Afloat on a game changing sea change in customer value

Doug Lawson signing in…

Now that I’ve got all of the appropriate TypePad registration completed it’s time to start blogging.  In this first entry I’d like to introduce myself, and my blogg’n topic for the next eight weeks.  I’d also like to invite readers to comment and engage in an exciting dialogue.   My name is Doug Lawson and I’ve been in various marketing roles for the last 15 years.  This has included product management and product marketing jobs, corporate strategy positions, general management, and consulting. I’ve worked with chip products, capital equipment, materials and software products in the semicondutor manufacturing market as well as education and healthcare markets.  Prior to moving to “the dark side” as my engineering friends used to say I was a process engineer in the semiconductor fab world.  Currently I am Vice President of Alternative Energy for a capital equipment supplier with a focus on marketing and business development.

I first got involved with Chris Halliwell and her Technology Marketing Course back in the early 90’s while working for Digital Equipment Corporation.  Chris was hired to teach a group of us how to market and sell the world’s fastest microprocessor – “Alpha” to people outside of DEC. While this effort is now just a footnote in the annals of Digital history, the knowledge gained from the class and the experience has stuck in my brain and impacted the companies, products, and people that have crossed my path since.

The case I will be discussing - How to Captialize on Changes in Customer Value Drivers focuses on how we changed a slow growth custom engineering company into a high growth semiconductor factory automation company by identifying a significant change in a customer value driver that completely changed their buying behavior.  In the coming weeks I will be discussing how we identified the change and what it took to capitalize on it.  Looking back on it, identifying the value driver change seems obvious, but getting everyone to agree that it was significant at the time was not a simple task.  In next weeks post I’ll discuss the situation, what we did to get agreement and focus, and how we decided to apply the TMC concepts.  In the meantime take a look at the case and think about how events, technology, public opinion, safety or any other influence can affect your customers values and change the way they make buying decisions.  Then think about how you would change things in your company to take advantage of it.

Have a great week, I’ll be back next Sunday.

Comments

[Geoffrey Anderson]

Wow, this is something that hits close to home for me right now. I will await further installments with bated breath.