Differentiate With The Five C's Of Community Marketing

Technology marketers must change their product-focused marketing habits if they want to win in the business technology marketplace. Product-based differentiation has lost competitive potency because buyers now focus on business outcomes, which are facilitated by products but dependent on the transformational work of people — technology pros, end users, channel partners, and vendor experts — for success. In an outcome-oriented marketplace, the vendor-customer dialogue is driven by customer needs, not vendor messaging, and empowered by social media. Tech marketers striving for success with business technology buyers must, therefore, evolve marketing resources to support interactive need-match-engage dialogues around clients' business problems. Forrester sees marketing emerging as a central vehicle for competitive customer engagement as it moves out of the sales organization's slipstream to focus on orchestrating exceptional brand experiences across the customer life cycle.