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Marketing High Technology (Hardcover)
by William H. Davidow
| Category:
High-tech marketing, Product strategy, Product management |
| Market price: ¥ 340.00
MSL price:
¥ 288.00
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Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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| MSL Pointer Review:
The definitive high-tech marketing guide and a must read for all high-tech marketers. |
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Author: William H. Davidow
Publisher: Free Press
Pub. in: June, 1986
ISBN: 002907990X
Pages: 224
Measurements: 9.4 x 6.3 x 0.9 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA01438
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0029079904
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- Awards & Credential -
One of the best written manuals on high-tech marketing. |
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- MSL Picks -
When this book was written, it broke new ground about the importance of crafting, marketing and selling "whole solutions." In an industry of constant technology innovations (and discontinuities, to steal a phrase from a follow-on editor), that is the only way to survive. This book is a must read, and really sets the stage for Geoffrey Moore's first book "Crossing the Chasm," another required reading.
(From quoting a guest reviewer)
Target readers:
Product directors/managers, brand directors/managers, and marketing directors/managers, especially those in high-tech sector.
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William H. Davidow is a general partner with Mohr Davidow Ventures in Menlo Park, California. Before forming this venture capital firm, he was senior vice president of sales & marketing for Intel Corporation and shepherded the renowned Intel 8080 and 8086 to success. Prior to joining Intel he was a marketing manager for Hewlett-Packard's computer group. Davidow graduated summa cum laude from Dartmouth College and holds a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University.
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From Publisher
Marketing is civilized warfare. And as high-tech products become increasingly standardized - practically identical, from the customer's point of view - it is marketing that spells life or death for new devices or entire firms. In a book that is as fascinating as it is pragmatic, William H. Davidow, a legend in Silicon Valley, where he was described as "the driving force behind the micro processor explosion," tells how to fight the marketing battle in the intensely competitive world of high-tech companies - and win.
Blunt, pithy, and knowledgeable, Davidow draws on his successful marketing experience at Intel Corporation to create a complete program for marketing victory. He drives home the basics, such as how to go head-on against the competition; how to "plan products, not devices"; how to give products a "soul"; and how to engineer promotions, market internationally, motivate salespeople, and rally distributors. Above all, he demonstrates the critical importance of servicing and supporting customers. Total customer satisfaction, Davidow makes clear, must be every high-tech marketer's ultimate goal.
The only comprehensive marketing strategy book by an insider, Marketing High Technology looks behind the scenes at industry-shaking clashes involving Apple and IBM, Visicorp and Lotus, Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor. He recounts his own involvement in Crush, Intel's innovative marketing offensive against Motorola, to demonstrate, step-by-step, how it became an industry prototype for a winning high-tech campaign.
Davidow clearly spells out 16 principles which increase the effectiveness of marketing programs. From examples as diverse as a Rolling Stones concert and a microprocessor chip, he defines a true "product." He analyzes and explains in new ways the strategic importance of distribution as it relates to market sector, pricing, and the pitfalls it entails. He challenges some traditional marketing theory and provides unique and important insights developed from over 20 years in the high-tech field. From an all-encompassing philosophy that great marketing is a crusade requiring total commitment, to a careful study of the cost of attacking a competitor, this book is an essential tool for survival in today's high-risk, fast- changing, and very lucrative high-tech arena.
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Chapter 1: Crush the Competition
Marketing is civilized warfare. If you find that metaphor too brutal, or if you are not prepared to fight, you should not enlist. As long as aggressive competitors exist - and in this rich and dynamic world they always will - you will be under attack. Your competitors' job is to capture business and then defend that new perimeter. So is yours.
Now, a lot of marketing is creative. It's strategic. Cerebral. But eventually you must make a move - and then the fighting begins. Even the most brilliant campaigns suffer occasional setbacks, and it is during those moments of crisis that the true mettle of the marketing team is tested.
MARKETING CRISIS
Every company faces marketing crises at intervals throughout its history. A company that fails to surmount one can slow to a halt, even atrophy, for many years. Just surviving such a test usually means only a return to the status quo ante.
But to triumph over such a crisis, to turn possible disaster into a resounding victory, can accelerate a company's growth in a burst of sustained business momentum. Meanwhile, such an unexpected turnabout can demoralize the competition or - at the very least - cause considerable discomfort.
Winning, beating the odds, converting defeat to victory - that's the point of marketing. The stories of such marketing coups are our business legends - what Iacocca did at Chrysler and what Townsend did at Avis. It is what Apple is trying to do right now in office automation.
And it is what Intel had to do in 1980. I know, because I was there. My career depended on a single victory.
Intel Corporation was founded in 1968 by Robert Noyce, the inventor of the integrated circuit, Gordon Moore, a legendary high-technology scientist and business strategist, and Andrew Grove, a now famous manager and executive.
Intel owed its success (Ben Rosen once called it the most important firm in America) to inventive genius, an ability to convert ideas into products (such as the famous microprocessor), Grove's dynamic management, and, not least, a talent for developing new markets for its new products. All those factors combined to give Intel one of the most remarkable starts in American business history.
But not all of Intel's success derived from intrinsic strengths. For a long time the company had also benefited from the benign neglect of more powerful firms in the same industry. Like many hot young electronics firms, Intel had focused on new markets, pursuing a path the industry giants had no interest in following. But the day of reckoning had come. By the mid-1970s Intel's achievements had become an embarrassment to its competitors and the target for most of the largest semiconductor manufacturers in the United States, Europe, and Japan. The list of competitors poised for attack was more than a little daunting: Texas Instruments, Motorola, National Semiconductor, Philips, Siemens, Nippon Electric Corporation (NEC), Hitachi, and Fujitsu, among others -- the Billion Dollar Club of the semiconductor industry.
Intel still prospered but was losing ground in some important markets and was threatened in others. Intel once had been the leading supplier of 1,024-bit "dynamic" RAMs (random access memory) chips, but had lost that leadership to a start-up company. We had been unable to regain that momentum. A number of companies also had jumped into the EPROM (erasable programmable read only memory) chip market and were applying pressure. Finally, by 1979, Intel's strong position in the microprocessor market, though relatively intact, had suffered inroads from a start-up company named Zilog, and from Motorola, the latter a number of times Intel's size.
By late 1979 Intel was under full siege. Such attacks were nothing new to Intel, and the company had won more than its share of battles. But this threat was different in one very important way: The product line in dispute, the model 8086 16-bit microprocessor family, was the linchpin of the entire corporation. A number of multimillion-dollar Intel businesses depended on its success.
In particular, the sale of every Intel 8086 and its companion chip, the 8-bit 8088, pulled along large numbers of peripheral, memory, and controller chips worth in total ten times as much as the 8086. Whenever an 8086 sale was lost, the departing customer would frequently turn to the new supplier for those ancillary products. On top of that, Intel had two very profitable systems businesses dependent upon the success of the 8086.
Les Vadasz and I had been co-general managers of the microprocessor division in 1976 when the 8086 was being planned. At the time we decided to make the product an extension of the then-successful 8080 family. That created some design problems, but they were more than counterbalanced, in our opinion, by the resulting access to a large existing software library.
The 8086 was introduced to the market in 1978. As the first high-performance, fully supported 16-bit microprocessor, it had quickly gained the top position in the market, capturing the lead from older and less capable products supplied by Texas Instruments and National Semiconductor. In response, Zilog and Motorola prematurely announced their own "paper tigers" (products that existed only on paper). Customers loved the features of the proposed products and were not too happy about some of the compromises Intel had made, so it was obvious that when and if those microprocessors ever emerged from the drawing boards, they would be a serious threat.
Meanwhile, as Intel had grown, the management had reorganized, and I left the microprocessor business to become the general manager of one of Intel's microprocessor-based systems businesses. Needless to say, any success I would have in my new role would be vitally dependent upon the survival of the 8086. So I remained in close touch with the 8086's marketing effort.
The 8086 marketing and sales group was suffering from apathy brought on by shattered morale. It was demoralizing to have one customer after the next lecture you about your employer's failures and your competitors' strengths. Many customers actually relished the opportunity to stick it to the famous Intel.
Some of the younger marketing people couldn't take the humiliation. It was easier to work on other projects. Being abused by customers - and even Intel's own sales force - wasn't fun.
Management encouragement had been ineffective at correcting what was becoming a destructive situation. In late November Don Buckout, an Intel field engineer on Long Island, sent management an incisive and desperate eight-page telex. The discussion of Buckout's telex at the executive staff meeting the following Tuesday couldn't have been more unpleasant. By the end of it I had either volunteered or been asked by Grove to run a marketing task force charged with solving the 8086 problem.
That was the beginning of Operation Crush.
ACTING FAST
A blue-ribbon group of the best sales and marketing people in the company was quickly assembled on December 4. We met continuously for three days. Among the "volunteers" were Jim Lally, the general manager of board products; Rich Bader, one of Jim's product managers; Dave House, the general manager of the microprocessor division; Jeff Katz, the marketing manager for microprocessors; Casey Powell, the regional manager to whom Buckout reported; and Regis McKenna, Silicon Valley's lop marketing consultant. That was the first thing we did right. We did not delegate the job.
I appreciate that this runs counter to the principles in most textbooks on management and that many managers become trapped following such a path, but in the current crisis delegating responsibility had already failed. And, I would argue, the great marketing crusades of the past were led by the top people in the company: Lee Iacocca and Avis's Robert Townsend, to name two.
The first thing the group did was agree on the problem. That wasn't hard. There were three of us in the race: Motorola was going to be first, Zilog second, and Intel was headed for obscurity. All of us agreed that if we whipped Motorola, we would win. For that reason we made our goal not simply regaining market share but restoring Intel's preeminence in the market.
In the semiconductor business, the only market share you really care about is the one you maintain when the market is mature. To accomplish that, a firm must convince sufficient numbers of customers to "design in" (that is, integrate) your chip into their products. So the task force established a goal of achieving two thousand "design wins" by the end of 1980.
That was the second thing we did right. We had set a shockingly high goal. Knowledgeable observers thought a few hundred wins more reasonable. We decided that every salesman could get one win a month. By simple arithmetic, the number two thousand fell out. We trusted our people to come through.
As the discussion developed, we increasingly talked about what our real objective was. It was Jim Lally who articulated the need to "crush the competition." The word was wonderful. It captured the essence of our attitude. It also left no doubt about the single-mindedness of our purpose.
The code name Crush was never supposed to be made public. Roger Borovoy, the corporate counsel, was concerned about the implications of such a loaded word. But the name already was spreading like wildfire throughout the company. Everyone loved it. We had been kicked around enough; Crush signaled that we now meant to stand our ground and fight aggressively. And it meant we were going to win.
We decided to kick off the campaign before Christmas, not waiting until the first of the year. Now that we had a concept, there was no reason to defer action because of the holidays... |
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Robert N. Noyce, Co-founder, Intel Corporation, USA
<>
Marketing High Technology documents clearly and forcefully that technological breakthroughs alone will not enable a company to survive. Marketing makes products. In particular, Davidow's discussion of the cost of entering a well-established competitor's market will be required reading for all marketing managers and chief executives. |
Theodore Levitt, Editor, Harvard Business Review; author of The Marketing Imagination, USA
<2008-07-15 00:00>
Marketing High Technology is a rare and marvellous book - rare because it shows, in its own readable words, that while "great devices are invented in the laboratory, great products are invented in the Marketing Department." For the first time an experienced practitioner from a first-rate high-tech company tells the inside truth about the ingredients for marketing success. And it's a marvellous book because it says everything so well and convincingly. Life will never be the same. |
John Sculley, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Apple Computer, Inc., USA
<2008-07-15 00:00>
Bill Davidow is both an insightful thinker and respected player in the Silicon Valley phenomenon. Bill's unique perspective on high technology marketing makes this an important book for all of us in high technology to read.
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Thomas J. Perkins, General Partner, Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers, USA
<2008-07-15 00:00>
Davidow writes about successful product crusades. Indeed, he is a crusader here, but for all marketing, for all companies: a tough challenge but one handled masterfully. This book should be required reading not only for marketeers, but for all those who depend upon successful new products - from engineers to financiers.
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