Value-Path Marketing™:
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Fifth Business answers your questions to gain further
insight into how the application of Value-Path Marketing fuels
growth for emerging information technology (IT) companies.
 What's the high-tech marketing climate like, today?
 Technology companies spend a lot of time,
effort and money making their products different from all others in
the marketplace. Better than the competition and maybe better than
everything else out there. But, many have trouble getting everyone
to realize it! Putting new ideas across requires a disciplined
marketing effort. It requires an appraisal driven process...one that
builds inherent, incremental and sustainable value along the way.
Simply put, we are in a market laden with noise...many competitors,
too many messages...and for high-tech companies, it's more difficult
than ever to get the customer's attention. Audiences have turned
cynical, especially in the business-to-business space...where savvy
customers can smell the hype, most likely based upon at least one
bad experience...making customers risk avoidant and more value
conscious.
How do you create sustainable marketing value?
Marketing cost-sensitivity prevails within
these high-tech firms...and now success is not being measured by Web
hits alone. Entrepreneurs and investors alike are turning to focused
and pragmatic marketing initiatives to fuel business models to
profitability. "Premature elaboration" with respect to marketing has
always been very expensive and now its become futile and often fatal
for an enterprise. We think the secret to turning great ideas into
successful technology companies is making marketing decisions based
upon clear and direct proof "that something is working."
Accumulating evidence along a proven path of solid marketing
milestones creates sustainable value and equity for stakeholders,
prioritizes and preserves capital and dramatically reduces
risk...while increasing the success of subsequent milestones. We
call this approach "Value-Path Marketing."
What is the essence of Value-Path Marketing?
Value-Path Marketing recognizes the "when"
and "how" of go-to-market programs determine whether a company is
"investing" or "simply spending money" on marketing.
The difference lies in mastering the
fundamentals, namely, emerging technology companies must have real
customers, a defensible technology and the right infrastructure in
order to "earn the right" to grow and prosper. Today's high-tech
market climate reinforces our belief that a disciplined, yet
adaptable, marketing approach is vital to the creation of customer,
employee and investment value.
How do you work Value-Path Marketing milestones into real-world
client settings?
The "day-in-the-life" of a Value-Path
Marketing implementation starts with a joint assessment of where the
client is currently positioned along the value-path, corroborated by
the "evidence." We call this discovery the Value-Path Gap Analysis.
This is critical step in our engagement and
a prerequisite to the pursuit of future milestones. In fact, this
initial effort has proven a unique way of uncovering the truth. Once
we agree upon the progress-to-date, we discover exactly where we are
on the Value-Path, substantiating efforts to-date with real
data...putting us in a solid position to move forward.
Are Value-Path Marketing milestones sequential?
Value-Path Marketing affords the concurrent
pursuit of multiple milestones; however, the level of investment
risk and failure rate increases when companies prematurely dedicate
resources to downstream milestones.
Our job is to focus the client on the
events at hand, while collecting more evidence (intelligence-base),
triggering the right to pursue future milestones. With the process
underway we become facilitators, evidence collectors and overall
marketing operatives on behalf of our clients...providing the
discipline, implementation skills and leverage necessary to create
measurable and sustainable value.
Why is Value-Path Marketing attractive?
Value-Path Marketing is dynamic
self-evaluation...nimble enough to embrace opportunistic situations
and flexible enough to react to diverse audiences...like investors,
customers, prospects and employees.
Value-Path Marketing is, above all, based
upon concrete evidence that is continually assembled and analyzed at
every milestone along the way!
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