Brainless Branding

As a reflection of that, when bidding systems as part of a contract, many solution providers don't fill in the portion of the bid that specifies which vendor will provide the systems, or they'll write "tier-one vendor." That way they can bid on the contract and determine later whether to use Hewlett-Packard, IBM or Dell, depending on the best price of the day.

Worse yet for vendors is the fact that many customers have stopped specifying hardware brands. If you listen to the way IT people talk about their systems, they will say they have a two-way or four-way Intel system on the server side, and on the client side they will identify their systems by the gigahertz rating and Pentium or AMD generation of processor. It's only when pressed that they may actually identify themselves as an IBM, HP or Dell shop, and very few of them can actually identify the brand name of the product line of any given set of servers or PCs.

A lot of this simply reflects the commodity status that hardware has achieved in the past few years. It also highlights how ineffective branding campaigns around specific product lines have become. In an era when vendors are preaching to the channel about the need to add value, they should take a good look in the mirror and ask themselves the same question. Generally, none of them are effectively marketing the value proposition of working with their company. Instead, all of their marketing dollars are poured into a futile effort to raise awareness for a specific product line or some generic industry slogan that amounts to little more than a vague call to action for end users.

Rather than engaging in "do as I say, not as I do" preaching, vendors need to step back and start marketing solution sets to the channel and to end users. They then might actually begin to see the market reflect the value they all think they richly deserve. When that happens, we can once and for all put an end to the not-so-useful art of hurling veiled recriminations that tends to dominate the discussion today.

Are you listening? Do you agree? I can be reached at (516) 562-7477 or via e-mail at [email protected].