When Tech met packaged goods

(image: the Colossus computer, the work of Alan Turing. courtesy of Wikipedia)


When you look at the above image of Colossus ( source : wikipedia)a pioneering computer built by Alan Turing in the 1940's , it is incredible to think that what I would describe loosely as "Tech" is today being marketed much like packaged consumer goods.

The daily struggles with tech that accompany most of us today however trivial or important show just how much Tech has impacted and changed all our lives since the arrival of mass market offerings and consumer adoption of items such as mobile phones in the early nineties, followed within a few years by the arrival in our homes and workplaces of the internet and personal computers of various types and footprints.

As a long time marketer of branded consumer goods, pretty much exclusively in food and drink, I have been a keen observer of marketing in other categories beyond packaged goods, but perhaps none has evolved as significantly and as quickly as Tech..I am sure marketers of fashion and beauty products which change all the time will disagree with me , but please do explain what I got wrong.

So what are the similarities , what can tech marketers learn from food, and vice versa ?

The classical similarities are all there: product range segmentation tending to hypersegmentation , brand and retailer brands ,route to market choices , pressure on shelf space, promotional noise and for some brands the investments in consumer comms. We can also see the financial pressures on brand owner companies , the emergence of on line only brands in mobile phones who then dance Dell like into omnichannel instead early on ...

Superficially at least Tech categories have a lot of things going for them that most packaged goods brands would love to have , not least the consumer frequency of interraction , the category interest and top of mind that these bring, the opportunity for product innovation compared to many types of packaged goods like food for instance , opportunities for visible self reflection , and last but certainly not least the growth opportunities that come with constant reinvention ,new tech , finite product lifecycles and geographic penetration growth opportunities in populous emerging economies.

And yet it would seem to me that with the notable exception of the Apple brand family there is little or no real brand distinctiveness or stickiness elsewhere in Tech ,which means somewhere along the line that marketing is not as effective as it aims to be in building profitable brand ecosystems. As a personal example ,how many of us non Apple users are brand loyal when we change phones,tablets, pcs ? I ended up buying on functionality and price, not brand for instance and have over the years been disappointed by my misguided brand loyalty in mobile phones for instance ...

So , Tech products are more like packaged goods after all ( schadenfreude ?)... low margin ,limited brand loyalty, interchangeability and all.

Maybe the grass isn't greener in Tech after all....