Ivan Chong: The I-Blog

Friday, November 18, 2005

Dramatic Effect

I recently had dinner with one of our board members who has had a remarkable career in marketing. We spent three hours talking about his experiences and he offered some really interesting pieces of advice. One thing he encouraged was the use of a "dramatic effect." The example given was that of the Memorex commercial with the tape recording of the opera singer shattering a glass. The company was branded on the notion of high fidelity. The ad "Is it Live or is it Memorex?" worked to succinctly drive home the notion of fidelity to the consumer. Memorex products were therefore branded with the notion of hi fidelity. The dramatic effect was the shattering of the glass. In consumer goods, marketeers strive to come up with a value proposition so compelling that buyers jump up and down over the perceived benefits.

Is it reasonable to have this notion carry over to enterprise software? Is there such a thing as dramatic effect for this category of product? SAP, the most dominant applications software company in the world, has very lukewarm endorsements from its users. At a recent conference, I listened to a panel of SAP users talk about their experiences with SAP. "We're happy that we have SAP. Implementing SAP was a nightmare, but at least we lived to tell about it..." "We've been successful with SAP, no question. We're scarred from the experience, but hey it's working for us." Obviously, there are lots of examples in enterprise software where success is not correlated with having a raving fan base. The question is -- will this always be the case?