What role should marketing play for an IT high-technology company in 2002? While some of the greatest high-tech success stories have been built around products that literally sold themselves, the vast majority of high-tech companies do not enjoy this luxury. If your company’s IT product inventions are not flying off the shelf and selling themselves, you may want to consider examining your company and marketing focus in the five following areas:
Are you solving a real customer need?
Do you have a competitive advantage?
Is your brand recognized as a category leader?
Are you leveraging partners?
Is the trend your friend?
Customer Need
Are you solving a real customer need — one that is “must-have” and not just “nice to have”? Do you have an understanding of what areas are the most important to your target buyers and yet are not well satisfied by competitive offerings or alternatives? What can you do to better align your company and product strategy with your customers’ real needs?
IT products that solve real “must-have” customer needs enjoy the benefit of being bought (pulled) and require less selling (push)! If you are not solving a must-have customer need, you may want to see if you can link your offering to a closely related must-have customer IT need to increase your pull.
Competitive Advantage
Do you have an advantage over other offerings and alternatives or substitutes? Is this defensible and sustainable? In what areas can you build and strengthen “the moat” around your business?
Every business or product needs a collection of secret sauces that help it consistently serve up unique and superior customer experiences. In addition to differentiating your offering, this helps keep your IT business or product from becoming a commodity.
Category Leadership
Are you a leader within your category? If not, have you considered establishing a new meaningful category where you can position yourself as the brand leader going forward? Do you have validation and confirmation of your leadership from an independent market research firm?
Customers are increasingly looking to make “best-of-breed” high-tech purchases from IT vendors. At the same time, increased IT product complexity and rapid product cycles make it challenging for customers to completely rely on product comparisons. With customers increasingly “buying by brand,” investing in positioning your brand as a clear category leader can help make you the preferred and safe customer choice.
Partner Leverage
Are there potential technology and sales partners that can help increase your competitive advantage, industry mind share and/or customer reach? Are you leveraging these partners to augment and/or complement your efforts?
You may be able to reach customers more quickly or more effectively in combination with others. Also, there may be auxiliary components of your IT offering that are better sourced from the outside vs. being internally developed or delivered. Partners can often also provide an added dimension of credibility to your company’s value proposition.
Market Trend
Are your existing offerings aligned with current customer needs and trends? Are you taking the right actions to anticipate future market trends?
It usually doesn’t pay to fight the customer or market trend. It’s a lot easier to work on understanding the trend and make it your friend, versus making the trend turn your way.
Carefully examining and tuning your marketing plan in the above five areas can help position your company to win in 2002 and beyond.
Asheem Chandna is vice-president of business development and product management for Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. (Nasdaq: CHKP). Check Point is the market leader in the VPN and firewall markets and is deployed at over 100,000 corporations around the world.
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