The three Ps of marketing

If you're a telecom equipment vendor wandering the frozen telecom tundra, the three Ps of marketing could be the most powerful tool you have in the battle between survival and extinction. These precious golden nuggets are "packaging," "positioning" and "presenting" your product to the target market with the ultimate goal of gaining a sale and showing revenues. Although booking a sale these days is becoming more and more like Frodo's arduous trek towards Mount Doom, losing sight of the importance of marketing will ultimately translate into decreased brand awareness and customer loyalty. You need to maintain the visibility of your product so when the landscape has thawed and customers are ready to buy, your company and product will be on top of their mind.

It is important however to remember that marketing is a mind game, an art rather than a science, a mixture of a psychological thriller and a college textbook. Understanding the three "Ps" of marketing will shed some light on the complexity of the concept.

Package

Packaging a product means putting it together in a way that is appealing to your audience. Established vendors are masters of packaging their products, and somehow their internal organizational structure has managed a truce between the engineering and marketing factions. The engineers develop and the marketers market, and at times their agendas overlap. In many start-up companies however, engineering and marketing proceed through their daily routines with an amazing amount of disdain for each other. Engineers claim that the products' astounding bells and whistles will sell the product, and the marketers counter with examples such as the flop of 3Com's Audrey or fiasco with Ford's Edsel.

Nortel's Succession family was a superb example of packaging: The company bundled a variety of mature products, gave it a snazzy name that not only maintained the ties with legacy networks but also created a bridge to next-generation equipment and voila! To top if off, the products actually sold in the face of stiff competition from technologically superior switches. The Succession was packaged in a way where not only did it provide and end-to-end solution for service providers frustrated with the hodge-podge of multi-vendor networks, but it also played on their fear of moving to next-generation products and losing the QoS capabilities of their networks. Packaging is where marketing becomes a mind game.

Position

Positioning a product is where you want the collective understanding of your brand or service to be in the mind of your audience. If the distance between the product's capabilities and your positioning statement is too great, the audience will not buy the message. If the distance is not enough, it means that your message was too ho-hum and most likely the audience will yawn. If the distance is just right, the target market will be compelled to try the product.

So here are the steps to take for proper positioning of your product:

1. First you need a good understanding of the requirements, perceptions and purchasing patterns of your target market. What are their major pain points?

2. Next, you need to segment your market, not geographically or demographically, but rather according to real "customer needs" or the "added value" of your product. Then you can define your price point.

3. Determine what really differentiates your product from the competition? What are four attributes that are truly unique to your product? This may not be a technical superiority but rather a pricing or time-to-market one. This question can usually be answered by asking yourself what requirements or inefficiencies are you addressing? What costs are you eliminating, what additional revenues are you generating or what processes are your improving for enterprises or service providers?

4. What are your company's internal strengths? Is your CTO the chairman of a major committee at IETF, or are you employing the person who was one of the original inventors of cellular technology? How are you capitalizing on those resources?

5. Establish your product as THE standard in the industry against whom others have to benchmark their capabilities. Are you a wireless software vendor targeting enterprises? Make sure you address their needs in terms of security and data accessibility and you have established a new standard in the industry.

6. In this market where many have been burned by hype and vapor-ware, make sure your product is not viewed as too "state-of-the-art" or too "lackluster." Take the middle road.

Present

Now that you have properly positioned your product, you need to make sure it is suitably presented not just to your target customers but also to the media and analyst community. Hopefully through the positioning exercise, you have been able to develop a focused, consistent and refined marketing message about your product: ABC company's new chip technology reduces Bill of Materials by 30%, or XYZ company's ground-breaking switch provides a bridge between ATM and IP technologies. Here are some other crucial presentation pointers:

1. 1. Does all your company collateral reflect your product's message, including the product spec sheets, white papers, Web site, press releases, brochures, etc. You would be amazed to know how often these messages are not in sync with each other. For example, a network switch developer can call itself a "leading multiservice switching company focused on next-generation networks" in one press release, yet change the description to "a network switching company that develops next-generation switches" in a white paper. Is the company developing a next-generation switch or a multiservice switch?

2. 2. Is everyone at the company singing the same tune? Is the engineering department touting one aspect of the product that is of keen interest to it and the marketing department hyping another?

3. Once you have refined your product's message and are reflecting it in all your collateral, make sure to give your customers a good reason to purchase your product. A comprehensive cost analysis is usually the best way. Show (rather than tell) your customers how they will save money or generate more revenues by using your product. Develop a sample case, create a spreadsheet, compare your product to the competition and provide it to all your customers as well as the analyst and media community. Information is priceless. Use it to your advantage.

Goli Ameri is the President of eTinium, Inc. (www.etinium.net) a telecom consulting and market research company specializing in wireless and switching technologies. She can be reached at gameri@etinium.net.