Technology Marketing Ideas

Marketing thought of the week – do VCs typically get the insight they need regarding marketing?

In their book Marketing That Works, Leonard Lodish, et.al., cite a survey of venture capitalists that had them rate the importance of various business functions to the success of the endeavor. The marketing function ended up with a rating of 6.7 on a scale of 7 – the highest rating of any function. In-depth follow-up interviews found that venture failure rates can be reduced as much as 60% using pre-funding marketing analysis.

 

This finding can’t be unknown or a surprise to the VC community. A focus on technical wizardry or novelty without a rigorous examination of the marketing plans and resources of the venture-backed firm seems shortsighted. Are most VCs capable of performing this type of analysis? Once funded who performs the function of monitoring the firms’ marketing planning and tactics? Do they relinquish total control over marketing to whoever is handed the function internally or just ignore it out of the belief that a “better mousetrap” will always prevail? Should they take more of a hands-on approach? Have things changed much regarding the assessment of marketing since the dot com bust?

Marketing thought of the week – is the tech sector rebounding?

So is the tech sector on the cusp of a rebound? After HP and Microsoft both saw small, but positive revenue growth in their last quarterly reports over last year’s results, IBM just announced earnings exceeded expectations and Intel issued a statement indicating that it believed the home computer market had bottomed out. Are these indicators that the worst is over for the tech sector? Are we on the upslope of the curve, and if so, how steep is the grade? From what I’m witnessing it’s still a little hard to believe the tech sector is in recovery mode. Even if we’ve bottomed it seems the slope of the uptick is going to be long and gradual.

Marketing thought of the week - don't forget the basics

Maybe it’s me but it seems that the vast majority of marketing-related articles I see these days have to do with some aspect of social media. I can see why there’s great interest in the field – it’s dynamic, it’s hip, it’s cheap (if you don’t count the time it takes to figure out what you’re doing), and there’s value in it. It’s just hard to measure how much. You wonder if some marketing basics are getting overlooked while firms focus on how to use social media. And are missing opportunities as they do so.

 

For example, the economy has driven many businesses to close their doors or to change dramatically in some fundamental ways. I wonder how many firms are now updating their analyses of their competitors to assess changing their competitive positioning? I’ve seen nothing in the marketing blogs I monitor about updating positioning – but granted I don’t read everything. It just makes sense that during times of transition successful firms should be monitoring the environment to see how they should respond to these changes. 

Marketing thought of the week

In a column in the current issue of BtoB Magazine Paul Gillin offers firms advice on when to avoid social media. One of his admonitions is that you should have clear, measurable objectives before launching into the use of social media. In the same issue of the magazine there's a front page article entitled "Some question payoff of social media efforts." This article contains results from a recently conducted study by the Aberdeen Group of "best-in'class" companies' perceptions of the effectiveness of their social medial campaigns. One of the findings was that nearly 60% of these companies found it either very difficult or somewhat difficult to make a business case for investing in social media initiatives - one-fifth of the companies surveyed plan to increase their social media marketing budgets by more than 25% this year. I wonder if the firms increasing their budgets are within the 40% of firms that didn't find it difficult to justify their investment? Should you not engage in a social media campaign if you don't have a methodology to effectively measure results - or are social media an exception, either because of their relatively low cost or wide popularity, that you implement one measurement be damned? What are the yardsticks that companies are using to measure success?

Marketing thought of the week

As marketing dollars become tighter one would think that firms would spend more time and effort assessing the value of the components of their marketing mix to insure that their more limited resources were being spent as effectively as possible. Does this drive firms that have not done so to adopt the use of marketing mix decision models. Do the consultants and firms who provide decision model related services and tools prosper during recessions? Are firms that have traditionally made their allocations by “seat of the pants” decision processes driven to more methodical processes? Do technology firms have a greater tendency to adopt marketing technologies during a downturn than their non-technology counterparts?