Ur-Marketing (continued...)
So, continuing to examine Sun Microsystem's "wood in one arrow" campaign, the good news was that Sun either lacked the funds or the gall to run its opaque message more than once. The ad disappeared with very little trace.
The irony was the Sun had achieved $1 billion in annual revenue without running a scintilla of advertising, and its initial foray demonstrated why it was wise to forgo the TV Siren during its climb from arrogant little start-up to arrogant major player.
Fast forwarding to the late 90s, one once again saw Sun's message on television, although this time the ads were hard to miss. The company had by now morphed up more than a magnitude to $10 billion in annual revenue and rising. It had ridden the dot-com boom by providing a large share of the servers that supported high-traffic websites and by benefitting from a ballooning stock price through media hype of its Java programming language.
Java, for which my marketing company had written a modest white paper concerning outlining its original, modest vision as a set-top box operating environment, was suddenly the universal solvent for all technology challenges and opportunities. Java had a simple, appealing name (in contrast to typically arcane-sounding programming languages such as C++ or Modula-3), which led to simplistically appealing coverage of its wonders as the driver of the dot-com age.
Mid-level marketing managers associated with it became overnight media superstars and Java was said to be the magic brew fueling the Worldwide Web.
All of this resulted in Sun deciding to position itself as "the dot in dot-com." Any Marketing 101 professor will tell you neither to position yourself to narrowly if you don't have to nor to attach yourself to something so new and exciting that its tenability could be suspect. Undaunted, Sun decided that it had latched onto the perfect message, that by "attaching our grappling hook to the dot-com rocket," in McNealy's phrase, it could now tout its success to the masses.
One little problem I had with this campaign was that it seemed to kill its customers: the TV campaign featured a bunch of what appeared to be a nice enough, properly diverse group of youngish execs sitting around a standard-issue boardroom table, only to suffer apparently lethal electrical shock as Sun's omnipotent "dot" invaded their space and blew them away.
The toothy arrogance of McNealy et alia was alive and well, but again, resulted in a message that was a.) unclear in defining the company's benefits, b.) vacuously uncautious about the underlying message it was communicating.
When dot-com became dot-bomb, Sun was shown to have no aplomb. Revenues started to disappear as its narrowly cast message proved worthless to technology buyers looking for value and flexibility rather than glibness and hubris.
More to come soon...
9:18:16 AM 
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