Imagine this scenario:
- A marketing executive presents market data suggesting there is a need for product X to serve market Y. A healthy discussion ensues at a board-level meeting, which results in agreement that the idea is worth pursuing.
- When presented with a business case, the chief developer logically dissuades the management team from trying to develop product X because the problems are too hard to overcome (lack of skill sets, few resources, etc.). Typically, the management team and board buys into this argument as building product X would cost money, take time, and be a distraction from current development efforts.
- The result: The company may have missed an opportunity to establish itself in a market. The engineering team continues to keep the company on a divergent path -- a path potentially away from the needs of the market. The board tells marketing to figure out how to sell what is available.
This scene is one of the more common situations we have seen at innerbridge, while running vendor marketing, and while observing vendor decision making as an analyst.
Marketing problems: Focus on No. 2
What vexes marketing executives? First and foremost, they usually bemoan lack of budget. They are tasked with increasing market awareness, strengthening the brand, and providing tools and pricing that make it easy for sales to do their job. Yet, few feel they have the money or staff to properly manage these activities. While budgetary complaints are most likely as old as marketing itself, the second major issue is marketing a weak offering. This is something that can be more readily addressed. Almost everyone in high-tech marketing at some point in his or her career has grimaced trying to sell an under-powered, feature-starved, or buggy solution. For many, helping sell weak products defines a technology marketing career. That does not have to be -- and should not be -- the case.
Apple and Microsoft as examples of extremes
While budget issues will always remain, the key to addressing issue No. 2 is to get marketing involved earlier in product definition and development. High tech vendor poster children Apple and Microsoft are useful as examples.
Apple thinks about the customer experience throughout the engineering process, whether it's when discussing or designing case bevels, ambient keyboards, graphical design, or even packaging. Microsoft, on the other hand, seems to design products in a more typical high-tech fashion. Marketing and other executives have input on the initial design, but soon engineering and review committees take over and the product gets a life of its own -- often devoid of the view of the customer. Windows Vista is a perfect example, where executive decisions, engineering choices, and a thin veneer of consumer desires resulted in a product that has little momentum of its own, despite a multi-million dollar marketing campaign. On the other end, Apple's iPhone generates waves of free publicity for the company, brand, and product with each small or large bit of news.
Should companies adopt the Apple approach? No, but they shouldn't stick with the Microsoft -- or typical high-tech approach -- either. Most companies simply don't sell products where the ultra attention to detail is needed or offers enough return to be worth the investment. But somewhere in the middle ground makes the most sense. To get to that space, marketing needs to change its primary entry point from after manufacture to much earlier in the product assembly line.
Marketing reality for many: Product triage
Today, marketing is essentially a triage operation at many high tech companies. The product or service that needs to be sold is at best, OK, at worst, a weak or poor market offering. With little money to spare, marketing executives act like a typical politician, spinning their product story in order to get the most traction from the media, analysts, bloggers, and other third parties. For prospects, that spin can be dangerous as the instant, public Internet feedback loop will quickly expose overzealous marketing efforts. The results is market distrust, brand erosion, and stalled sales. Since many vendors don't have much brand power to start with, over extension of product claims can create a chicken-or-egg blame game in the company. Engineering will point fingers at marketing for false advertising, while marketing will point out that it has to sell whatever its been given to keep the lights on.
Marketing and engineering will always butt heads to some degree. Both do what they do to be successful. Marketers want to sell more product, and therefore they want to make a product appeal to prospects -- sometimes they have to invent that appeal. Engineers want to deliver on what they have promised and what they feel is possible. They don't want to hear or have to back up inflated claims about their software, and animosity develops as they feel marketing is overselling the product or forcing them to weaken the offering by constantly changing the requirements.
Marketing in the product development trenches
So, how does marketing help create better products and improve its relationship with developers? By injecting itself earlier into the product development assembly line. But just sitting in on development meetings won't get the job done. The marketing representative needs to be:
- A forceful customer advocate. The top job of the marketing liaison is to promote customer needs and the need to generate revenue (remind developers where their salary comes from). Marketers should come equipped with actionable customer data, not only to help understand what customers want, but to help show data-centric engineers that marketing has a clue.
- Knowledgeable of engineering constraints. Developers already are suspicious of marketing, so a representative that comes in without knowledge of how software development works won't improve the situation. Pushing engineers to deliver promised features on time is the right thing to do; constantly adding to product requirements, particularly late in the development cycle, is the wrong thing to do.
- Flexible in the face of reality. Though the first two points are valid, in the real world, marketing needs to be flexible as development schedules slip or market changing events force product re-evaluations.
The key to a more successful marketing and engineering relationship is twofold: 1) the reliance on data to make points or support positions; 2) the ability to compromise in order to make the best, most marketable offerings. While a marketing director and an engineering director will always, to some extent, think the other "doesn't get it," they can learn to work on the same page.
Putting marketing in the product development trenches -- and making them useful while there -- will help deliver products customers want and products the media and blogger community want to talk about.
Leave a comment