We talk a lot about Big-M Marketing around here — in fact, we’ve written a book about it — and when we use that term we mean marketing in a very broad, inclusive way.  It’s true that in a lot of industries, marketing is used as a synonym for advertising, but in the high-tech world, the term usually means a product marketing centric activity.  Big-M marketing then includes product definitions, product planning, competitive analysis, pricing, sales training, forecasting, strategic planning, documentation, customer visits, and yes, promotions including advertising.

To put numbers on it, when I was VP Marketing at Zilog, then a $100M microprocessor company, there were 120 people in marketing… one of them spent half his time on advertising.  That means in this company, roughly half of one percent of the people worked on advertising.  All of the rest were involved doing the things just listed… ie, Big-M Marketing.  Getting a group like that together is a big deal.  For one thing, the various activities demand different kinds of people… different personality types — that make it really hard to execute with just two or three individuals.  With a larger group, it’s easier to split the functions into well defined activities with dedicated personnel.

But even without a large group, it’s vitally important that the company do all of those marketing functions.  In our vision of Big-M Marketing, we include six different functions:

• Product marketing
• Tactical marketing
• Technical marketing
• Strategic marketing
• Promotional marketing
• Order entry and customer service

Together those six make up what we refer to as the complete marketing function and somehow you have to all six to succede in the high-tech marketplace.  If you don’t, you’ll be knocked off by someone that is.  Many companies do those activities, but some of them are not in marketing.  That’s too bad because it means busy executives are doing this stuff part-time.  These are marketing functions and they really should be done within the marketing group by experienced people dedicated to those activities.

Obviously this is a posting that sets the stage for others yet to come.  In some cases those function names are descriptive enough to intuit what they mean.  Others are probably too cryptic, and in any event we have some tweaks to make those functions more effective.  We’ll cover them in detail in future posts along with an acre or so of ramblings about the subject — after all, this is the home of Big-M marketing.

Tags: Big-M Marketing

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 1:01 pm and is filed under Big-M Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.