High Tech Marketing new start-ups

Marketing   ·   February 8, 2009

Marketing new high technology products and services is a critical issue facing businesses and in particularly new start-ups. Entrepreneurs in particular beaver away for months and even years, overcoming major technical problems, developing a product that still has no customer focus.

The problems of small start up businesses entering new markets with a new product is legendary for its list of failures some quite spectacular.

This has been highlighted further in a white paper produced at Aberdeen University Which investigates the successes and failures experienced by 80 companies.

It is easy to be too carried away with the products being super complex and therefore requiring some special tailored formula for marketing. The simple fact is that regardless of what it is you have, invented or produced it has to be explained in the simplest of terms and the customer must be able to get-it almost immediately.

One past example is the Anita electronic calculator. The first electronic calculator in the world invented in the 1950’s by Bell Punch in England. When this product went on sale no one apart from the electronic engineers who invented it knew how it worked yet it was immediately a success. By the late 1960’s it was causing a sensation at office equipment exhibitions and in no time the Anita and other competitors soon came along and replaced the old mechanical adding machines that had ruled for over 20 years.

A high technology product produced by a company known only for making excellent mechanical devices for punching tickets on buses and a superb mechanical adding machine they should have owned this industry - what happened?

Well technology happened. An article in the journal ‘New Electronics’ of February 17th 1970 describes the ANITA at its zenith and as the bees-knees in calculators. This was however, looking-over-the-shoulder-time and signs of change in the form of the “Integrated Circuit” was on the horizon - a new device that replaced 200 individual transistors. (Who are they?) The word Japanese is mentioned and at the end of the article a prediction was made that, “perhaps one day the Anita would be made small enough to fit into your pocket!”

The point of this history lesson is that here was a product instantly recognisable, very useful and requiring minimal marketing since once it was demonstrated to customers they got-it. Most of the early Anita calculators were sold to businesses and like the photocopier market; they relied on renting them out. Not particularly well designed by modern standards, but it replaced a mechanical object and did a lot more in less time. I’m being quite unfair to Bell Punch. The Anita calculator quite literally revolutionized the way we calculate mathematical problems in a way comparable to the Chinese Abacus still used today and probably in use a millennium earlier. Just imagine where we would be if bank workers and accountants didn’t have these sophisticated tools to work with, making sure they get their sums right!! (For the benefit of future historians reading, this article I’m writing at the height - possibly not - of the worst global recession thought to have been experienced and brought about by foolish accounting - in spite of calculators.)

So a superb product, the Anita with its 25 printed circuit boards and hundreds of individual electronic devices was doomed. Not by the emerging technology, they could and did adapt to this, but by the inability to move away from an office product where their business was rooted and to become a consumer brand - leaving others to exploit this market.

Jumping forward to the next millennium, it has taken companies with iconic brands to lead the way in marketing high technology. Apple for example can be compared to Bell Punch. Their original computers targeted a niche market of technically aware people. Loosing the battle for the mass market, they went on to establish a profitable business selling on the strength of their design and unique features. Appealing to publishers, graphic designers and the arts world in particular, they have led by superb product design. Apples iconic brands, the work of Englishman and IPod designer Jonathan Ive, are instantly recognisable around the globe.

Therefore, my conclusion is it is vital when planning the marketing of a new high tech product to take account of the background of the management team involved in the project. History tells us it will be their experience and culture in addition to their technical expertise that lead them down a preferred route. The problem here is making sure customers agree with them.

In the case of Bell Punch, it would have been very difficult for people in that culture at that time to make the switch in to consumer electronic products. However, for Apple, from their earliest days employing Pepsi Cola’s marketing man as their CEO, and despite a foray into the B2B sector, they never lost sight of their original roots. Calculators became the size of modern day IPods and in the same way the Japanese scored with product design, Apple have managed to achieve this producing their own iconic brands - albeit with the help of…..an Englishman!