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Good and Bad Marketing
Throughout our Habitat research, we have observed that many IT professionals don't understand what marketing really is. As the executive vice president at a global asset management firm observes, "Most people in technology mistake marketing for advertising." IT professionals need to understand that, like cholesterol, there are good and bad kinds of IT marketing.
The CIO at a global manufacturer has wrestled with this issue throughout her career. She has discovered that the traditional approaches to promotion -- newsletters and annual reports -- have mixed results. This CIO recognizes that while they were important mechanisms in the "perpetual drive to try to get people to pay attention" to the accomplishments of IT, they weren't enough.
"We are in competition for very limited attention span," says the CIO at a manufacturing company, who notes that classic marketing approaches (i.e., company newsletters) don't have much impact in large organizations. "I would rather put the bulk of my efforts on more direct strategies, things like face-to-face interactions."
The CIO of a midmarket services firm says that basic, in-your-face messaging is powerful. When IT has a successful project wrap-up, for example, an article about the project gets posted on the intranet. "This gets us out to the masses. We want everybody to see what we are doing," he says.
The CIO at a financial services firm sees the marketing challenge a bit differently. Marketing IT was an important part of staying visible with clients. "IT was valuable because it was perceived as being valuable by real, paying customers," this CIO notes. At this company, customers could see the importance of technology. "We had a subtle but well-defined program to make sure the industry saw our technology as leading edge. It really reinforces the brand."
Educating Internal Customers
More than any other department in modern enterprises, IT is beset with existential angst about its role and function. At root is a problem of expectations: What is IT expected to deliver?
Part of knowing what to deliver is educating your audience. As the CIO at a midmarket manufacturer states emphatically, "To be successful in advancing the IT ball, you have to have an educated customer. This is the ongoing, constant challenge: helping them become a good customer."
Not all customers "evolve at the same speed," he adds, so "you have to know where they are. Your IT organization itself is at varying evolutionary levels and competencies. Trying to match those two up all the time is how I would describe the marketing IT challenge at this point."
The CIO at a global asset management firm concurs, "Marketing is really all about understanding the customer, educating the customer." This executive goes on to make a critically important point: "Part of marketing IT is creating the set of facts upon which executives make technology investment decisions."
This precipitated the question: "Do your C-suite colleagues accept the facts you use to explain IT spending?" (see Figure 3). Large companies are further along the curve in getting their business cohorts to trust the numbers behind IT decision making. Their numbers are more credible because they come from finance or the business. Larger enterprises are able to employ personnel and processes to prepare their financials.
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