Tough marketing gigs
… try scientific
products and services
So, Roger James thinks that marketers in the motor industry have the toughest job! (read James’s article, Marketing Update, August 2006). I would like to seriously challenge him on that, and ask if he has considered the marketing of scientific products and services?
I am the marketing manager for an unincorporated joint venture between Australia’s CSIRO and New Zealand’s Scion. Our joint venture was created to capture the synergies between two like-minded science agencies, both doing research and development for the Australian and New Zealand forest industries.
My job is primarily to market our professional services and products to the forest, wood and paper industries (and you can throw in a few environmental agencies for good measure).
We have been concentrating on creating a new brand that leverages the scientific legacy of both joint venture partners, but also communicates fresher values around our relevance to this sector and our ability to solve problems with quality science.
If for some reason this is sounding easy to you, let me point out the following:
- We are not a purely commercial venture. A good portion of our funding comes from the Federal Government. This presents us with dual roles, one to service the community with quality science and the other to deliver value to cash-paying customers, which naturally creates some tension.
- The joint venture spans a big ditch of water called the Tasman, and I have two teams each with sometimes quite different priorities as dictated by the national interests of the day.
- Launching new products can be challenging, particularly when the product sometimes takes up to 25 years to reach commercialisation stage.
- Services are often hard to market as we are in the relationship business, and often one or two ‘star’ scientists will make or break your reputation. Therefore, the internal culture of the joint venture is a significant factor in our branding.
- We are creating a joint venture brand that leverages the scientific legacy of both joint venture partners by anchoring them into the brand. However, add in the challenge of one joint venture partner deciding to rebrand their entire organisation after only nine months into the partnership.
In all seriousness, however, the challenges have been hugely rewarding. It is not often you get the opportunity to apply marketing and branding skills to a very traditional area that is going through such immense change.
So how important is the brand in this environment? I would say very important. If we had not focused on creating a new brand we would not have suffered from confusion during this early stage. However, we would have suffered from the more problematic scenario where clients and staff think nothing has changed, “it’s the same old same old”.
Perhaps there are tougher gigs out there, but in my opinion scientific products and services beats the motor industry any day!
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