Novell Finds Marketing
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I have a right to kid Novell on their corporate wide marketing strategy.
Under the (mis)leadership of Jack Messman, they messed it up man.
Ugly puns aside, we are seeing something of a rebirth of marketing acumen at
Novell vis-à-vis the SuSE product line. Allow me to provide a bit of
historical perspective so this all makes sense.
I was a marketing strategist for SuSE before Novell bought them.
The situation I encountered at SSE was desperate, with flat North American
revenues for more than three years. Think about that for a moment — flat
revenues in one of the fastest growth markets the tech industry has seen since
disk drives were invented.
The reasons were many and complex, but one thing was certain — Red Hat "got
it". Red Hat recognized that enterprises would eventually agree to test
drive Linux, and would turn to their techies to define action plans. Red
Hat spent a lot of money assuring that every techie on the planet could get a
copy of Red Hat for free, and encouraged them to deploy
skunk work
projects using Linux. Thus, when management said to the techies "let’s
try Linux", the techies replied "OK. We’ll get another copy of Red Hat."
By the time Silicon Strategies Marketing was brought on board, there was no
use in SuSE trying to repeat the process. New strategies had to be
developed (for
a fuller recounting of Silicon Strategies Marketing work for SuSE, see out white
paper titled "Manhandling Markets" in our white paper library). Red
Hat’s strategy, effective as it was, did not involve IT management to any
obvious degree. Thus, SuSE embarked on an executive thought leadership
campaign, showing how Linux meant more to CIOs and CTOs than mere cost savings.
This worked pretty well,
contributing to a 5,000% rise in top-line revenues for SuSE in North America.
But Novell neither continued or modified the basic strategy, and lost this
marketing strategy vision as they depreciated Open Source as a business
direction in favor of using Linux to resuscitate their
aging
proprietary products.
I paint this historical (hysterical) picture to foreshadow the news of the
week — Novell has rediscovered marketing and promotions! As I noted in
last week’s blog, the
old
SuSE branding has remerged, and some passion has reawakened in Novell’s Open
Source marketing teams.
And they are going after the techies — a reverse of what we accomplished at
SuSE. Novell will not likely abandon any thought leadership process with
IT executives, but they realized they had to engage technologists and community
members at a visceral level to break the mindshare stranglehold Red Hat has on
them. Thus, in
the latest
SuSE promotional materials, we see techies and community people as the
spokespersons. Using peer images (ultra casual clothing, geek
continence, abusive music), the ads connect to the average younger technologist
(the Linux geeks) at an emotional level, which is an essential step in
establishing a trust relationship.
This visual and audio approach is amplified with select language. For
example, a new slogan is "Your Linux is Ready". The word
"your" is a externalizing word, putting the buyer as the center of the
discussion. Too many technology companies lead with "we are" or "we do",
and few start a conversation with "you are" and "you need". "Your Linux"
shows Novell wants to connect to techies in ways they have never done before.
Lest you think this is speculative, I’ll note that
John
Dragoon, Novell’s new CMO, tells that this campaign is one of "the most
ambitious marketing launches in Novell’s history."
What makes this of interest to me is the reversing roles a company must
occasionally take. When SuSE was being left in the dust by Red Hat, we had
to find an unexploited angle to gain traction. Coaxing and coaching IT
executives was that angle, and it drove major advancements for SuSE (including
landing a global contract with Ford Motor Company). But back then we knew
there would come a time when techie resistance would trump executive preference,
and SuSE would have to apply as much promotional power to the lower IT castes.
It looks like that time has come.
