In the mood

Below is an image I created to capture how I’m approaching the concept stage of my major project. The board alludes to the two-tier audience theory described in my earler post. Essentially this brand must show that the company understands the tech-savvy client yet is also able to create consumer-friendly brands and UIs.

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Charts, graphs and lists

Talking to Elise last month (see interview here) raised many questions in my mind and made me realize that I still had much to learn about the tech industry and its unique marketing needs. Through internet and library research, I found a couple of great resources that helped me lay the groundwork for understanding what I’ve determined are the two tiers of audience I was about to design to.

Tier One: Our clients

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I found a very well written blog article entitled “Why High Tech Companies Have Low Brand I.Q.’s" by Dannielle Blumenthal that playfully discusses the different ways tech people and branding people think (finally determining that they think completely differently). Essentially, the branders need the techies to create innovative products and the techies need the branders to sell the product to the right audience. Below I’ve illustrated the article’s metaphor, “A technology and a brand person walk up to a tree”:

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The authors of Winning Market Leadership: Strategic Market Planning for Technology-Driven Businesses go into great detail about how to successfully market a tech product. Regarding the tech industry’s view of marketing, they confirmed a point Elise made during our interview saying, “Many technology-intensive business underestimate the importance of marketing communications, assuming that great products will 'sell' themselves.” They cite Microsoft as an example of an "inferior" product that thrived due to effective positioning and marketing communications. (p. 22)

Tier Two: Our clients’ consumers
More so, the authors of Winning Market Leadership extensively explain the second target audience tier for my design. Most helpful for my research was their outline of the unique, global environment technology exists in which involves swift, dynamic change and blurred market boundaries. They explain that tech businesses are also ruled by network effects – meaning that the value of a product or service to its users depends on the number of users engaging with it. (p. 5) An example would be social media outlets like Facebook and Twitter that thrive because the number of people using them to communicate with each other.

They then detail the adoption process through which all tech products are subjected to. These labels and accompanying descriptions really capture the tier two audience and their varying degrees of tech-savvy.

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Competition:
No communications research project is complete without taking a look at potential competition for your product/service. As Elise alluded to in our interview, there are very few agencies out there specializing in this specific niche. Here are a few that I did find:
http://www.matizmo.co.uk
http://www.binarypulse.com/bp/index.asp
http://www.clarityqst.com
http://www.otmmarketing.com
http://www.creativerge.net

With this newly developed knowledge base, I feel ready to start thinking creatively about how I’m going to give this company a look, vision and voice.

Getting on the same page

I’ve recently been getting started on research for my major project (see brief here). My first step was to talk to my client, Elise W., to get her thoughts on what this brand needs to accomplish. Here is the write up of my interview with her:

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