Marketing Technology As A Service

Despite the fact that vast engineering networks are the foundations of modern society, the services that technology companies provide over them have been a relatively neglected area of study. As a result, marketing in some technology businesses has been depressingly tactical and inconsistent. Marketers with little experience, and even less professional training, run around presenting PowerPoint decks to each other, chasing after the latest fad and throwing erratic, changing activities at the market each quarter. Many work on the unchallenged assumption that markets are fast changing and that customers only want the lowest prices. Yet this industry has liberated human imagination in the internet and convinced the world that they must have a PC and a mobile phone. Now, as a result of profound, relentless, global forces, some of the leading firms and greatest minds in it are at last turning their attention to service. With the advent of ‘cloud computing’ and radical changes in the engineering of some utilities, the marketing of services that are based on a technical infrastructure is about to become as important and sophisticated as in, say, consumer products. This book explores their story and experience. “I really enjoyed the book From Products to Services by Mr Laurie Young. Encouraged by it, Haier accelerated its changeover from a traditional product-driven to a more customer-centric company. This new book Marketing Technology as a Service is another major contribution to technology companies for the cultivation of service needs worldwide.” – Mr Zhang Ruimin, CEO and Chairman, Haier Group, Beijing “Young and Burgess describe a shift in mindset and pragmatic techniques that are quite doable – Rae Sedel, MD, Global Technology Practice, Russell Reynolds Associates. “This book provides practical and insightful advice on how to use services to turn technology into value add solutions for real people – Rudy Provoost, CEO, Philips Lighting “Business leaders in India have been remarkably successful at offering technology based services like outsourcing across the world. Currently worth $60 billion, they intend to reach $300 billion by 2020. To succeed, the Indian business community must offer new value propositions and adapt to emerging trends, like cloud computing. Burgess and Young have put together the first comprehensive and practical guide for business leaders to meet their challenges of exponential growth.” – Dr Mukesh Aghi, Chairman and CEO, Steria (India)

This book provides the basic models applicable to, and the applicable methods for, the profitable use and marketing of advanced technology. It provides a guide to developing and administering marketing plans, conducting market research, searching for and managing partners, tapping capital for innovation, scoping adequate pricing methods, managing intellectual property rights and selling and distributing products and services. It also shows how to develop formatted business plans which will prove attractive to investors. It is rare that technology professionals fully understand the esoteric world of marketing and, similarly, few marketers are familiar with advanced technology. As such, this title is uniquely focused on the critical technology/market interface and provides an executive introduction to the competitive marketing of products and services. Modern managers and technology professionals who need to understand marketing in technology-intensive business worlds will find this an indispensable source of information.

With intensifying competitive activity and continuing budget constraints, technology marketing teams are under pressure to be more accountable and deliver measurable results that demonstrate an effective return on investment. To add to the complexity, the market for technology products and services is global, with continuing growth in both developed and developing territories. Taking Technology to the Market provides a practical guide to the critical success factors in marketing technology. It uses a project-based approach, providing comprehensive guidelines for key strategic and tactical marketing programmes. The book will help you improve your chances of developing a winning marketing programme by providing essential steps to success and insight into best practice. Individual chapters provide self-contained guides to planning specific marketing tasks. The range of tasks covers the most common challenges facing marketing teams in technology companies. The book will help you understand the key success factors for overcoming a range of marketing challenges and give you the tools to put specific programmes into action quickly and effectively. The technology sector is a global business characterised by short product cycles, rapid change, longer-term customer relationships, complex decision-making processes, high levels of collaboration and partnership with customers and the supply chain, diverse channels to market and an emphasis on the value of information. These factors make the marketing of technology products and services a distinct discipline within the overall marketing spectrum to which Taking Technology to the Market is the definitive guide.

Stefanie Paluch employs multiple qualitative methods to explore the perception of remote services and its impact on customer-provider relationships in USA, Germany and Sweden. She develops a comprehensive model about customers’ holistic remote service experience and derives theoretical propositions that reflect main influence factors.

Marketers have recently witnessed an explosion of technology-based innovation that has profoundly affected their management and strategy. This technology can be a gift – enabling them to get closer to their customers and their needs – or a poisoned chalice, should they fail to keep up with technology innovation and find themselves, or their products, irrelevant. In this book, Eleonora Pantano, Clara Bassano and Constantinos-Vasilios Priporas describe this phenomenon as the 'consumer pull vs technology push' that forces marketing strategists to innovate to survive and thrive. It is a guide to the emerging approaches to marketing prompted by the impact of innovation and technology, in order to help students, scholars and practitioners work innovation and change to their best advantage. Including a wealth of empirical and theoretical contributions, models, approaches methods, tools and case studies, this book is essential reading for marketing strategy, digital marketing, and innovation students, as well as marketing practitioners.

Conventional techniques for marketing technology products fail primarily because marketers do not truly understand their customers. Do you know what customers really think about your technology? Now, drawing on their award-winning research and case studies ranging from America Online to the Discovery Channel, marketing experts A. Parasuraman and Charles L. Colby demonstrate how the adoption of technology is influenced by unique beliefs that do not apply to conventional products and services. In the context of a general set of powerful techno-marketing strategies, Parasuraman and Colby introduce "Technology Readiness" (TR), a groundbreaking concept that enables you to measure and assess a customer's predisposition to adopt new technologies. Employing their TR construct -- a psychological amalgam of fears, hopes, desires, and frustrations about technology -- the authors identify five types of technology customers: the highly optimistic and innovative "Explorers," the innovative yet cautious "Pioneers," the uncertain "Skeptics" who need the benefits of technology proved, the insecure "Paranoids," and the resistant "Laggards." Using this typology, you can customize your technology strategies by combining insights from your context-specific assessments with general marketing strategies presented in the book. Essential reading in technology companies will be the chapter devoted to Parasuraman's Pyramid Model, which explains the critical role technology plays in a marketing organization as a link between employees, the organization, and the customer. Finally, the authors have included a self-administered quiz so you can score your own Technology Readiness and a chapter on the "Techno-Ready Marketing Audit" to provide a framework for taking immediate action based on the precepts in this book.

Winning in Service Markets: Success through People, Technology, and Strategy is the first practitioner book in the market to cover the key aspects of services marketing and management based on sound academic evidence and knowledge. Derived from the globally leading textbook for Services Marketing by the same author, this book offers a comprehensive overview of extant knowledge on the topic. Accessible and practical, Winning in Service Markets bridges the gap between cutting-edge academic research and industry practitioners, and features best practices and latest trends on services marketing and management from around the world.

This title provides a thorugh overview of the issues high-tech marketers must address, and provides a balance between conceptual discussions and examples; small and big business; products and services; and consumer and business-to-business marketing contexts.