Marketing Memos

Sometimes technology is wholly too complex, a fact that HP has latched onto.

In all product marketing, one pays attention to the ‘whole product’, which is the sum of all the expected outcomes from using a product (this is a combination of features, benefits, services, price points, etc.)  Whole products are different for each market, each segment and each buyer genotype. Taken as a whole, a whole technology product can be very complex, and the complexity grows as the number of targeted segments grows.

Technology isn’t for wimps.

Thus, there is often a trade-off between a whole product and the product suited for new users (who can be considered a subsegment).  Often part of a whole product is offered as another whole product, but to a market or segment that is less sophisticated than buyers in the larger group.  Another common trick is to grease the skids for implementing a whole product or provide a stripped down whole product in order to create an “ease of use/implementation” feature.

HP seems to be doing both.

Implementing cloud computing is non-trivial.  Even battle hardened geeks, armed with cases of diet Coke and enough manuals to depopulate a rain forest are intimidated.  Yet the economics of cloud computing are nearly inarguable, and thus our nerd friends geek-up and grind through implementations seemingly designed by Inquisition engineers.  In smaller companies with limited technologists resources, implementation might never happen without the aide of outside service.

This is where HP’s CloudStart appears.  In brief, it is designed to ease implementation and operation of clouds by simplifying the process.  It is a cluster of hardware, software, consulting services (heavy on that last bit) and their Cloud Service Automation tools that allegedly allow an enterprise to build a private cloud (with four ported work loads) within 30 days.  In the history of IT, a 30-day implementation of any infrastructure is unheard of, especially for something as fundamental as servers.

HP’s offering is not entirely unique.  Many companies – most notoriously IBM – have offered quick-start programs for major IT implementation.  In each the goal is the same:  to simplify the process for the buyer while locking them into a one-vendor path for implementation.  Let us ignore the latter mentioned lock-in (it is a given, like your congress critter lying to you) and instead focus on applying grease to the implementation skids.  Doing the latter in parallel with outbound marketing reinforces a single golden rule for marketers everywhere:  reduce friction.

Aside from buying water, most purchase decisions are reasonably complex.  Technology more so.  The time required to make a complex decision, and the likelihood the decision will ever be made, is inversely proportional to how simple you make it for the buyers.  Every instance where a buyer encounters confusion or doubt is a place where the sales cycle elongates and your VP of Sales’ blood pressure rises geometrically.  One of marketing’s missions is to reduce complexity in buying decisions and keep your sales exec from encountering stroke, heart failure or a drinking problem (that last one is a jest … all sales people have a drinking problem).

This is why Best Buy allows you to compare good products with crappy ones online: it quickly eliminates a point of purchase delay.

With any product, guiding the buyer to a decision is a primary marketing responsibility (one web design analysis firm refers to the lack of such marketing effort as “allowing unsupervised buyer thinking”).  The parallel with HP’s CloudStart initiative is to reduce the customer thinking required to make implementation (and thus purchase) decisions for cloud computing.  Guiding geeks to glory, if you will. SalesForce.com did this amazingly well with sales people and CRM, making their discovery, learning, trial and acquisition a snap, despite their perpetually intoxicated states.

The marketing lesson herein is to stop spewing text and data on web page after web page, and start leading buyers by the nose through the paths of discovery, education trial and adoption.  Rent a passel of prospects and watch them as they walk through your materials, and wherever they stop or have a question, fix the problem that caused it, even if it is in the product itself.  Focus on eliminating friction, diversion or rejection.  And if you sell a complex product, build a selling tools that guide buyers through the same process at lower levels.

And buy your IT geeks another case of diet Coke.  Seriously, they’re putting on weight being locked and chained in the server room like that.

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Who would have thought Microsoft could be cool?

Not Microsoft the company, the product line or substandard tech support. No, Microsoft marketing is cool because they engineered a reverse promotion campaign that leveraged a competitor’s positioning, used it to attack their weakness and amplify a Microsoft strength all in one sweep.

That’s cool.

Anyone with a pulse is familiar with the great ad campaign designed by Apple, pitting a dowdy looking actor as a generic PC, and a young hipster (Justin Long in real life) as a Mac. Justin played the Mac role as low key, friendly, effective, peaceable and, in a sub dude way, cool. Justin was also the voice of Alvin in Alvin and the Chipmunks, so we have to subtract three ‘cool points’.

For a company built primarily on image and vendor lock-in, Apple did a great job. Their ads were memorable and also provided a method for serially picking on the weaknesses of Windows. They made being a Mac cool and being a PC a crime against humanity. Combined with the everlasting Windows Vista fiasco, the campaign seriously damaged Microsoft sales, brand and market mindshare.

Microsoft used judo.

Like most take-down martial arts, judo recommends using your opponent’s weight against them. Don’t bother hitting a 260 linebacker in the face because it might merely amuse him. Instead let him charge you and then help him convert his forward momentum into downward momentum. Once he in on the floor and you are standing over him you can then either run like hell or execute a ‘ground-and-pound’ attack.

Microsoft grounded and is pounding Apple.

Take the basic premise of the Apple ads, which paraphrased is “Macs are cool and PCs are a headache.” These concepts were communicated by actors as proxies for operating systems and hardware. In the process Apple made ‘PC’ a dirty word, which was their intent. They wanted to position Macintoshes as the un-PC. Apple’s ad campaign was so successful, that they created momentum.

Microsoft responded with their “laptop hunter” ad campaign, and in doing so Microsoft used Apple’s momentum against them, changing the basic conflict between Apple and Microsoft. Apple said Macs are cool, but Microsoft said PCs are smart. The average consumer knows they will never be cool, so being smart is an attractive option.

Let us itemize things Microsoft marketing did to judo Apples ads:

• Apple used actors – Microsoft used real people in real stores (Fry’s no less).
• Apple picked on Windows weaknesses – Microsoft promoted their strength, namely getting more bang for the buck (smart consumerism).
• Apple only sold against Windows, not promoting their strengths – Microsoft buyers are shown listing their required features and “getting what I want” for less.
• At the end each of those real consumers says “I’m a PC”.

Central to all of this is that Microsoft took Apple’s momentum in creating a negative “I’m a PC” stereotype and used it to sell Windows market strengths. When paired with allegedly real consumers shopping, comparing and choosing PCs, Apple’s momentum becomes Microsoft’s momentum. Using real consumers also eliminated the advertising advantage Apple obtained with actors (and given that Justin stared in such epic cinematic endeavors as Happy Campers and Idiocracy, we can take him only so seriously).

In promotions, perception is everything. Apple had a good start by amplifying dissatisfaction with Windows weaknesses, but they did not capitalize on their own momentum by shifting the focus of their ads to Mac strengths. Microsoft was able abscond with that momentum and used it to sell Windows market strengths with more authenticity.

The genius was that they did not stand toe-to-toe with Apple and slug it out. They hijacked Apple’s efforts and picked their pockets in one smooth move.

That’s smart and cool.

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I’m rarely impressed by other people’s promotions, but this one I have to share.

When introducing your company, products or services you must rapidly communicate what it is, what makes it different, and why the prospect should be interested. The more abstract the product or service, the more difficult this becomes.

When I came upon an online intro by NearSoft, I found a case study in how to do web promotions right.

NearSoft is a near-by outsourcing software development house … in Mexico (not a country one normally has on a short list of offshore opportunities). Their value propositions are that (a) they are closer than India – same time zone as Phoenix – and (b) they eliminate many of the common offshore headaches (such as the cost of flying to India to manage project details).

The folks at NearSoft knew they had to communicate their unique value propositions in a short amount of time and make the message stick. They also knew that buzz marketing was the most effective means of spreading the word that outsourcing to Mexico was possible and sane.

So they made a video.

My initial reaction was “Well who in the Sam Hell hasn’t made a video?” Getting your video noticed in the flood of online content has been classified by the American Psychiatric Association as a form of auto-masochism. Yet another self-serving promo video, from a Mexican software house none-the-less, sounded like a model for failure.

Here is what NearSoft did right. Use it as a “how to” model for promotions in general and web intros in particular.

Guarantee of brevity: They flatly state the intro lasts a mere 53 seconds. Anyone will invest under a minute is they know the time limit is real (which it wasn’t, but that doesn’t matter).

Selling the benefits: The speaker reads the benefits and the video animations drive home the points. This technique takes advantage of a subtle quirk of the human brain whereby it can absorb more information per unit of time if the information comes from multiple sensory input and it tightly related (this is the way we learn languages, by matching visual input with spoken words). I cannot tell you exactly what the speaker said, but after one viewing I got the idea that NearSoft was a $500 plane trip within one time zone, and that this saves me time, money and headaches.

Humor: Being funny makes even a software outsourcing company, in a relatively unknown town in Mexico, seem approachable. Humor can be tricky, so NearSoft uses visuals that are universally understood (or understandable) and tight synchronization with the spoken word (in fact, an early slide admits that the video is actually 85 seconds long while making the promise that it is 53 seconds). They juxtapose the announcer listing serious off-shoring issues (such as the “excessive rework”) with unrelated images (Michael Jackson’s nose).

The net effect (pun intended) is that the video successfully gets you to visit, listen, communicate why NearSoft is important, and give you a reason to spread the word (like I am doing now) even if you do not need their services. And they did it for very little money. All in all, great promotional effort.

Silicon Valley could learn a lesson or two from Hermosillo.

http://www.nearsoft.com/nearsoft-quick-intro.php

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