of the shadows. The HP brand is visible, respected and valued and serves as an umbrella for product line brands like Vectra, Laserjet, and Inkjet. A few weeks ago, I went to a two day class offered by Marketing Education called, "Creating Customer Advocacy." It was led by Northwestern University marketing professor Lisa Fortini-Campbell, who does a lot of consulting with HP's high volume product business units. (See also Jottings #42, which mentions a talk of hers that I attended in 1995.) Fortini-Campbell tried to get us to understand two key concepts: first, that we focus on creating "advocates" for our brand, and second, that we need to think in terms of the "whole brand." Advocates, according to Fortini-Campbell, are those few customers at the top of the pyramid, who are not only loyal buyers, but who also will recommend us to their colleagues. The base of the pyramid contains all the possible buyers, the "suspects." Then come those who are actually in the market for our products, the "prospects." From those prospects, we cull the "1st time buyers," then "loyal customers," and, finally, the "advocates." The whole brand is very much like Geoff Moore's "whole product." The whole brand is everything that's in the mind of customers when they use our products. The whole brand includes the product features, of course, but it also includes what customers hear from our "other messages," from every one of our contacts with that customer, from our service, our reputation, our advertisements, and our distribution channel. As I listened to these ideas, I tried to place them in the context of an internal IT vendor. We look at our customers by location and separate them by their needs for specific products and services. We assume they will (must?) buy from us; we rarely test their motivation much less their enthusiasm. Right now, we present to our internal customers a very fragmented product array. We separate computational services from network services from desktop services, although many of these come from different but central vendors. In addition, local sites and business units deal with site service organizations and with business IT departments that provide business-specific applications. We leave it to our customers to sort out the confusion. A reorganization of the central IT infrastructure services is already underway. One of the goals of that reorganization is to try to pull some of the separate services into a consistent package. Maybe we can carry this idea one step further and actually create a "brand identification," at least for the HP-IT infrastructure, an umbrella that would create a valuable image in the minds of our internal customers. The goal, I think, would be to turn these customers from "captive users," to "enthusiastic users," to "advocates." Fortini-Campbell suggests a three step process for implementing a "brand advocacy" plan: - Choosing the target customers - Developing the "insights" for those customers - Getting the "whole brand" right The first step is to precisely target the customers who we want to become our advocates. From the large pool of potential customers, we need to identify those "we'd love to get," and then focus on the few "who we MUST get." Philosophically, this step is most difficult. We generally aspire to the egalitarian notion that all customers should be treated equally and thus focus on everyone... or no one. Fortini-Campbell feels that no organization has sufficient resources to succeed at that policy. In HP's external world, we have long given our best customers special attention by assigning major account teams to them. Maybe it's time to think about that internally also. External customers are chosen mostly for their revenue potential. That may be one criteria internally also, but we might want to also focus on those internal organizations for whom IT infrastructure is mission critical or on those who are early adopters that influence the buying habits of less IT-sophisticated business units. As the second step, Fortini-Campbell suggests that we develop, for each of those "must get" customers, individual "customer insights." The customer insight is the motivational force that would cause the customer to be enthusiastic about their IT infrastructure services. This insight probably includes some objective performance criteria, but it also includes the psychological connection that identifies the "sweet spot" for that individual customer. The connection must be relevant, but it must also be personal. The customer insight is a "respectful, empathic, comprehensive understanding of (individual) customers." Then, we have to arrange for the customers to experience our "brand of products/services" such that the customers perceive them to be hitting their individual sweet spot. We do this in two steps. First, we create and implement products/services that form the base of what is needed. Next, we help the individual customers perceive the product as being uniquely satisfying. The first step is one of product design and implementation. The second is of communication; we are building the brand identification in the minds of these key customers. We build that identification by creating the "whole brand," as mentioned above. The identification is formed in the minds of the customers and includes the messages we intentionally send, and the "body language" that accompanies those messages. We can actually build an inventory of those messages and figure out what the likely perception will be. Since most of us are consumers of IT infrastructure services, we probably already have perceptions of the HP-IT infrastructure "brand," and it would be an interesting exercise to articulate how we feel. Notice that this whole brand advocacy process starts with the customer and ends with the product. We in the HP-IT infrastructure usually start with the product/services and then fit them to the customers. Fortini-Campbell suggests these as the barriers to "whole brand advocacy": - Business models that de-emphasize the customer - Lack of behavioral and motivational customer information - Product focused organizational structures - Functionalization within the organizational structure - Reliance on historically successful marketing and sales tools - Poor cross-functional working relationships - Metrics focused on total market performance, rather than on performance with specific customers - Inability to measure the results of having advocates I think that many of these barriers are alive and well and living in our HP-IT business models. What do you think of all this? Do you feel that this type of marketing approach is appropriate for an internal vendor such as the HP-IT infrastructure? If not, what kind of business model makes more sense to you? If this is an appropriate model, what can we do to implement it? And what metrics can we use to tell us how we're doing? If ideas like this make sense for the IT infrastructure, to what extent do they also make sense for the IT applications groups? Regards, Joe