e-Learning Self-Study: Foundations of High-Tech Marketing

Chasm Institute and Option Six Win Bronze "Brandon Hall Excellence in Learning Award" in the Custom Content Category.

Marketing disruptive innovations is tough. Getting strategic alignment across the entire organization is a challenge. And instilling a common vocabulary among hundreds of people in the organization takes more than just "reading a book". "Foundations of High-Tech Marketing" is an online (elearning) training program delivered via hosting or yourcompany's intranet that helps high-tech organizations better understand, communicate and execute strategy for marketing disruptive innovations. It is based on principles from Geoffrey Moore's business best-sellers includingCrossing the ChasmandInside the Tornado, plusThe Chasm Companionby Paul Wiefels.

Program Objectives

The objectives of this program are threefold:

• To help you develop a common vocabulary so that you can discuss strategy concepts with others
• To teach you best practices for high-tech marketing, including key principles and frameworks
• To help you apply the concepts of high-tech marketing to your specific situation

Who Should Enroll

Any employee who needs to understand the basic principles around which the company develops and executes its marketing strategy

Topics

High-Tech Marketing Basics

• Why there are huge benefits to achieving market leadership
• How high-tech marketing is different from traditional marketing because of the frequent introduction of discontinuity
• The concept of high-tech value chains
• How technology products move through the Technology Adoption Life Cycle (TALC)

Buyer Behavior will introduce you to five key types of buyers: technology enthusiasts, visionaries, pragmatists, conservatives, and skeptics

• Technology enthusiasts ensure that a new technology is "ready for prime time"
• Visionaries see a new technology and want to use it to gain a competitive advantage
• Pragmatists want to solve a problem and demand a whole-product solution
• Conservatives are willing to wait until the technology is mature before they adopt it, knowing that it will become relatively risk-free and possibly less expensive
• Skeptics will do what they can to prevent the adoption of new technology into their organization

Dynamics of Market Development will introduce you to the six phases of the TALC: the Early Market, the Chasm, the Bowling Alley, the Tornado, Main Street, and Total Assimilation.

• Discontinuous innovations are introduced in the Early Market to visionaries who are looking for a way of gaining competitive advantage
• New products experience the Chasm when there are no longer any more visionaries to sell to, yet pragmatists view the product as too risky to adopt
• The Bowling Alley creates a sustainable market for discontinuous innovations by first solving a broken business process in a niche market
• Some product categories experience a Tornado of demand, fueled by mass adoption by pragmatist infrastructure buyers who are switching to a new infrastructure
• Main Street offers an opportunity to maximize margins by focusing on additional value-added offers to your installed customer base
• Total Assimilation is recognition that the adoption of your category is pervasive, and there may be opportunities to offer your product as a service

Planning Your Strategy contains a broad set of tools used to clarify and confirm your category and determine its place relative to the TALC.

• You will learn that when addressing life cycle issues, it's not about you, but about your category
• Once you have determined your category, you must then place that category in the TALC
• Discontinuity analysis correlates "the pain endured with the gain received" by customers adopting the product category, and provides a roadmap for future strategy
• "Type of market development strategy" answers whether your strategy should be deal-driven, niche marketing, mass marketing, one-to-one marketing, or product-to-service marketing

Modeling Your Strategy contains nine key elements of strategy and explains how the execution of each of these nine elements changes as your category evolves through the TALC.

• The target customer provides the funds to purchase your product
• The compelling reason to buy motivates target customers to part with their funds
• The whole product is the solution of products and services that fulfills the compelling reason to buy for target customers
• Partners and allies are recruited to help complete the whole product
• Distribution strategy determines through what channel your product is brought to market
• Pricing is a function of the value chain's frame of reference (competition versus value-based) against the customer's adoption motivation (enable gain versus reduce pain)
• Competition represents the logical alternatives that a prospective customer would consider in addition to your offering
• Positioning is how you differentiate your offering from that of your competitors
• Next target defines a logical next market move for your product

Advanced Concepts helps validate and clarify the strategy direction you are taking for your category. In this module you will be introduced to an additional set of tools.

• Architectural control is important to examine in potential Tornado situations to know the odds of your offering being overtaken or potentially overtaking the competition.
• Service management priorities must be chosen to properly balance the type of service needed (deep water fish, medium water fish, or shallow water fish) with the maturity of your product category relative to the TALC
• Product management priorities shift from initial release, to enablers, and later to price/performance and delighters, depending on where your category is in the TALC
• Two of the four value disciplines (discontinuous innovation, product leadership, customer intimacy, and operational excellence) need to be concentrated on at any given time in the TALC
• Different metrics of success (time-to-market, design wins, segment share, market share, margins, customer satisfaction, and revenue) can be very appropriate in one phase and become inappropriate in another phase of the TALC

What You'll Walk Away With

Templates for creating a summary 9-point strategy

Prerequisite

None

Program Duration

6-8 hours