Marketing technology infrastructure

September 6, 2004

BY MICHAEL KRAUSS

Strange things have been happening lately. Companies once thought of as engineering powerhouses and impoverished marketers are showing signs of promotional life. Some even appear to be succeeding. For others it's too soon to tell.

Consider Schaumburg, Ill.-based Motorola Inc., situated in my backyard in suburban Chicago. No one expects a Midwest-based tech company to be a master of marketing sizzle. That's Silicon Valley stuff.

Since CEO Ed Zander took the helm as chairman and CEO last January, however there's a new zip in the air. Zander has signed deals with Apple's iTunes and has its CEO, Steve Jobs, showing up on live feeds at analyst meetings.

Zander's even got young Wimbledon tennis phenom Maria Sharapova live on his new Ojo Personal Video Phone promising to buy his technology. Zander scored big points with analysts recently when Sharapova promised to get a Motorola phone.

After upsetting Serena Williams at Wimbledon, Sharapova had a stunning cell phone failure while trying to call her mother to share the news. "Come on, technology," she reportedly said. Sharapova's celebrity and her timely introduction by Zander make him look like a marketing master.

According to published reports, Motorola will introduce 134 new products this year, up from 80 last year. This is smart, savvy marketing from a firm better known for Six Sigma quality in manufacturing than the four P's of marketing.

Then there's Stratton Sclavos, chairman and CEO of Mountain View, Calif.-based VeriSign Inc.

Consider these statistics: VeriSign secures more than 400,000 Web sites. Each day its enables 11 billion Internet transactions, supports 3 billion telephone interactions and enables $40 billion worth of e-commerce transactions in North America. And, more than 50% of all cellular roaming calls in North America travel with VeriSign's help.

If you've heard of VeriSign at all, you probably think of it as a security company. Remember the old adage, "On the Internet, no knows if you're a dog." When you do a transaction over the Internet, you want to know if the other person is a dog and whether he has fleas. VeriSign cut its teeth providing technology that assures the Web site you transact with is really who it says it is.

"You think of us as the guys who made your electronic purchase secure," says Ben Golub, senior vice president of marketing and corporate affairs and VeriSign's chief marketing officer.

The White House knows VeriSign.

Back in October 2002, the entire Internet was in danger from a distributed denial of service attack. This is a situation where thousands of computers around the world try to flood the Internet with data. These attacks are typically targeted against an individual company but this time the entire Internet infrastructure was under attack, according to Golub.

"The first call Stratton got was from the people running our infrastructure saying, 'Hey, everything is under control,' " Golub says.

"The next call was from the White House." It was counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke. Golub won't say exactly what Sclavos and Clarke discussed, but it's obvious Sclavos reassured Clarke the Internet was stable and wouldn't crash.

"Remember the old BASF commercials?" asks Vernon Irvin, executive vice president at VeriSign. "It's not the carpet, it's the glue in the carpet. It's not the curtains, it's the fabric. VeriSign really enables most digital experiences around the globe. This is a global story." In fact, VeriSign has customers in more than 120 countries and offices around the world.

Over the past few months, Sclavos and his management team have put together a plan. They decided to do more than an annual plan; in fact, they decided to do more than a three- or five-year plan. They've laid out a 100-year plan. It may sound audacious, but it fits VeriSign's personality.

"Verisign was unique among Internet companies," Golub says. "It didn't want to just be a company that grew, got a big stock price and got sold. This was going to be a company that changed the way that people fundamentally communicate and conduct commerce.

"It may sound high-falutin', but if you think about what telegraph and railroads were to the 19th century, and what highways and the telephone were to the 20th century, we want to be that in the 21st century--where the infrastructure is information."
The problem facing Golub and his colleagues is how to effectively tell their story. Increasing brand awareness and establishing a better understanding of VeriSign's role is a key cornerstone of the plan.

VeriSign sees itself as an intelligent utility. Its job is to enable people to find one another, connect with each other, stay secure and transact business across the global telecommunications and Internet infrastructure. While that makes sense from a back-office engineering perspective, telling a compelling story that pulls it all together is more difficult.

VeriSign has the vision and the engineering might. Its executives have built a world-class, military-grade technology infrastructure that works. But do they have the narrative powers of great marketers and story tellers? That remains to be seen.

Starting this month they'll launch an integrated advertising and public relations effort. Having heard the VeriSign story several times, I think Golub and his agencies have a wonderful marketing challenge. I doubt they'll do much more than scratch the surface of positioning this important company over the next 12 to 18 months. I hope I'm wrong, because VeriSign is a unique organization.

One of the earliest homilies young marketers learn is this: Don't bore the customer with how the product is made. No one wants to know about the factory. They want to hear about the benefits the product delivers. They want to understand how the product will improve their lives.

VeriSign needs to step beyond their infatuation with technology and illustrate how they enrich individual consumer's lives. Its marketing needs to demonstrate to its enterprise customers how it enables them to succeed.

Listening to Golub and Irvin is like ear candy. They have the world's most marvelous technology and their responsibility is global and mission-critical. They're great at managing the technology. Yet when quizzed about their proposed marketing executions, they tend to sound--not surprisingly-like … well, engineers.

Not like Motorola's Zander who's out front communicating why his technology is both beneficial and hip. Maybe Sclavos should invite Russian tennis champion Maria Sharapova over for a game. "Come on, technology."

Michael Krauss is a partner with Marion Consulting Partners based in Highland Park, Ill., and can be reached at Michael.Krauss@Marionpartners.com or news@ama.org.