Roadmap to IT branding: A preview
So you have an IT company, right? You have invested a lot, yet not as much return as you expected. No sales growth, customers are sending you dissatisfaction mails and what is your brand again? Sorry, never heard of it.
So your IT brand is not performing well. In fact, it is not even a brand. If it were, your balance sheet wouldn't have shown the nulls.
The core problem is, even if you make good products, you are not really sure whom to cater, how to sell and what to say. Now that we know, where your Achilles' heel is, we will try to solve it. Let's take a tour through this report and find out how exactly we are solving it. With derived insights from industry experts, we have designed a complete guidebook to branding and marketing IT ventures with case studies and well researched evidences. Here you go:
Vision matters: Before starting with any marketing plan, as an evolving IT-preneur you need to ask yourself- 'First, What am I offering and to whom?' . Then, 'How do I serve differently than others?' And lastly, 'Where do I see my venture going in the foreseeable future?' By answering these questions you are just setting a vision for your venture.
Vision guides a venture, helps forecast the future and mostly, helps against complacency with immediate success that might derail a company from its goals. Marketing decisions have to be rational for your startup company, since you cannot afford designing a plan B. An entrepreneur has to be passionate about the work and absolutely in love with it. Only then, his work can flourish. This can be done by choosing to be 'benefit' oriented, rather than being 'product' focused only. McDonalds does not just offer fast food, rather it promises to serve customers with "good time, great taste, with your family". So be driven, be a visionary and let it guide you
Be Localised: The typical IT-preneurs develop world class apps and software for their foreign clients. They do not consider the local market to be in their favour. Or when they do, they go for it in wrong ways. But it's time you started going against this trend and set your own example.
Bangladesh has the advantage of demographic dividends, unilateral linguistic and an inborn interest for art and music in the popular culture. You may benefit from aligning your ideas with these features and get a unique brand theme. See how Bkash has done it. They set a vision first, created an imagery of that vision. And they incorporated a sense of localisation in the process. The logo, tagline, campaign theme; every where they attach a feeling of Bangali identity. That's the beauty of strategic localisation.
Make Marketing a culture: From day one, do not consider marketing to be distinctive function of your business. Your finance guy should be a part of your marketing strategy as well. Every touch point of your business should send the right message to the people. This should be consistent, acknowledged and practiced with consensus. You should make it an internal culture before it steps on to become public.
Rather be fluid: Global market has become so dynamic that it develops every second. You have to be ready to get hold of every second of these changes or you are already lagging behind. Fluid marketing refers to flexible approaches of touching every possible option. This means that marketing criteria should not be fixed from day one. You need to settle on the ever changing notions, not setting one option or strategy market their products. IBM does this so flawlessly, it might amaze you. Even during global recession in 2008, they set up a brilliant campaign named "Let's build a smarter planet" which went responsibly about promoting in a crisis market. And at the end of the day, this spontaneity got rewarded.
Now that you have set the vision and built your attitude towards following it, we can explain to you how you are going to execute these thoughts and make your balance sheet as lucrative as you are capable of. Hold your patience and stay with us till the end of this journey. We promise to serve you with something worthy of your patience.
This is a preview of a report on the critical findings of IT marketing forum-2013 to be prepared by "Team Alternatives". Full version will be available soon on www.basis.org.bd
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