Friday, May 28, 2004

Ur-Marketing I dunno, maybe I'm just stupid. But I simply "don't get it" when it comes to much of the past and current advertising and related marketing efforts by technology companies. (I don't fully understand a lot of other companies' advertising and marketing either, but I'll stay focused on technology companies for now.) Let's take Sun Microsystems as an example. I've done a lot of consulting work for Sun over the years, once was publisher of a magazine focused on Sun technology, started Sun-centric trade shows in the U.S. and Japan, and facilitated the major deal that launched the company's fabulous JavaOne trade show. High-level Sun execs still return my e-mail inquiries occasionally, and I'm currently evaluating the company's technology for a project. None of this makes me the expert-of-all-experts on Sun, but I have had more than a nodding acquaintance with the company throughout its 20-year history. Sun grew from start-up mode to $1 billion in annual sales without spending one cent on advertsing its products. It established early on a reputation for good performance, good pricing, and the latest in a software environment that appealed to technically oriented users who were writing software, designing bridges, and taking over Wall Street with what was then a new category of "technical workstations." The tall, sage figure of company co-founder and software genius Bill Joy was ubiquitous at relevant trade shows during the early days, giving a human face to this upstart company that eventually drove numerous larger firms out of this part of the business. Sun leveraged this success into larger systems that served networks of workstations, in increasingly sophisticated and complex applications. It spread its influence into all the major vertical markets, whether government, manufacturing, telecommunications, or retail. It became a legitimate competitor to industry behemoths IBM and Hewlett Packard. Sun finally became large enough to force its fiscally conservative CEO Scott McNealy to start advertising. So it did. Some of its campaigns were direct and successful, others less so. Its initial efforts were in a pre-Web age, so it concentrated on focused, print advertising campaigns. It avoided expensive, diffuse TV advertising. The one day, sometime during the 90s, Sun seemingly discovered television and Microsoft all at once. McNealy started railing against "the evil empire from Redmond." While railing against the "mainframe hairballs" presumably developed by its traditional competitors, he saved his most vitriolic and personal attacks for Microsoft and its chairman Bill Gates, once even noting that he was "sure that my child is better looking than his." A stated libertarian, he most likely was terrifically offended by what he perceived as Microsoft's monopolistic market manipulation. Microsoft broke a compact, in McNealy's view it seems, by flouting the anti-trust codes of a federal government that he felt shouldn't be empowered to intervene among fair-minded competitors. But with McNealy seemingly believing that Microsoft was acting less than fair-minded, he became a proponent of federal action to mitigate what Bill and company were doing. But McNealy's Microsoft-bashing didn't end there. He also seemed to believe that Sun's systems were legitimate competitors in the consumer marketplace to personal computers running Microsoft Windows. Sun was superior to Microsoft in every way, ran this view. No one should ever run a system based on Windows. To this day, Sun employees are strongly encouraged to avoid all Microsoft products and forbidden to run some of them, according to a recent report in the San Francisco Chronicle. What does all this have to do with "Ur-Marketing," the title of this particular column? Nothing and everything. On the one hand, it is merely a digression about one CEO's seeming obsession with another CEO. On the other, it strkes to the heart of the matter of why I get so confused by a lot of technology advertising and marketing. McNealy's Microsoft obsession (still in evidence despite a recent tete-a-tete between Sun and Microsoft) badly skews the message his company should be sending to its customers and prospects. This is not the only instance of this phenomenon. When Sun ran its first TV ad in the 90s, it featured an arrow flying through space in a circuitous route toward a target, finding the bull's-eye at the end of the commercial. "All the wood behind one arrow" was its theme. Sun employees and vendors knew what this meant, but did anyone else? We knew that Scott was fond of using this analogy to describe how Sun would focus all of its efforts on a single, integrated hardware and software platform that was allegedly more powerful and effective than anything on the market. Don't get distracted with multiple systems approaches (as IBM and HP had in those days), but keep all the wood behind one arrow. I am sure that at least 99.9 percent of the viewing audience had no idea of why this analogy was used and what it was supposed to mean. (continued...) 12:30:53 PM    comment []

It's Time to Marshall Our Resources Widespread consciousness of the field of "mass communications" dates to the work, primarily in the 1960s, of famous Canadian Marshall McLuhan. Phrases such as "cool medium," "the medium is the message," and "global village" entered mainstream speech and thought, and the world, as they say, changed forever. Far be it from this writer to pontificate about McLuhan, lest I be compared to the professorial windbag from Annie Hall who gets his comeuppance from the man himself. I've personally found McLuhan's writing difficult to penetrate, and I'll leave it to others to interpret it well. What's interesting to me is that the field of mass communications has had no other entrants to its pantheon (which I guess means it's not officially a pantheon). Marshall McLuhan died in 1980, and since that time we've had sea changes the technologies and products associated with mass communications. Cell phones arrived and conquered; the Internet begat the World Wide Web and became a consumer must-have; high-speed computer connections became the norm; cable channels proliferated; and digital video techniques changed forever the concept of what is real and what is not in our newspapers, magazines, and broadcast news. Cyberage novelists and commentators have proferred their views of how the technology is leading us into futuristic domains. Hosts of business consultants have told us how to deal with live on Internet Time. Programs in mass media, TV, and mass communications have multiplied in universities throughout the world, and the study of mass communications has achieved academic legitimacy as a social science and interdisciplinary study. Yet the original insights of McLuhan remain the touchstone, despite his reputation on the one hand as a lightweight academician and on the other as a ponderous popular commentator. It is time for new McLuhan's to emerge. Mass communications is a critically important area for all the peoples of the world today, given the ubiquity of mass communications technology and the battle by governments, busienss, and individuals to master it and use it to their personal and insitutional advantage. It behooves us, therefore, to consider mass communications seriously. My plans to contribute encompass a.) to focus this blog, whether portentous, pretentious, or asinine, on mass communications, b.) to do the same with all of my writing, c.) to leverage my experience as an editor and publisher to start a thoughtful publication (initially on the Web, of course!) devoted to the study of and commentary about mass communications.   8:53:21 AM    comment []