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If pragmatists are hard to win over, they are loyal once won, often enforcing a company standard that requires the purchase of your product, and only your product, for a given requirement.
While Microsoft won out in the end, each one of these companies was able to ride a pragmatist wave within a specific market to boost its sales a quantum leap upward. It is crucial, therefore, for every long-term strategic marketing plan to understand the pragmatist buyers and to focus on winning their trust.
When pragmatists buy, they care about the company they are buying from, the quality of the product they are buying, the infrastructure of supporting products and system interfaces, and the reliability of the service they are going to get. In other words, they are planning on living with this decision personally for a long time to come.
(By contrast, the visionaries are more likely to be planning on implementing the great new order and then using that as a springboard to...
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Pragmatists tend to be “vertically” oriented, meaning that they communicate more with others like themselves within their own industry than do technology enthusiasts and early adopters, who are more likely to communicate “horizontally” across industry boundaries in search of kindred spirits.
Pragmatists won’t buy from you until you are established, yet you can’t get established until they buy from you.
As a rule, however, the path into the pragmatist community is smoother if a smaller entrepreneurial vendor can develop an alliance with one of the already accepted vendors or if it can establish a value-added-reseller (VAR) sales base. VARs, if they truly specialize in the pragmatist’s particular industry, and if they have a reputation for delivering quality work on time and within budget, represent an extremely attractive type of solution to a pragmatist.
What the pragmatist likes best about VARs is that they represent a single point of control, a single company to call if anything goes wrong.
Pragmatists want to buy from proven market leaders because they know that third parties will design supporting products around a market-leading product.
By contrast, if they mistakenly choose a product that does not become the market leader, but rather one of the also-rans, then this highly valued aftermarket support does not develop, and they will be stuck making all the enhancements by themselves. Market leadership is crucial, therefore, to winning pragmatist customers.
This is a long-term agenda, requiring careful pacing, recurrent investment, and a mature management team. One of its biggest payoffs, on the other hand, is that it not only delivers the pragmatist element of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle but tees up the conservative element as well.
Conservatives, in essence, are against discontinuous innovations. They believe far more in tradition than in progress. And when they find something that works for them, they like to stick with it.
when products are extremely mature, market-share competition is driving low prices, and the products themselves can be treated as commodities.
they are engaging with the low-margin end of the market, where there is little motive for the seller to build a high-integrity relationship with the buyer, they often do get stung. This only reinforces their disillusion with high tech and resets the buying cycle at an even more cynical level.
If high-tech businesses are going to be successful over the long term, they must learn to break this vicious circle and establish a reasonable basis for conservatives to want to do business with them. They must understand that conservatives do not have high aspirations about their high-tech investments and hence will not support high price margins. Nonetheless, through sheer volume, they can offer great rewards to the companies that serve them appropriately.
The products they understand best are those dedicated to a single function—music, video, email, games. The notion that a single device could do all four of these functions does not excite them—instead, it is something they find vaguely nauseating.
The conservative marketplace provides a great opportunity, in this regard, to take low-cost, trailing-edge technology components and repackage them into single-function systems for specific business needs.
The quality of the package should be quite high because there is nothing in it that has not alrea...
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It is, in short, not just a pure marketing ploy but a true solution for a new class of customer.
If you give them something they can relate to, they are more than willing to pay up for it. Just check out an Apple Store. Far more dollars could be mined from this segment of the high-tech marketplace if American leading-edge manufacturers and marketers, with their high-volume channels and vast purchasing resources, simply paid more attention to it.
The key is to focus on convenience rather than performance, user experience rather than feature sets. Backup cameras in cars are a great example of technology conservatives gravitate toward, as are parking assist systems.
High-tech business success within it will require a new kind of marketing imagination linked to a less venturesome financial model.
Just as the visionaries drive the development of the early market, so do the pragmatists drive the development of the mainstream market. Winning their support is not only the point of entry but the key to long-term dominance. But having done so, you cannot take the market for granted.
To maintain leadership in a mainstream market, you must at least keep pace with the competition. At this point it is no longer necessary to be the technology leader, nor is it necessary to have the very best product. But the product must be good enough, and should a competitor make a major breakthrough, you have to make at least a catch-up response.
But in Oracle’s case, it was not just bulking up in its traditional categories, but rather it was buying up the assets needed to create a top-to-bottom enterprise “stack,” the full complement of what a Fortune 500 CIO would expect to own. This included customer relationship management from Seibel, application server middleware from BEA, and product life cycle management software from Agile, and eventually led even to annexing Sun Microsystems for a complete hardware solution as well.
Such consolidations are designed to conserve rather than to innovate. It is not that innovation has ceased but rather that it has relocated.
Technologies from a prior era, once the focal point of innovation, now become the scaffolding upon which next-g...
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The key lesson is that the longer your product is in the market, the more mature it becomes, and the more important the service element is to the customer. Conservatives, in particular, are extremely service oriented.
In the last decade, high tech has truly come to grips with this phenomenon by actively reconfiguring its product offers as services. Software as a service (SaaS), data center infrastructure as a service (IaaS), development and deployment platform software as a service (PaaS)—all are creating a new stack in the cloud, that virtualized space to which more and more computing is migrating.
The first is that vendors must design out as much as possible the service demands that derive from installing and implementing their products successfully.
Thus, the primary function of high-tech marketing in relation to skeptics is to neutralize their influence. In a sense, this is a pity because skeptics can teach us a lot about what we are doing wrong—hence this postscript.
The point is, as any experienced seller of high-tech products can tell you, cost justification of high-tech purchases is a shaky venture at best. There is always the potential to return significant dollars, but it always depends on factors beyond the system itself. Put another way, this simply means that the claims that salespeople make for high-tech products are really claims made for “whole product solutions” that incorporate elements well beyond whatever high-tech manufacturers ship inside their boxes.
What skeptics are struggling to point out is that new systems, for the most part, don’t deliver on the promises that were made at the time of their purchase. This is not to say they do not end up delivering value, but rather that the value they actually deliver is not often anticipated at the time of purchase.
Ultimately the service that skeptics provide to high-tech marketers is to point continually to the discrepancies between the sales claims and the delivered product.
From a marketing point of view, we are all subject to the “Emperor’s New Clothes” syndrome, but particularly so in high tech, where every player in the market has a vested interest in boosting the overall perception of the industry. Skeptics don’t buy our act. We ought to take advantage of that fact.
By isolating the psychographics of customers based on when they tend to enter the market, it gives clear guidance on how to develop a marketing program for an innovative product.
Indeed, making the marketing and communications transition between any two adoption segments is normally excruciatingly awkward because you must adopt new strategies just at the time you have become most comfortable with the old ones.
conservatives look to pragmatists to help lead them in their technology purchases.
Both groups like to see themselves as members of a particular industry first, businesspeople second, and purchasers of technology third. Pragmatists, however, have more confidence in technology as a potential benefit and in their ability to make sound technology purchases. Conservatives are considerably more nervous about both. They are willing to go along, up to a point, with pragmatists they respect, but they are still slightly unnerved by pragmatists’ overall self-confidence. So, once again, the reference base has partial value in transitioning between adoption segments.
Namely, that markets—particularly high-tech markets—are made up of people who reference each other during the buying decision. As we move from segment to segment in the technology adoption life cycle, we may have any number of references built up, but they may not be of the right sort.
Visionaries lack respect for the value of colleagues’ experiences. Visionaries are the first people in their industry segment to see the potential of the new technology.
Indeed, it is their ability to see things first that they want to leverage into a competitive advantage.
They do not expect, therefore, to be buying a well-tested product with an extensive list of industry references. Indeed, if such a reference base exists, it will almost certainly turn them off, indicating that for this technology, at any rate, they are already too late.
Pragmatists, on the other hand, don’t put a lot of stake in futuristic things. They see themselves more in present-day terms, as the people devoted to making the wheels of their industry turn.
Where pragmatists are concerned, sweeping changes and global advantages may make for fine speeches, but not much else.
Visionaries are building systems from the ground up. They are incarnating their vision. They do not expect to find components for these systems lying around. They do not expect standards to have been established—indeed, they are planning to set new standards.
When they see visionaries forging their own paths with little or no thought of connecting with the mainstream practices in their industry, they shudder. Pragmatists have based their careers on such connections. Once again, it is painfully obvious that visionaries, as a group, make a very poor reference base for pragmatists.
Visionaries have little self-awareness about the impact of their disruptiveness. From a pragmatist’s point of view, visionaries are the people who come in and soak up all the budget for their pet projects.
the company may be saying “state-of-the-art” when the pragmatist wants to hear “industry standard.”
The problem goes beyond pitches and positioning, though. It is fundamentally a problem of time. The high-tech vendor wants—indeed, needs—the pragmatist to buy now, and the pragmatist needs—or at least wants—to wait. Both have absolutely legitimate positions. The fact remains, however, that somewhere a clock has been started, and the question is, who is going to blink first?
