Patrick Lannigan - Spring 2003

The essence of marketing is not about advertising, Power Pointing, product features, brochure design or corporate communications per se.  Those are important, but secondary to the what Peter Drucker claims is the primary purpose of business: to create a customer.   As Mr. Drucker says, "markets are not created by God, nature, or economic forces but by business people".  Chrysler is a great example. Chrysler created the market for their minivan. Industry analysts didn't tell them to do it. Customers didn't ask for it. Chrysler had the courage to create a solution for car-jockeying parents of the early 80's. Good thing they had the guts to do it because their courage ended up saving them, financially. 

In the case of Chrysler, they had the courage to do something they believed in. Sometimes it also requires great courage not to do something . A great example is Sybase (in the early days). Sybase concluded that they were not getting a good return on investment from trade shows.  Instead they focused almost exclusively on seminars to bring in leads. It worked. Less courageous marketers would have said "You have to do trade shows". Same goes for four color brochures. Any marketer knows you have to do them. That's a no-brainer, isn't it? Yet it was hard to find a four color brochure at Cisco in the early 90's. Instead of the normal four color fluff you 'd find in most sales offices Cisco produced dozens of four page black and white "tutorials", to teach communication architects the ins  and outs of routing, multiplexing and de-multiplexing various protocols. When the internet boom hit, who else were these communication architects going to turn to? The default choice was Cisco. Sybase and Cisco didn't play it "safe" by doing what every other company did. They had courage to be different. 

Other ways "safe marketers" expose themselves is over-reliance on technical jargon. I once remember asking a product manager what his product did. Out spewed an endless list of acronyms beginning with J2EE and ending with XML. After he finished there was a proud look on his face as if to say "see how smart I sound?". Too bad he didn't answer my question. Hiding behind jargon is for the timid and insecure. 

Industry analysts can be a problem for smaller companies. Somehow the illusion exists that if you can convince the industry analysts your product is worthy of their blessing, customers will line up to buy it. Have you ever seen this happen? I haven't. Worse still is the fact that analysts make more money off the losers second tier players, than the top tier. "Oh if we can just get into that magic quadrant all our problems will go away" the marketers think to themselves. So they spend big dollars on analyst consulting. The analyst then writes something flattering about them. Then nothing happens. Oops. I've seen it happen dozens of times. Companies that focus on creating customers win the day every time. Besides, nothing speaks better to analysts than results. 

* * *

¯¯postfix¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

Admittedly, I'm hard on industry analysts. Perhaps I've just seen one too many small companies spend too much money trying to get into the Gartner magic quadrant and ignore their real duty; to create customers. Yet I can't deny that I haven't seen Gartner contribute to a company's success. The situations in which I've seen them best utilized is when a company is looking to formulate a crisp message that is easy to understand. Analysts, by nature, are effective communicators and can help with this problem. Another useful tactic is getting a quote from Gartner that supports your market focus. The Gartner quote doesn't hurt, but it's not going to make or break your business; your customers are.