Friday, May 22, 2009

Technical marketing

The term technical marketing originated at the beginning of the explosion of the commercial Internet. Technical Marketing bridges the gap between engineering and sales. In a sentence it can be condensed to, “the art of bringing together significant research on a product and presenting the 'Delta' features in a dramatic way".As the computer industry continued to mature toward the turn of the millennium, there continued to exist a gap between engineering and sales.

Engineers were highly talented at building brilliant and powerful computer systems, and sales were equally proficient at relationship management and generating revenue. System’s Engineers oftentimes filled that gap but they’re focus was on revenue and not marketing. There was an increasing need for marketing talent to bridge the gap between sales and engineering, to take the products engineers had built and articulate them in a meaningful way so that sales people and systems engineers could convert them into sales revenue. More and more companies in the Silicon Valley began to hire “Technical Marketing Engineers” to bridge the gap between sales and engineering, and to increase sales revenue.

Technical Marketing has become a key role in bringing products to market and a key component in competitive strategy in maximizing industry leadership and revenue.Many companies today have a customer focus (or market orientation). This implies that the company focuses its activities and products on consumer demands. Generally there are three ways of doing this: the customer-driven approach, the sense of identifying market changes and the product innovation approach.

In the consumer-driven approach, consumer wants are the drivers of all strategic marketing decisions. No strategy is pursued until it passes the test of consumer research. Every aspect of a market offering, including the nature of the product itself, is driven by the needs of potential consumers. The starting point is always the consumer. The rationale for this approach is that there is no point spending R&D funds developing products that people will not buy. History attests to many products that were commercial failures in spite of being technological breakthroughs.
A formal approach to this customer-focused marketing is known as SIVA (Solution, Information, Value, Access). This system is basically the four Ps renamed and reworded to provide a customer focus.

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