Driving into Ft Collins, Colorado, Margo and I came
across this big billboard. It brought a smile to both our faces even as we were
later to comment that in fact, it was a poor reflection on our times. The
creative process leading to innovative expressions seems to have lessened
during the lockdowns driven by the global pandemic as not being able to
congregate around the water cooler, throwing out ideas, and challenging each other
just doesn’t seem as productive in the virtual world as it did when we could
hassle over the choice of words in person.
I wasn’t familiar with Creative Agency of Ft Collins,
Colorado, but when I looked them up on the web, turned out that they were “a
full stack digital marketing & creative agency.” Naturally enough, the
reference to a full stack caught my attention, but then again, as they state on
their web site, “Your time is precious. Leave the strategizing up to us.” Well,
there you go again, leave the strategizing up to you marketing partner. Ouch!
Marketing comes in many guises and for large companies,
including HPE, you will find groups categorized as corporate marketing that
often includes marketing communications. Then you have a variety of customer
and partner facing organizations such as industry marketing and product
marketing both self-explanatory that is, if you are into marketing. No matter
the title, marketing today is all about communicating with specific target
audiences using your knowledge about who they are and most important of all
when it comes to positioning your product, what they need.
Marketing isn’t about selling but rather smoothing the
path to better sales results. Essentially, clearing the path of any obstacles
prospective customers may be concerned about, whether real or imagined. One of
the better explanations I came across was that of an IT Pre-Sales rep who
recently wrote. “Marketing objectives is to get consumers to think about a
company’s brand and generate leads. At the same time, Marketing has to align
with Sales in order to understand whom they should target, how should they target
and the best way to do it.”
I like this as it is simple and to the point. And yet,
when it comes to HPE and NonStop, like most members of the NonStop community I
wish that more could be done to better market NonStop, particularly now that
there is a path laid out for NonStop participation in GreenLake. Historically,
ever since those disastrous times under Compaq ownership, marketing of NonStop
has only been obvious because of its absence.
This is not a criticism of the HPE marketing teams, but
rather a reflection on decisions made to market HPE, its vision and strategy
and its desire to become a global leader in the edge to cloud everything as a
service platform provider. Individual HPE products, including NonStop, then
have to pull budget from wherever they can find it with the assumption that
simply the brand HPE sells itself. But is the marketing of NonStop really
absent from the industries it serves? The NonStop organization isn’t always
showcased at NonStop events but I have become acutely aware over the past two
years that there are marketing activities underway globally.
For NonStop, as the product moved beyond fault tolerant
to being massively parallel to where today it’s well, it has become a lot of
things:
Experience 100%
availability, massive scalability and operational efficiency with a fully
integrated, fault-tolerant software stack.
How did I come across this? Yes, the web site, but then
where marketing is often simply the presence of a web site there is the
troubling issue of determining exactly how to navigate to the pages you want to
view. In this case it requires navigating to products, selecting compute, then
knowing you need to go to mission critical and from there scroll to the end to
find your first reference to NonStop. Don’t try typing in something simple like
HPE.COM/NonStop as that isn’t recognized.
HPE Ezmeral targeted Twitter with tweets promoting a
Big Announcement. That was it – it was a teaser to a future product update
featuring cloud-native analytics. I am not sure what response this generated
but it did leave me scratching my head. Seriously? With no reference to a
stack, full or otherwise? There are ways to communicate using Web sites, social
media channels and digital publications, but at the end of the day, every
member of the NonStop community is today a marketing outlet. All of us have the
ability to communicate.
I have written about this numerous times in the past,
but to simply sit back and suggest HPE invest even more into the marketing of
NonStop isn’t realistic. What is realistic is the work being done by the
NonStop vendor community and by organizations like Connect. Together with
committed individuals prepared to promote NonStop this represents marketing at
its finest. Remember those times where it was a matter of writing a customer
case study that would be highly influential to closing a sale? Well then in
today’s digital world, every tweet, post and commentary is in reality a
testimonial of one type or another.
Marketing as we may have thought it should be isn’t
along for the ride. At its best it is an active participant in smoothing that
path that closes the sale. With the volume of comments exchanged on your
popular social media site there really shouldn’t be any opportunity missed
where we can extol the virtues of NonStop – yes, it’s fault tolerant and it can
scale massively. A single system image across 24,000 cores – try anything as
massive on any other system! And orchestration of processes across it all
courtesy of TS/MP (aka Pathway) – yes, a major contributor to the overall fault
tolerant properties found on every NonStop system! So yes, marketing is very
much alive and surprise, surprise, it’s all of us. Welcome to the world of
crowd-happy marketing of our favorite product, NonStop.
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