CIOs and the Marketing of IT

Last Monday's post started out, "Marketing guru, Mary Schmidt, . . ." which was a similar start to the previous Monday's post, "Marketing guru, Seth Godin . . ."  At first blush it may seem strange to be referencing marketing experts in an IT blog but I believe IT can benefit greatly from applying some common marketing concepts.  For purposes of this discussion I mean true marketing, not to be confused with advertising or sales.  While I also believe advertising and sales can be important for IT, they are different from marketing so I'll defer discussions on those until later posts.

Marketing is at its heart a strategic approach to how you decide what your product is, what the target market is, its pricing and delivery.  The classical way of looking at it is the 4P's of marketing (also try a Google search for many more references):

1. Product
2. Price
3. Place
4. Promotion

Product for IT are the various services we deliver whether it is infrastructure services such as voice and data; productivity tools such as word processing; and business system whether ERP or individual systems.

Price in our case is what our user community is willing to pay for these services.

Place is our distribution method, how we deliver these services.   This is where you see client-server, SOA (service-oriented architecture), web technologies, etc. come to play.

Promotion is about how we make our users aware of our services and how we convince them to adopt new technologies.  This is often the one IT has the most difficulty with and I'll talk more about this in future posts.

Interestingly enough some have suggested 4 new P's which mesh well with the technologies we offer:

• Personalization
• Participation
• Peer-to-Peer
• Predictive modeling

I won't go into detail on these as there are better sources on marketing available.  However, the key thing to remember is that all of these factors are inter-related.  Although we may want to implement a full-blown ERP solution (product) is has to match with what our customer is willing to pay (price).  The other important thing to remember is that we operate in a dynamic environment.  With constantly changing technologies and market conditions our marketing plan needs to be review periodically to make sure it is appropriate.

When you study the 4 P's I think you'll see they are really a good framework for a strategic plan.  When you look at that way IT and marketing have a lot in common.

How have you applied the 4 P's to your IT organization?

"I ate peas whilst waiting" photo by stonelucifer

If this topic was of interest, you might also like these:

• The Marketing of IT
• David L. Margulius on "MarketingIT in a noisy world"
• The Power of 3 Little Words
• Or the posts in the "Branding and Marketing" category