In many low-tech industries, mention marketing and people think of advertising.  That’s not true in tech companies who tend to be organized around marketing viewed as Product Marketing.  That said, tech companies still do promotions and that certainly includes traditional advertising.  In many companies this activity is grouped with other related activities and labeled “Marketing Communications,” or MarCom for short.

Some of the things that typically fall under this group include but definitely not limited to:

• Advertising
• Public Relations
• Literature including data sheets, catalogs, brochures and sometimes annual reports
• Trade shows
• Preparation and coordination of industry trade show papers and presentations
• Managing the annual sales meeting
• Give-aways like T-shirts and other branded items
• Logo designs
• Tag lines
• Package designs
• Website creation and management
• and these days,  Presence on social networks

In some companies this can also include things like the logistics (location and staging) of the annual shareholders meeting, company parties, award ceremonies, etc.  One of the reasons all of these things are handled by one group is that group has the resources.  Generally they engage an advertising agency and sometimes a separate public relations agency.  In more sophisticated groups they will also hire an outside design agency to “design” templates for things like data sheets and catalogs.  Design agencies are frequently called in for specific jobs like brochures and especially for annual reports.

When I joined Intel it was to create that group — I called it the Merchandising Group though it would become known later by the more traditional term, MarCom.  Intel was running at $50M a year and doubling every year.  They had about 1500 employees many of which were offshore building parts, but that headcount was also doubling every year.  That meant that after just 12 months you had seniority over half of the people you passed in the hall.  The fact that Intel had gotten this large without a central group working literature, for just one example, was amazing.  Everyone in marketing was doing their own stuff working with outside services called paste-up shops, and everything looked different.  For one thing they had that “ransom note” look — I counted 9 different type fonts, styles, and sizes on the front page of one data sheet alone.  But just as bad, they didn’t look like they came from the same company!

I’m a big believer in having a “designed look” for a company.  Years ago I found myself on the Orient Express from Paris to Milan on, believe it or not, a sales trip.  It was quite an experience but one of my most memorable impressions was the look and feel of everything from the inlaid wood in the compartments to the towels in the bathrooms and the appointments in the dining and club cars.  They were all designed and executed by YSL — Yves St Laurent — and the consistency made everything look like it belonged.  That’s what I want to see in any company we’re involved with.  Getting that designed look is far less expensive than you would think, it’s mostly just knowing to ask for it.  This is the kind of thing that having a good MarCom group does for you.

In the next couple of postings (I haven’t written them yet so I don’t know how many) we’ll look at the basic things this group does.  But basically they all revolve around the concept of messaging.  If anyone but me understood it, that’s what I’d name this group — the Messaging Group.  But since people don’t get that, I tend to call them the Promotional Group.  I refuse to call them the advertising anything, because in many companies they really don’t do any advertising per se.  But they certainly do everything else on that list.  Now having brought up the subject of messaging, let’s focus on that.  This is a 3 part process.

First, you need to figure out the content of the message, not the exact wording, but what the message is supposed to convey.  And that content is not determined or set by the Messaging or Promotional Group.  It is determined by Product Marketing in conjunction with company management.  It says things like, “we build microprocessors for embedded applications that provide orders of magnitude more performance than competitors but sell for under $10.  While the applications we go into have been done before, they have never been done economically in a commercially successful product because of the expensive computing power required.”  OK, that’s some real content (literally real — we wrote it for a past client).  Unfortunately it’s not something you can put on a postage stamp or a T-shirt.  This content is delivered to the Promotional Group — it’s their input for the messaging process.

The second step is creating a memorable message from this.  The marketing poetry that people will hear and remember and associate with the brand.  “Intel delivers” and “Intel inside” are marketing messages that imply all sorts of things — hopefully positive things to the people on the other end of that message.  The promotional group creates these messages from the content provided to them.  A friend of mine, Andy Arbuckle at Borders, is a poetry fan.  I asked him once to define poetry, and he told me that it had been defined (by others) as “words made memorable.”  That’s what you’re aiming for here.  Marketing poetry.  Branding messages made memorable.

The third step is delivering that message to a mass of people.  You can certainly do that through advertising, but it’s just as important that every press release, website page, product package, conference presentation, etc. — they ALL have to carry that message, some more overtly than others, but they HAVE to be CONSISTENT.  This third phase is also owned by Promotional Marketing.  They receive the intention — the content — and create a memorable message, a tag line, around that message and then find ways to get it to the absolute maximum number of key people.

In future posts, we’ll discuss the ways that message is actually carried to the world of customers and prospects, editors and analysts, friends and wives.