Insights

Brands often want to influence and change the world around them – sometimes within the bounds of authenticity, and sometimes not.

Tech is no different, but when it comes to platform brands, it’s perhaps more true than other segments. Platform brands are often the youthful upstarts and yesterday’s unicorns with high regard for their market contempt and trouble making. They’re often the ones making up the new rules, and zigging when others zag.

A strong belief system or manifesto aligned with their carefully carved niche is super critical to success. There’s little room for the meek and mild here.

New economics of platforms brings new entrants

Platform plays have disrupted many established markets and industries – Uber in taxis, AirBnB in hospitality/travel, Doordash in fast-food – to name just a few. Most markets have received some challenge to norms and business models from a platform-upstart that’s looking to shake-up the status quo and entrenched commercial agendas.

To do it, they (largely) use existing technology to create unique IP to introduce a new route-to-market. But they also come at it with an ecosystem mentality, looking to introduce value to actors that are critical for the platform to be a success. These are often fellow disruptors looking sideways at a market and thinking, ‘We could do with some of that action’. 

In fact, six of the ten most valuable companies in the world today are platform businesses: Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Facebook, Tencent, and Alibaba. They all allow ‘vendors’ to use their platform to monetise their wares. And they’re doing well out of it!

Now, the winners are not necessarily ‘the tech pioneers’ – they’re often ‘the pioneers with tech’.

But while the platform-model is loved by shareholders and business leaders alike, these brands are faced with some unique pressures. Notwithstanding existing businesses undergoing ‘platform-reincarnation’ and looking to benefit from recurring revenues and sticky services themselves.

Platforms need an engaging core

More than many other tech businesses, platform co.’s need a rock-solid raison d’être for others to exist. They often provide an alt. route to market that still needs to compete with old world models as well as subsequent waves of disrupters.

The kernel of their original business plan needs to surface for ecosystem ‘contributors’ to believe in their vision and collaborate/co-create to the underlying business intent. These participants – together with the end-buyer – need to believe in the operating model as much as they do the character of the marketing. There ain’t no hiding here!

What should the platform marketer look for?

To achieve the relationship above, platform marketers should ensure:

• The business purpose is very clear and sustainable for ecosystem participants – even more so if a market is experiencing various disrupters with similar models.
• The purpose is translated into persona-based messages/journeys at key touch points.
• The value of the model is seen/projected to carry substantial value to contributors (i.e. lean/efficient route to market) and end-buyers (i.e. ease of selection/provision).
• The brand purpose (i.e. what the brand believes in) must co-exist neatly with the business purpose (i.e. the reason for invention).
• Bullets 1 and 2 must sense and respond to changing plays of new entrants.

Addressing these issues head-on will get you well into the success zone.

Long live the tech-centric business

This new breed of tech-centric business, or the enlightened leadership team of a ‘platform-reincarnation’ play, are generally in-tune with the needs of the end user. They understand the self-empowered and open business mindset and how that’s good for the market – and their prosperity.

As such they’re generally less infatuated with ‘tech-spec marketing’ than the tech pioneers of yesterday. But they still need to enact the bullets above to make sure their play engages and endures.

The Rubicon Agency has significant experience in platforms play – whether the original platform disruptors or the re-incarnators. 

Check out our experience in platforms.

An Invisibility Cloak is a magical garment that renders the wearer or whatever it covers invisible – and brought to infamy in the Harry Potter film and book franchise. These cloaks are exceptionally valuable within the wizarding world as they are made from the hair of a Demiguise, a magical creature that possesses the power to become invisible at will.

It’s a shame that many infra marketers seem to be using them on their infra plays – making little effort to display their own magic.

The world needs infrastructure visible

Infra may not be the new rock & roll, but it is undergoing a new dawn in appeal and recognition – driven by software defined capabilities, domain convergence and new cloud operating models amongst other market shifts.

Further, infra has arguably become more key as industry moves toward platforms and marketplaces – and (digitally-transformed) business processes become even more infra-dependent. Goals for corporate agility, sustainability and Net Zero have turned up the pressure too.

Technologies that run global industries, markets and communities like 5G, IoT, blockchain, and smart grids rely on infra – and in themselves they ARE infra too.

But to succeed, the impact of this ‘digital plumbing’ must be manifested in a very real and visceral manner. But not all vendors and service providers do a good job in landing this.

More than digital plumbing

It’s probably worth a few words defining infra here – we mean WAN, LAN, mobile, data centre, security, Wifi, interconnectivity. You get the gist.

It doesn’t matter whether it drives a private, public or hybrid environment – the backbone is critical, and its invisibility needs to be overcome with very visible benefits. Often, it does more than connect A to B – it’s linked to possible shifts and transformations in business operations and posture.

Top marketing tips for infrastructure campaigns

The key messaging and creative watch-outs for the tech marketer include:

• Build bridges between incremental technical/functional benefits and specific business indices. These are likely to be steps towards the bigger goal(s) of the next bullet.
• Establish a credible link between the holistic, improved operations story and (business or tech) aspiration.
  • By ‘credible’, we mean elevated but within the elasticity of the brand and the authentic purpose of the tech.
  • And by ‘aspiration’ we mean contribute towards goals such such Net Zero, competitiveness, boosting NPD, service acceleration etc.
• Create an emotional attachment with the above messaging. This is likely to be linked to personal, team or business reward and success
• A positive response to all these principles will propel you well in the right direction.

Businesses generally invest in tangibles

The above sub-head may not ring true with NFTs and crypto, but most organisations demand highly measurable results.

None more so than big-ticket deals in ‘digital plumbing’. From service/cloud providers to enterprises/SMBs and public sector orgs, all need to act with prudence and diligence – but also with a next-gen mindset. Decisions made can have long-term consequences – good and bad.

The b2b tech agency or tech marketing function needs to make sure their technical argument commands an RFI/RFP, but their aspirations and promise secure brand preference.

The Rubicon Agency has deep experience with networking, cloud and data centre propositions, working with many of the leading vendors in the space. 

Check out our experience in infra.

We all know one. An inquisitive, passionate petrol head that knows the inner workings of the combustion engine. Someone who can explain the mechanics of the turbocharger, crankshaft and gearbox. They’re a great source of free education – but they can be very heavy on the minutiae you pretend to be interested in, just to get the educated answer you’re after.

Cloud and AI vendors can have similar traits – super keen to show what they’ve learned and built over the years – and wanting to share technical detail that exceeds your need, desire (and let’s be honest), comprehension.

More innovation and bamboozling ahead

When cloud started to gather on the horizon a couple of decades ago, little did we all know the profound effect it would have on our lives – whether in the tech or marketing industry or just as a plain old consumer. We’ve needed to introduce and normalise emerging technologies rapidly – and sometimes we’ve overcooked it.

What started as ‘some virtual storage somewhere in the ether’, gained momentum, surfaced disruptive innovations and was the catalyst to a fundamental rethink of computing. It unlocked an Alladins Cave of possibilities and potential that not only reinvented what tech can do, but also business operating models, software supply chains and consumption models.

Tech marketing pros and b2b marketing agencies have spent the last 2-decades marketing cloud services in a way that’s made XaaS the de-facto that it is today. But like our erstwhile petrol heads, we’ve done some bamboozling and blindsiding along the way too.

Don’t love the tech too much

Early adopters can have a habit of thinking everyone ‘gets it’ and ‘instinctively knows where things are going’. And with that can come a false presumption of awareness and understanding.

Cloud upped the ante on what’s possible – but AI has taken that onto a whole new level. All segments, industries and economies are looking over their shoulders for what it could mean. It’s fair to say that (as of writing this blog) much of the AI market is still in its early adopter and (some in segments) early majority phases.

The early majority onwards need tech marketers to join the dots. We need to translate what the emerging tech is – into what it does and what it achieves.

We can’t afford for these emerging innovations to not achieve lift-off just because their value hasn’t been articulated. After all, not all tech vendors are led by visionaries with skills in crisp and eloquent distillation. We need to play our part.

Technologists – programmers, architects, engineers – are all understandably proud of their efforts and their stack. But product/portfolio management and marketing teams need to step in and stop this hitting the market without decoding the value.

What do cloud and AI marketers need to consider?

Solution, product and marketing teams should ask themselves these 3 key questions:

1. Does your current marketing decode what’s enabled and achieved with your technology, rather than what it does and how it does it?
2. Do you have tiered messaging to translate functionality and capabilities for varying levels of technical proficiency?
3. Do you present crisp use case benefits and stories against the status quo?

If some of these answers are no, you may want to think again.

Serving a more tech-friendly audience

Cloud and AI technologies are great for audience levelling – often bridging the needs of the business managers while offering something more progressive and flexible for IT pros.

Alongside that shift, the business manager is becoming more digitally able (with greater workforce representation of millennials and Gen Z).

So, while business decision makers are becoming more technically literate – you still need to keep ‘Team IT’ on-side – especially in larger businesses. This means tech marketers (and their tech agency partners) must balance the need for simplicity with crisp business benefits and technical depth.

Campaigns and collateral produced by b2b technology agencies (and internal marketing functions) need to land the purpose of the tech proposition – without patronising or bamboozling buyers and users.

Collectively, we don’t want to be known as the petrol heads that no-one wants to sit with at the Christmas party!

The Rubicon Agency has significant cloud and AI expertise, working with many of the leading vendors in disruptive innovation.

Check out our experience in cloud and AI.