Richard Fouts

About half the marketers I talk to in technology firms, manage just one of marketing’s 4 Ps.  Promotion.  About 25% of them manage promotion – with influence one of the other P’s such as product management or distribution (aka, Place). 

The rest don’t even know the other three exist (because they are educated in fields other than marketing) or they just let their senior managers relegate them to marcom and promotional campaigns. Hence, “throw it over the wall” marketing is alive and well. It is particuarly rampant in Silicon Valley.  When I call on smaller vendors in the valley, this age-old phenomena is everywhere. But even marketers in the divisions and BUs or larger firms are often limited to promotion and lead generation.

If you’re a marketer that’s trying to get out of the marcom trap, there’s a body of research about the CIO’s move to the strategic table that Gartner has published for years. And it’s working. Since Gartner started coaching the CIO who simply “keeps the trains running on time” to become educated in business strategy, more and more CIOs have successfully done two things:  they are reporting to the CEO, and they are successfully shifting more resources to projects of strategic, not just tactical, value.

What an odd coincidence. Many marketers are in this same situation. Without going into the details of how a marketer can get out of the weeds and garner an inviation to the strategic table, let me illustrate with an example.

Nick Jones writes an interesting blogpost about “the end of mobile isolation” and how the killer application in mobile is still the phone call. In his post, he describes several capabilities mobile phone manufacturers can start exploiting for greater differentiation.

Mobile marketers should be all over his advice. But unfortunately, they are so buried in promoting phone calls and other current gizmos that they will do what they always do: wait for engineers to throw products over the wall for them to promote.

However, by getting involved in new product ideas up front, and in fact actually leading the charge, they can put their skills to work to to align (and quantify) various strategic business options with the competencies of their companies. 

For example Nick talks about audio wiki, photo conferencing, spill-over video, VuPoint, multiplayer mobile games, and how to take more advantage of context. But in so many cases, the decisions to pursue these developments won’t be market driven, rather engineering or product driven … meaning, those ideas that engineers are comfortable with will go to the top of the list, versus those that have the highest potential for market adoption and traction.

So marketers, start getting in front of the curve on new ideas. Garner the respect of your senior managers with your knowledge of business strategy, not just promotion.