Technology Marketing Ideas

Marketing thought of the week – Confucius was pretty spot on, change is constant

Two articles in the Wall Street Journal this week raised the theme of confronting change. One was about a product that’s been around since the 1930’s; the other about a much younger offering. 

 

The first was an announcement by Eastman Kodak that they planned to cease production of their Kodachrome film. Once the choice of many professional photographers, today sales of the film account for less than 1% of Kodak’s traditional film revenues. The film is expensive to produce and the adoption of low-cost digital photography made it an unnecessary luxury. How many years will it be before no one understands what Paul Simon was singing about?

 

The other article was about how Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is already planning for the demise of the DVD. Although recent months have seen significant growth in their subscriber base for their DVD rental business, he has seen the future, and the DVD isn’t part of it. Remote downloads/access will eventually eliminate the need for the medium. He understands that for Netflix to continue to prosper he needs to embrace another delivery model – and he’s already started the process.

 

These two articles illustrate how important it is to keep anticipating change and evolving. Those firms that focus solely on the next couple of quarters without a longer term perspective often find themselves dying a premature death. I’ve seen it happen.

 

By the way, if you’ve got some useable Kodachrome around you might want to go ahead and shoot it. There’s only one place in the world that still processes it (in Kansas) and they probably won't be offering that service for much longer.

Marketing thought of the week – why wouldn’t software firms conduct email marketing campaigns?

Back in November SoftLetter conducted a survey of its readership (which is paid subscription and made up almost solely of software firms) and asked this question: “Does your company conduct e-mail marketing campaigns?”. 68% of the 175 respondents said they did and 32% said they did not. At first glance I thought the 32% to be shockingly high given how inexpensive email marketing can be. Could that many software firms not  be using email as a campaign tool?

 

A few questions about that 32% come to mind: 1) if we took the survey today, given how firms have trimmed their marketing expenses I wonder if we’d find that more of that group has embraced email campaigns? 2) Do they not use them because they believe there is something related to their software offerings that make its use inappropriate (e.g. complexity of sale, price of software, etc.), 3) Do they not use them because they believe there is something about their brand that makes them inappropriate? 4) If the question had been phrased differently, say to ask about the use of email for marketing purposes, would the responses have been different? I guess I find it interesting that a third of those software firms surveyed would not be using such a low-cost technique, especially in the face of our current economy.

Marketing thought of the week – The coming explosion in Web video

It seems to be that everyone that prognosticates about such things believes that there will be dizzying growth in the use of video via the Internet. One self-interested prognosticator, Cisco Systems, has released a study claiming that by 2013 Internet traffic will increase fivefold with more than 90% of this growth coming from video (mobile growth in data usage will grow 66 times according to the same study). If we assume that at least some of this video will be newly produced footage for corporate use, who will produce all this video? Will the price of video production fall through the roof?

 

The Internet has, for the most part, created a pretty level playing field for smaller firms looking to compete with their larger brethren in terms of quality of  Web-based marketing. The playing field becomes a little slanted when it comes to video production. We have gotten pretty spoiled from watching so much high- quality produced video that when we see something with lower production values we tend to form negative perceptions. Compromise a little with your web site or brochure quality and you might get away with it. Create a video that doesn’t meet viewer standards and you’ve shot yourself in the foot.

 

Quite fortunately the price of high-quality video production and editing hardware/software has fallen. At some point in the not-too-distant future we should also see more emphasis on video scripting. Perhaps we should also brace ourselves for a tidal wave of bad video.

Marketing thought of the week – Can smaller firms establish themselves as thought leaders?

Firms that are perceived as thought leaders usually enjoy more business opportunities and often command a higher premium for their offerings. Smaller firms can be intimated by the requirements of becoming a thought leader. Thought leadership programs entail a commitment to writing and speaking on a topic of interest to their target market; requirements that some technical people are not comfortable with. Additionally, there can be substantial time requirements in establishing and maintaining a position of thought leadership. Larger firms with more resources can divide some of the responsibilities – or have sufficient confidence in the value of their program to make the often significant investment of time and dollars to engage in thought leadership activities. Smaller firms often have to devote the time of someone who could be “ringing the cash register” to spending their time on activities that are overhead – with no certainty that they are ever going to pay-off – and probably good confidence that they’re not going to pay-off quickly. It’s not that this dilemma is unique to thought leadership programs. I believe it is this uncertainty combined with the discomfort about doing some of these activities that ties some smaller firm’s hands when it comes to engaging in thought leadership programs.