I’ve been looking at a lot of storage marketing lately, and I’m identified two poles of marketing that are widespread across the industry. You might call the poles technical marketing and consumer marketing. In general, you can clearly identify these poles if you review your competitors.
The tech marketing guys insist that “technology is why customers call” so they say things like:
Get heterogeneous array replication and continuous data protection with multiple recovery points to restore applications instantly to a specific point in time. (direct clip from a storage site).
Another way to categorize this statement is that it’s thing-oriented: it’s about a product.
The consumer marketing guys say “customers are people and need to know we’re people, too.” So they write something like this:
Our product enables you to continuously protect data against downtime and disaster (another direct clip).
This is a customer-oriented statement: it’s about customer need, fear, and potential.
I think this difference goes beyond technical marketing vs. consumer marketing. It is simply an expression of two fundamentally different communication styles. Some writers like to think about things, others like to think about people.
I can see the merit of both points of view because I’ve observed that different customers embrace different language. But what do you think? Do gearhead storage engineers like customer-oriented statements? Do CEOs like technical mumbo-jumbo?