Seek Expertise

Marketing guru Scott Bedbury, who led the "Just Do It" campaign at Nike and turned coffee into a mystical experience at Starbucks, says the best marketers don't merely convey facts - they also tap into people's emotions. "No matter what the challenge, the greatest benefits of any product or service are usually emotional and not entirely tangible," he says. IT people often forget that technology generally helps meet some emotional need, whether it's to gain control or power, avoid risk, feel complete or satisfied, or just realize potential, Bedbury says.

A good first step, then, in building a marketing program is finding someone who understands these needs and knows how to use them to connect with people - an experienced marketing pro. At Tyson Foods, CIO Jeri Dunn employs an organizational change consultant to help with marketing and is looking to hire a vice president of organizational change whose responsibilities will include overseeing communication. Dunn readily admits communication is not her forte and that she needs help crafting messages. She says she tends to assume that everyone has the same level of understanding on IT issues that she does. "The organizational change person will keep me honest," Dunn says. "If I'm going 100 miles an hour, I need someone to say: 'Hey wait, no one's following.'"

Having experienced staffers at least partly dedicated to (and accountable for) marketing communication can help IT groups build proactive campaigns to replace the reactive, defensive communication that is more typical in IT (see "What's Your Marketing Maturity Level?", page 84). Even if a company lacks the resources to devote someone to marketing, the CIO should consider tapping into the expertise of the corporate marketing and communication department. If nothing else, this group will have the independence to see things from the internal customer's point of view.

Find the Target

CIOs typically have six distinct audiences: internal IT staff, end users, line of business heads, executive management, the board of directors, and vendors and partners. An effective marketing campaign will tailor messages for each group, taking into account what matters most to each. "If you meet with the CFO, the presentation should be numbers-driven," advises Patricia Jaramillo, CEO of Magnolia Communications, an IT marketing consultancy. "Don't tell me how many outages you had. What did it mean in dollars?"

When marketing a new plant maintenance system to Tyson plant managers, Dunn had the group vice president of production services talk up the system's benefits. "He had more impact making this presentation because he is owner of the business process. He is the champion for the change," says Dunn. One slide in his presentation touted productivity benefits by showing a plant maintenance employee working in front of a PC rather than hanging out in the coffee-break room. That slide would not, however, resonate with salespeople. When Dunn updates the sales team on an IT initiative, she describes how it will save money, which the company can invest in more advertising.

Generally, the higher up in the organization the target, the more simplified the marketing message should be. When Steven Agnoli, CIO of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart, writes his monthly status report for executive management, he consciously keeps it short and sweet. "I don't want to get into minute detail on technical stuff," he explains. "It's important for them to understand there's a lot of work going on, we're completing assignments and they're actually getting things for the money they're spending."

Agnoli is also careful to write in business terms to avoid clouding the message with what he calls technical mumbo jumbo. To that end, he enforces the "no acronym" rule for all communication that crosses the IT threshold. "In the IT world, there are probably more acronyms than words," he deadpans.

At Harley-Davidson, initial attempts to educate executives on "the business of IS" met with resistance. "Early on, we had a lot of people who said: 'I don't want to know this stuff. Don't confront me with your business. I don't confront you with mine'," says Engstrom, who shares the title of director of information services with Tschurwald. "We concluded that we hadn't yet put the information in front of people in a manner they could absorb or that really established their interest level." The quarterly report succeeds because it directly relates what IT is doing to the business executives' strategies and goals.

The upshot is that Engstrom, who once had trouble getting anything funded, says he recently gained executive approval for a $US2.1 million project in less than a minute.