The attentive visitor of via fCh has seen how much fun the Q&A section of LinkedIn can be. A while back I posted the question Emotional brand building for enterprise software?
Here's a little background on the above question: During my formal days in enterprise software I used to say that if advertising sold servers then we should have hired some actress/model to sell them like shampoo. At that time, this was rather my reaction to those folks in marcom who had the budgets and seemed to have spent most (their) resources on some template or color scheme.
Not only when associated with consumer products rather than enterprise IT infrastructures, brands have an emotional component.
Even if short lived, the MS Office paper clip animated character was aimed to assist while driving emotions--alas, negative. In the enterprise space, we have an end-user component of most software, but it is seldom that the users themselves make the buy-decisions. Such decisions, in case they are still made in our time, belong to people who are several levels away from that end-user component.
Now, a few additional angles for the action & thinking types:
Here's a little background on the above question: During my formal days in enterprise software I used to say that if advertising sold servers then we should have hired some actress/model to sell them like shampoo. At that time, this was rather my reaction to those folks in marcom who had the budgets and seemed to have spent most (their) resources on some template or color scheme.
Not only when associated with consumer products rather than enterprise IT infrastructures, brands have an emotional component.
Even if short lived, the MS Office paper clip animated character was aimed to assist while driving emotions--alas, negative. In the enterprise space, we have an end-user component of most software, but it is seldom that the users themselves make the buy-decisions. Such decisions, in case they are still made in our time, belong to people who are several levels away from that end-user component.
Now, a few additional angles for the action & thinking types:
- Do the IT infrastructure-providers themselves "put" enough emotion into their products? To begin with, think of the penguin associated with open source (OS) projects! I know, one may object that mere emotion is what fuels a great deal of the OS movement.
- Can a regular organization support concepts like "movement," or "emotion as fuel"?
- Even if the organization were to foster emotionally driven working environments, will that turn into emotionally charged products?
And, for those who cannot make it to LinkedIn Q&A, here's my choice for the best answer:
There is an old saying that goes something like this: "no one was ever fired for selecting IBM."NOTA BENE: The author of the above answer comes from sales. Obviously, the answer turns the initial idea/concept behind my question upside-down, while still being correct--Yes, negative emotion can be the default emotion in the brand tactics/strategy? of IT infrastructure vendors.
In a prior line of work, I represented a company with about 5% market share. We competed with a company that held 50% market share.
We often competed head-to-head for business and the decision was always made by a purchasing group.
Whether we were the better choice or not in any given situation, my company ALWAYS had to battle the perception that the other company was the safe choice.
To use a boxing analogy, we always had to win by knockout; if the fight went the distance, the scorecards always favored the reigning champ.
Fear may not be the angle you are looking to exploit, but it is a very powerful emotion.
Looking at the converse, I remember an old Mac commercial about a corporation measuring employee productivity on Macs versus PCs and the character says: "But that is not fair, people LIKE the Mac."
If a provider was able to co-opt the position of achieving high levels of adoption amongst users, I imagine that emotion would be very powerful for an an enterprise solution.
