Marketing for times of crisis
Intensity and expected duration of the current crisis is forcing a debate on the consequences that will bring in all areas of the company, including marketing. In general these tests are made from a unique supplier (how it will affect their marketing budgets, what tactics will prioritize ...). I prefer to start talking about the impact of the crisis on shoppers and their impact on the strategies of the suppliers.
Customers in the crisis also produced uncertainty and budget cuts: rising risk aversion and the search for security, there is less money to explore new technologies and postponing any investment that does not have an immediate and measurable effect on the business (preferably in the form cost reduction) and a rapid pay-back. As a result, the approval of investment committees increase their size and purchasing cycles are stretched to infinity.
Does the marketing of a technology update?
Some data from the latest Business Technology Marketing Benchmark Guide 2007-08 by MarketingSherpa, which focused on the B2B market of hardware, software and technology services in the U.S., give much food for thought:
* While technology companies spend on marketing something less than 4% of their income (compared to over 11% spent on sales), the marketing department is responsible for providing 60% of new business leads.
How much is an innovative product or technology?
Innovations pose specific challenges in implementing the market, the greater the greater the degree of innovation of product or technology in question. The question then is how to measure the degree of innovation of a product or technology to significantly impact your marketing strategy? The answer used to adjust the strategies and business techniques.
Traditionally, innovation has been associated with the idea of discontinuity. A product is more innovative break with the more traditional ways of meeting a need and benefits more differences, but probably require a change of behavior changes on users and the market.
What customers need?
Many people believe that the process of developing new products is broken and, indeed, any activity between 70 and 90 by a bad performance would be considered out of control from all points of view.
And although there are many reasons attributed to this failure (organizational, cultural, technological, ...) some of them have a much greater weight. In "Winning at New Products" Robert Cooper cited as the two most important factors for the success of new products (due to their impact on profitability) to the following:
Internet has revolutionized the marketing of software products
A recurring theme in this blog is that the Internet has transformed the marketing of technology products and in no industry has been so evident as in the software business. The software is a product unique for several reasons:
- Costs are dominated by the first unit, with marginal costs that can be negligible, even if they customize the product.
- Facility for collaborative development, including teams from loosely coupled, and that has led to the open source phenomenon.
- In many categories of software phenomena commoditization and availability of free products that make the users are less willing to pay for it.
- High product complexity, which makes it difficult to learn, use and communicate their benefits and that may impose barriers to the adoption and change.
Who has taken my IT buyer?
The marketing of IT products is undergoing a radical change. At a time like the present one in which business executives expect that technology is increasingly critical to its success and IT managers consume most of their efforts on maintaining systems with more than 30 years old, it is normal makers involved with business and even a "bridge" to his fellow-time systems to incorporate new technologies to improve their processes, or give them advantages over their competitors. And that means that marketing must take into account this shift in influence buying.
Technology markets and positive feedback
We all agree that the markets for technology products are often characterized by instability, unpredictability of its evolution, the ability of competitors to block market access, the ability to dominate the end product and lower profits for the generous the winner. And much of this behavior is due to the effects of positive feedback that occurs between actors in these markets and the economists known as increasing returns on the demand side. This positive feedback is responsible for a product that is beginning to evolve to succeed sole better (and that one with a bad position tends to worsen their situation) and is the cause of market movement, for example, to a certain operating system or a DVD made from among several competitors.
Competitive intelligence: those who do not know you could end up
Competitive Intelligence is a systematic process of observation and collection of relevant information about the environment of the company, followed by their processing, analysis and dissemination into the decision-making. Depending on the object of his analysis Competitive Intelligence can have more focus on the market, competitors, customers, the economic, technological, regulatory, legal, etc.. In any case, the ultimate goal is to obtain information on which to base the company's shares. This is a key aspect that makes the Competitive Intelligence is not only a more or less passive, but a proactive activity that enables it to detect threats and opportunities to discover and act accordingly.
Can the “customer orientation” ending innovation?
It is clear that the "customer orientation", making our organization will always be near him and put it metaphorically at the pinnacle of our organization is a prerequisite for success. This is even more important in technology companies, where the culture and strategy are often more influenced by what technology can do (technology-push) than what the market wants (market-pull).
The influence of customer orientation innovation should be absolutely positive, that can detect customer needs and effectively develop new products that meet. This has been confirmed in many studies, which identify the incorporation of the customer's voice as one of the main factors of success of new products and, conversely, cited poor market analysis as one of the most common factors of failure (e.g. "Winning at New Products" by Robert Cooper).
The most serious errors of startups
Why do startups fail? The answer is difficult because the factors influencing success or failure of any kind: leadership, personnel, money ... I will try to respond by focusing attention on those cases that deal exclusively with strategic marketing and specifically in the case of innovative startups (whose offering introduces some kind of discontinuity in the market). That is, we do not discuss such business models that replicate the success of others or whose products are inadequate from a purely technical point of view (not market)