High-Tech B2B Marketing Featured Cases: July 2012

• Geek2Geek Marketing. Case Collection featured 18 high-tech b2b marketing cases in July 2012.
• Here is the digest of cases categorized according to corresponding marketing process areas: intelligence, strategy, creative production, campaign, SCM, management.

Marketing intelligence: Foresight in Intel

Foresight is an important high-tech marketing capability. This is proved by the case of Intel, which  relies on futurists like Brian David Johnson to deliver a vision of how we will be using technology in the future.

Bottom Line: This is a great thing when you are attempting to review your marketing strategy to invite futurists and visionists to join your strategic planning panel.

Marketing strategy development: Never say never

Dollar Shave Club case reveals how 4 million viewers and funding from venture firms can be attracted  in one week with a viral video, while AutoCAD WS story explains how they have elaborated marketing strategy  to get out CAD B2B app for engineers of its ‘niche’ by creating funny, quirky and even touching content.

Bottom line: For developing marketing strategy in high-tech sector trial by error method works best. This does not exclude sticking to clear mission and vision, of course. 

Naming is one of the initial decisions in branding process. The mystery of naming for high-tech products is slightly uncovered by:

• Engagesite | HighTech Naming Samples
• Mentalfloss | What’s a Hulu? The Origins of 8 High-Tech Names 
• Mashable | 11 True Stories Behind Tech’s Top Names 

Creative production: Viral content wanted

To attract attention and interest of clients high-tech marketing have to be simple and contagious. High-tech companies use videos in order to explaine sophisticated ideas. But few succed in going viral: 

• Drinking beer in the bar? Here is the high-tech solution to make it even more comfortable. Viral video with more than 1 M downloads on You Tube.
• Video of AutoCAD WS niche application that reached more than 1 million audience on You Tube.
• DollarShaveClub viral video with a budget less than $5000.

Generating content is a nightmare for high-tech marketers. And it is not new.  The infographic on content marketing tells its brief history as a flow of famous cases.

Bottom line: Invest all your creativity into visualisation of your high-tech ideas. It pays back. Otherwise you'll stay invisible. 

Supply chain management: Agility and collaboration

Short lead times, turbulent markets and limited demand predictability put a premium on supply chain agility for high-tech businesses.  Apple shows how better collaboration lets high-tech companies enhance the supply chain keeping its agility.

Marketing management

And, finally, six marketing management cases are illustrating such high-tech critical capabilities as:

performance management; (1) a case study in linking corporate vision and KPIs in a balanced scorecard for Defense Science and Technology Organization, Australia, and (2)  KPI examples on online marketing metrics;

R&D, production and marketing coordination; Airbus A380 inside story of one of the toughest B2B high-tech megaprojects ever made (Part 1 and Part 2);

revenue model design; (1) history of Google; (2) current projects of 50 best angel investors in Silicon Valley; (3) venture capitalist Ben Horowitz explaining why tiny startup Nicira was worth $1.26 billion to VMware.