Wednesday, October 31, 2012

When Marketing Toots the Wrong Horn

Ever work with a technical marketing person who didn’t really know what your company was selling?

A few years ago I worked for a business intelligence software company.  Essentially, we sold business-oriented software, to business people, who were looking to solve business problems.  I can’t explain it any more simply than that. This was software that did not interest technical people.  Sure, once installed they had to maintain it, but it was not for them.
One day I get an email from our technically-oriented head of Marketing with the latest press release.  Here is a short quiz - was the press release:
A) A story about a financial service customers, extolling the virtues of our product, so I could leverage this and send it to my financial service prospects?, or was it
B) A story about a Retail customers, extolling the virtues of our product, so I could leverage this and send it to my Retail prospects?, or was it
C) A story about a manufacturing customers, extolling the virtues of our product, so I could leverage this and send it to my manufacturing prospects?
Unfortunately, the answer was “D, none of the above”.  The title of the release reveals all you need to know, “Latest Benchmarking test shows that (My company’s products) runs 27% faster on UNIX Servers than (our biggest competitor’s product)”.
I immediately felt sick.  I picked up a mail order catalogue I had brought from home in anticipation of this type of press release, and went  to see our Marketing VP.
“Heinz, why was the last press release about our speed on a UNIX box?  That’s ‘nice to know’  info, but what functional VP cares about that?”
“The IT Departments needs to know all the technical specs of our product, since they have to maintain it.”
“True, but we know that IT often only gets called in by the business groups at the end of the buying process, just to validate a decision that has essentially already been made.  I think we are cluttering our image in the market, since business people will also get these technical messages, and  confuse them with our ‘business value’ messages”.
“Well that’s why you are in sales and not marketing.”
“Heinz, do you see what I have here?”
“Sure it’s a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, why are you bringing that to work, nothing else to do?”
“I brought it here to prove a point.  You are delivering technical messages to business people.  They want to hear about business solutions to business problems.  Seems to me, If they made you VP of Marketing of Victoria’s Secret, you would fire all these gorgeous models, and replace them with a picture of you, standing in a white coat in a laboratory, holding a garment, and the caption would be, ‘we use 27% more lycra in our thongs than our competitors.’  How many thongs do you think you’d sell with that ad”?
Heinz was speechless.
© Marc Gedansky, 2011

No comments:

Post a Comment