(2 votes, average: 10 out of 10)
Loading ...Babes, bikinis and the IT buyer
“Yeah, baby,” the guy beside me purred. “I like that.”
As you may have guessed by now, this was not your average IT conference I was attending. It was a marketing event called Interactive to the Max, where ad agency types discussed how they could do a better job of targeting their messages to their intended audiences. The guy beside me was reacting to an ad, shown during a case study by Bud Light, which demonstrated the power of their “blatent marketing ploy” campaign. It’s too bad there weren’t any IT managers there, because I’m sure they would have appreciated it.
The ads take the clichéd commercials you expect from a beer company and turn them on their head. A “host” explains how deliberately brewers put in women wearing bikinis, cowboy hats (or both) in otherwise regular settings (ie, a bar) in order to entice beer-drinking males. Having gotten our attention, Bud Light assures us that taste is what keeps people coming back for more. Such eye candy, it is implied, would never work on its sophisticated clientele. Which I guess means marketing guys must not be beer drinkers.
I tell this story because at another point in the conference, a presenter showed a survey conducted by the public relations firm Edelman which ranked technology as the most trusted industry in 17 out of the 18 countries (the exception being China, where energy is the most trusted. Edelman explained it like this: “Tech is seen as an industry of the future, helping to create prosperity through new jobs, providing good returns for shareholders, without any pressing issues, such as environment and it is an industry that gives back to its communities.”
There are probably a number of technology professionals struggling to cool down their data centres who would dispute that point about the environment, and the rest of it would have sounded a lot more valid had it been written before the dot-com crash. Enterprise firms have demonstrated by their decreased spending on IT that even if they see technology as the industry of the future, they are much more focused on the present. If there’s trust there (at least in the enterprise) I think it may have more to do with the amount companies have to spend on software or IT infrastructure, and the kind of safeguards (contracts, licences) they have built into the purchase process. This, of course, makes you wonder if the marketing element really matters so these sorts of buyers at all.
If the trust was really there, for example, why would technology vendors spend so much time with blatant marketing ploys of their own? Think of all the ads pitching simpler installation, bug-free software, faster return on investment and better alignment with the business? These empty promises – often only fulfilled when you pay steep consulting fees – are the cowboy and bikini-clad models of our industry. This isn’t to suggest Microsoft, IBM or Oracle should start acting more like Bud Light and butter up IT managers with the idea they can’t be fooled. Of course they can, and often are. Instead, they should pick up on the other message from Interactive to the Max: that buyers want appreciate a more genuine interest in their needs, and value honesty in the pitch. Vendors need to start approaching their audience with the low-key integrity of a good friend. You know, like the kind of guy you’d have a beer with.
