Microsoft exec on Dot-com hangover

As part of my primary research study into the current state of B2B tech branding, I talked with Doug Free of Microsoft. Doug heads PR in Silicon Valley for the company, making sure that Bill G. and Steve B. and Ray O. are visible and connected whenever they visit our corner of the world. He was my client back in the 1996-97 timeframe when he headed marketing at an early web collaboration software company. His experience with branding goes deeper than logos and taglines, as he helped launched the GO Network for Disney when he worked at Infoseek.

Doug believes as I do that our industry is still suffering from "dot-com hangover". The conventional wisdom holds that branding is expensive because it necessitates a big budget to make a big splash. During the Boom, branding as a strategic marketing practice went out the window, and the term became synonymous with lavish launch parties at The Tech Museum and full-page ads in The Industry Standard. Good branding = high burn rate. There simply wasn't enough time - or even the need, it was widely believed - to steadily build one's reputation with customers over time when the IPO horizon for most startups was under a year.

Branding professionals must share some of the blame for this cheapening of our art during this period, as many of us were all too happy to collect high fees for actually planning the parties and placing the ads! Yet in doing so, we did B2B IT companies a disservice, missed an opportunity to soundly educate an industry, and are still suffering the fallout.

As Doug rightly points out, many tech marketers first real experience with branding was spending the "funny money" of the Boom, and he cited an example from his own experience. He recalled that one of his employers during the period wanted to run a major ad campaign to reach only a handful of key targeted investors. High-touch, low cost alternatives would have better driven the financing round but were rejected outright. Of course it was silly behavior in hindsight, Doug explains, but everyone thought - and was told by "the experts" at the time - that big spend was the way to build big brand. But every branding pro worth his/her salt knows that attention/awareness/buzz are the fringe benefits of a strong brand, not the goals themselves.

In all, Doug remains pretty discouraged with IT marketing professionals use of the term "branding" with vendor management teams. He thinks C-level understanding of the practice today extends merely to tactical design deliverables or is locked inexorably into the concerns of B2C markets. He asks what is easier: to educate an entire industry or change our language to fit the market? Doug was not completely pessimistic, however, and sees a lot of opportunity for branding to impact service-oriented B2B markets where Web 2.0, SaaS, and LAMP stack delivery models are coalescing.