It's Time to Fix Tech Marketing

Computerworld - "Do you have any idea how much money my vendor wastes in its attempt to market to me?"
That's one of the most frequently heard laments among the IT leaders participating in the Annual Vendor Toxicity Survey now being conducted at the IT Leadership Academy at Florida Community College at Jacksonville. In fact, assemble any senior group of IT thinkers, and even though they'll probably fight over middleware strategy, Sarbanes-Oxley compliance campaigns, outsourcing initiatives and the future of Linux, they'll agree that the way vendors market products and services is dysfunctional, if not an actual roadblock to value creation.
Why is this? Are vendor marketing people stupid?
The Toxicity Survey has revealed several causal elements:
1. Inappropriate and outdated mental models on why and how technologies enter the organization. The days of "crossing the chasm" are over. Geoffrey Moore, the creator of this once-dominant descriptive framework, has moved on; vendors should too. The simplistic, product-centric characterization of customers as innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority or laggards has given way to a much more fragmented and nuanced set of behavioral buying clusters. Just as society has fragmented into categories such as soccer moms, NASCAR dads and underemployed knowledge workers, so too have technology entry points atomized. Most vendor marketing programs haven't been successful at targeting the tribal leaders of these buying clusters.
2. Total disconnect from the political and organizational challenges facing the CIO. Vendors aren't inside the heads of IT leaders. Too many continue to prattle on about features and functions, but today those are the last things on the minds of IT leaders. They're wrestling with risk management, real-world economics, internal politics, and the problems of generating momentum and delivering value via behavior change.
3. History-based skepticism of vendor claims. As one IT leader succinctly put it, "They lie to us!"
4. The total cost-to-value relationship of solutions. Another question that was frequently heard during the research was, "How many consultants does it take to make your software work?"
The litany of things being done wrong is too extensive to cover fully here. The bottom line is that vendors offering products and services that can truly help organizations aren't getting the attention they deserve.
One of the symptoms of the broken marketing model that's now in place is the sad fact that vendors are being denied access to the "gated communities" where problems are laid out, solution alternatives are examined and decisions are made. Two things have to happen. Vendors have to somehow get inside those gates.This will require a whole new kind of trust-based marketing -- as opposed to T-shirt-based marketing. And marketers will have to create messages that focus on delivered value, not technical sophistry.
As a futurist, I predict that the next big thing isn't going to be what technology does; it's going to be how technology is marketed and sold. How you sell will have a big impact on whether you sell. Vendors are going to have to dismantle their Industrial Age product marketing assembly lines and learn some new tricks.
Thornton A. May is a longtime industry observer, management consultant and commentator. Contact him at thorntonamay@aol.com.

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