Simplified Traditional Technical Marketing - a base to build on

Apple's iPod used dancing silhouettes which is a big campaign. This is a product that needs marketing as much as any consumer product. ICS and enterprise software do not use consumer product marketing techniques.

Learning a bit of traditional marketing is useful for Web2.0 technologists. A technologist has an outsider's view of marketing and it's not always clear what marketing is all about. Marketing is usually defined as the 'three P's':

"definition and management of the Price, Place, and Promotion of a product".

In the technical world this also means defining the product (essentially specifying to engineering what the "package" will contain). It also means defining the three P's by understanding the market and the competition. This is true with more traditional consumer products but in the technology world it turns out a little different and crucial to understand.

This sounds simple enough but as a famous advertising executive once said: "learning marketing takes a year, practicing marketing takes a lifetime". This is because our work is highly competitive and the market conditions shift daily. The most important function of practicing technology marketing is bridging between the internal world of the technologist and the external world of the consumer (or market). This is more of a role and an attitude than just skills and experience. Marketers need to play the "devil's advocate" in front of the technologist when making a case for a more user friendly design. Reducing the complexity and price of a product. Enabling easier channel support. In front of a customer the marketer plays the "technologist" pushing them to try harder to make use of a technically complicated design. In convincing them to pay more for features they may never use. This puts the technical marketer in the middle ground and he/she needs to know both worlds well enough to influence them both. A big part of the work is translating from the "use model" to the "technical model". Use model is the final consumer's point of view. Technical model is the feature specification.

Technical marketing can be viewed as a "story telling" about a product. To tell a story about how a product works means building a model of some sort. It also means knowing who will hear the story (customers) and what other stories the customer hears at the same time (from competitors or other users). I use the "story telling" analogy to illustrate the more abstract concept of translating ideas of an abstract product quickly into usable concrete terms anyone can understand. The story is actually called a few different names (use model, features and benefits, package) and the name changes as the marketing "process" moves from before a product is designed all the way to final customer's hands.

The first phase in product marketing "story telling" is planning and definition. Here a marketer defines the product in enough detail for engineering to design and manufacture a product. Basic product definition starts out with the description from a user perspective then engineers add their story telling which explain how they will design and build the product (i.e. core technology, functions, features, components, elements). These would be algorithms, data structures, package, look & feel, physical components (such as hardware components, circuit elements, etc.) At this point of a product definition the exact customer and how he will use the product and competing products are still a little vague (that's OK for now). Once the basic product definition is done and engineers buy into the product a marketing team starts a customer and competitive work. A product idea needs to be seen by many people who will use this product.

The definition bridges the core technical specification with the main uses of the product. One of the best ways to define a product is by using "mock ups" or "demos" in front of perspective customers. Software products start out as screen shots (demo screens). It is very hard to demonstrate a software product's functionality, but sometimes it may be useful to do some engineering and get a "dummy mock up" which actually shows some functions and helps explain general uses. Hardware products like ICs (Integrated Circuits) are tested in front of customers mostly through preliminary specifications. A customer that sees a specification of the "next product version (the next big thing)" will usually give good feedback about how he/she could use the product. This also includes the drawbacks and missing functions which will make the product unusable as it comes out the first time. Without preliminary specifications or mock-up screen shots most potential uses will not have much to say about a product.

Blackberry personal communicator is marketed mostly through "channels", these are the carriers which provide the phone service.
Once the product is well designed and tested in front of customers the engineers can get to work. At this point the marketer needs to start preparing the "channels" and the "market" for the product's introduction. Channels are a sales term for the distributors, Representative firms and direct sales Representatives. I will talk more about the sales process in another article. So far, the launch preparation was a combination of the "promotion" and "price" aspect of the marketing mix. Most technology products are not promoted with advertising and public display the way consumer products are marketed. They use channels of distribution to promote products. New products usually need extensive support and training to get users started. This is the role of the channel. Sometimes technology marketers will have technical people who are called "application engineers". These technical marketers develop demos and training material to help early adopters start out.

The final part of this article is an introduction to a product launch. In the "marketing mix: price, place, and promotion" an introduction of the product to the market is a combination of all the pieces and has to be ready in time. The price is usually set by a competing product's price, the ability of the market to sustain a price over time, and the need to recoup the development cost. The place is usually the combination of the channels and the end market itself, where the customers sitting? Usually in companies which consume the technology, ICs are used by system companies building cell phones, computers and consumer products.

When the place is the "channels" it means using intermediate companies to deliver the product to the end customer. Sometimes in consumer marketing a place is the most crucial part of the marketing mix. If a product is on a shelf and people see it they will buy it. In technology companies that usually means who can get to the end targeted consumer. For example, Intuit the producer of Quicken (a personal accounting package) marketed their product heavily to stock brokers in the early stage of their promotion (1980's in the USA). The idea was to hook them and use them as a "reference" to get to the end consumer (average check book balancing user). Stock brokers were a relatively small market, but highly influential with their customers. Once the stock brokers started keeping their client's accounting on Quicken they could influence their customers to use the application as well.

Finally the promotion is how a new product will be introduced to the consumer. When you buy a new computer from HP or Dell you will get a bunch of "free trial" programs like virus protection, Quicken (personal accounting), and maybe a trial to Microsoft Office or a graphic processing program for your photos (Photoshop by Adobe). This is one form of promotion which is relatively low cost, is distributed to a wide market and even has the feel of a reference, it seems like HP and Dell are endorsing the software. The only cost to the marketer is the management of a relationship with Dell and HP. Microsoft does this with their higher end Office suites. When you buy a low end package they let you try more applications (like Access database and Visio charting).

This article used the traditional "marketing mix" model. For the most part, technology companies use this model initially to get started. Once I explore the other functions of the marketing "process" (I will also refer to this at the "marketing flow" ), we will go into more into specific areas of technical marketing which are unique to the field. But it's always good to know the very basic traditional techniques.