Category Archives: Marketing

Observations about the science of marketing technology

Market Vision

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“There is no market there,” I said to the entrepreneur, who left in a huff. Sure, I might have been wrong, but that is unlikely.  The entrepreneur may be one of those storied Silicon Valley visionaries whose acute sense of the needs of certain buyers is so profound that he soon will buy a small third world country with his spare change, but that is just as unlikely. The first need every company has is a market.  The first question is always “does a market exist?”  After all, without willing buyers no amount of product design, cost reduction, hard work or plain dumb luck will make a company successful.  This then brings to the fore the nature of identifying viable markets, a task Silicon Strategies Marketing routinely performs for our clients though we have to deliver bad news more often than we like. There are two primordial paths to market … Continue reading →

Marketing Innovation

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I am overly fond of quoting Peter Drucker who said “Business has only two basic functions — marketing and innovation” and everything else is merely administrative labor.  But you have to give the man credit for stating a truth as succinctly as could possibly be done. The effect of marketing on innovation must be understood.  Unguided innovation has created many interesting, amusing and completly unprofitable technology products that caused tons of venture capital to evaporate (often through excessive and misguided marketing budgets).  Similarly, marketing occasionally identifies untapped markets, and is the seed for new and successful products (unless the market research was flawed, in which case see the preceding outcome).  Thus, marketing is both a creator and regulator of innovation. This subject is often not understood my entrepreneurs and even CEOs of major corporations.  Inbound marketing — the more interesting half of the profession — is all about understanding markets, … Continue reading →

Social Inequity

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Short is sweet. No, this is not another diatribe on compact market messages, though that lesson is well worth repeating.  Where sweet and short nicely collide is in the sales cycle.  The shorter the cycle, the sooner the revenue, the happier the stockholder and the fatter your bonus check. Marketers know that social media is becoming an intrinsic, if not superior, tool for finding and landing customers.  What has not been well quantified is the degree to which social media helps.  The folks over at the Software and Information Industry Association, where I am a perpetual CODiE judge, recently presented some data that indicates how and which social media may be helpful in shortening the sales cycle (click the graphic for one large enough to read). The blue bars represent sales closing in less than 90 days, and the gray bars sales lasting more than 90 days.  Where you see … Continue reading →

B2B Socially

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I’m hoping for antisocial media.  I can see how to make a buck off of that. Meanwhile, social media continues to gain dominance in marketing, and for good reason.  Humans, and even politicians, are social animals.  We commune for pleasure, profit and procreation (which pretty much describes a day in the life of Eliot Sprtizer).  Even the most sterile of pursuits requires some social aspect.  Every poor blogger, alone in his office, hammers out prose in order to asynchronously connect with other humans. Business-to-business (B2B) activities are thus social interactions.  Oracle commits social acts when it interacts with other enterprises, aside from the select few it eats.  Thus social media should be a component of B2B. The oddest aspect of B2B social media concerns who in the relationship needs to socialize and why.  The failure to think through these two questions have led to various B2B social media catastrophes including … Continue reading →

Positioning Power

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Growing your market in the modern age without knowing your positioning is like driving motorcycle down an Interstate while blindfolded.  You will lose and the resulting splatter will not be pretty. Positioning is simply establishing where on a competitive map your products are in the eyes of the market.  The concept is quite simple if you ignore for a moment the complicating factors of market maturity, multiple segments many buyer genotypes, or 3,274 other elements.  To determine one’s position you simply have to identify the issues that are of primary concern to your buyers, and either measure their attitudes about competing products and perform a realistic evaluation of all the entrants. Sounds simple, but it isn’t, and often leads to awkward issues.  Here’s an unfunny example. Silicon Strategies Marketing recently performed a series of investigations for a client to determine what the market felt was important about a services offering … Continue reading →

Ora-gel

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Oracle, as always, has a good game plan, though they have not thought out everything under the Sun. I attended Oracle’s outbound communication extravaganza concerning the completed swallowing of Sun.  In the time from initial purchase to the final approvable by European Union regulators, Oracle has been busy deciding what parts of Sun to keep (pretty much everything), how to integrate to company (interestingly) and where to create real market value (specific).  In an event short on surprises — unless Larry did something quirky, which I missed by having to leave early — OraSun changes the game, which is the entire point of marketing. Aside from seeing “Sun” positioned over “Oracle” on all the event branding (the last time this will undoubtedly occur), the basic market strategy of the merger can be summarized as “We are your IT hub, we are specializing the center of your operations, and don’t look … Continue reading →

Open Changes

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Desperate times create desperate marketers. Such seems to be the case with Sequoia Voting Systems, a manufacturer of electronic voting machines (known among libertarians as ‘election hijacking devices’). Sequoia recently announced that they were opening the source code for their Frontier balloting systems. A wise move, aside from the fact that it exposes Frontier as being Microsoft based. I know nobody who would trust their vote to be counted by the same people who brought you Clippy (It looks like you are trying to vote. Would you like me to cast your ballot for you?). For reader who have resided in Tora Bora for the past decade, electronic voting machines were thrust upon the American public in a fit of panic. In the 2000 elections, a few senile seniors in Florida could not navigate paper ballots. Since the appointment of the next president was to be based on fewer votes … Continue reading →