Thank you for being with us for the first month of our new blog. In case you missed any posts, here is a recap, beginning with, in chronological order, our special report on getting technology to market, The Commercialization Ecosystem, which continues this month.
By Linda Forrest
I’ll admit it – I look forward to the Oscars all year. I’m an ardent movie fan, and so I look forward to seeing which movies are the most celebrated at the annual awards ceremony. This year was no different but I did feel highly skeptical going into it about the hosts that had been selected in an attempt to lure in a younger demographic to watch the show. I also had a bad taste in my mouth from last year, where the hosts did a surprisingly middling job and, in my opinion, the wrong folks took home the top hardware. Still, I couldn’t wait to watch and see who would win what.
Having stayed up on Sunday way past my bedtime to watch the Oscars, my worst fears were realized when the show proved to be a poorly written, disjointed affair that only shone when it harkened back to awards shows of times gone by. Early ratings suggest that viewership was down 7 percent from last year. Roger Ebert Tweeted: “The worst Oscarcast I’ve seen, and I go back awhile. Some great winners, a nice distribution of awards, but the show? Dead. In. The. Water.”
As disastrous as it was to watch (the audience in my house alone went from four to one over the course of the program), some marketing lessons can be gleaned from the 2011 Academy Awards.
This is the first contribution to this blog by Associate Phil Newman, a London-based marketing and commercialization strategist for technology companies.
By Phil Newman
When the iPad was finally revealed in 2010, it took time for the market to know how to categorize the device; everyone settled on simply creating a new category. One year on, the lead that Apple has is a replay of its iPod-iPhone momentum, but Google’s Android caught up quickly. This year will be a truly fascinating one of winners and losers. Not interested? You should be. Media tablets have re-written the rules.
iPad. You can do everything you want on one really. If you’re a high-end originator of Photoshop masterpieces or an individual with particularly fat fingers, you might not be so convinced, but if you try one for a reasonable period of time you’ll start to get frustrated with the boot-up time of your old laptop, the lack of software apps to enhance your entertainment or productivity and the whole battery-cable-charger-airport-connectivity thing.
Give the human race 20 years and the laptops we all lug around will seem as ancient as the clay tablets the Assyrians used to record cuneiform lists of goats, gold and slaves. We’re witnessing the next evolution of computing and something on par with the mouse and graphical user interface computing milestones of the 1970s.
By Leo Valiquette
“Software as a service (SaaS, typically pronounced [sæs]), sometimes referred to as ‘software on demand,’ is software that is deployed over the Internet and/or is deployed to run behind a firewall on a local area network or personal computer. With SaaS, a provider licenses an application to customers either as a service on demand, through a subscription, in a ‘pay-as-you-go’ model, or (increasingly) at no charge when there is opportunity to generate revenue from streams other than the user, such as from advertisement or user list sales.”
Offering customers this option versus the traditional model of selling boxes of CDs in shrink wrap is a “price of admission capability for software companies these days,” Rob Bell, director of service operation and corporate IT for Kinaxis, said at OCRI’s #smarTALKS event last night.
Bell was part of a panel that included Marc Brule, vice president of client services at Halogen Software, Aydin Mirzaee, co-CEO of ChideIT, and moderator Jeff Bennett, CEO and partner at ServiceVantage Corp. They discussed the transition from the industry’s traditional revenue model to a co-hosted SaaS model.
The key message? The SaaS model puts software vendors closer than ever before to the end users of their products. This is a paradigm shift that, perhaps paradoxically, creates fresh challenges and new ways to get it wrong even as it provides some distinct benefits for both users and vendors.
Here are the Top 10 takeaways from the discussion:
By Linda Forrest
Francis kicked off the launch of this blog by listing to some of the more common objections made by technology companies about why they’re not investing in marketing. One of these straw man arguments, an all-too-common refrain, is a lack of budget. From that first post:
“Lack of budget is the next most common excuse for not engaging in marketing. This one has more legitimacy but it also betrays a failure by marketers. If we can’t get the funds we need to do the job we believe needs to be done, it’s because we have failed to adequately plot the line between cause and effect, between marketing outflow and revenue income. What rational person would decline to invest a second and third dollar into a marketing program that has proven that the first dollar actually produced the revenue we said it would?”
We’ve long said that marketing is an investment, rather than a cost centre, and that’s absolutely the case. A business that views marketing merely as an expenditure rather than a tool to increase market share and revenue is doomed to failure. Marketing requires investment of money, time and resources to be successful. To borrow a line from a Canadian bank’s advertising campaign, “you’re richer than you think” when it comes to having “budget” for marketing. And here’s why.
