Marketing Weblog: THE FIRST TO COMMUNICATE IS THE FIRST TO LAUNCH (THE HEWLETT PACKARD & SONY VAIO CASES)

THE FIRST TO COMMUNICATE IS THE FIRST TO LAUNCH (THE HEWLETT PACKARD & SONY VAIO CASES)

You are the first one to launch a product or service to a market. You really think that you have the advantage of the first comer, that you will be able to reap its benefits in terms of skimming the market and getting an innovator positioning. However, one of your competitors launches the same product six months after you do and gets all the credit and most of the market. What has gone wrong?

Many reasons might explain the situation. However, one possible and likely one is that you haven´t communicated properly to the market and your competitors have. This was recently the case of a mobile internet solution announced by Sony with Telefonica, and has been the case of HP with many functions announced in its products.

The case of HP is a classic one. HP is a terrific marketer that faces two scenarios:

1. Scenario 1 happens when HP is the market leader. In this scenario, what many manufacturers do is to produce for them and to let them create the necessity for the whole market. These manufacturers, some of them Japanese, might have shyly launched a new functionality or product, but renounce to take all the credit of being the first to launch for they do not know how to make a mass launch! So they let HP to make the ATL campaign, get the product massified and then do their best to get as much market share as possible in the new market.

2. In scenario 2, that takes place in markets where HP is not one of the market leaders, what HP does is to take a functionality which has not been announced massively and appropriates of it. This is for instance the case of some functionalities that mobile phones have, such as email to voice conversions.

The second case just happened one month ago in Spain: Sony Vaio announced with Telefonica the launch of notebook that had integrated a modem for getting mobile internet access. The announcement did not say that they were the first launching the solution (actually it was Vodafone with HP + Acer + Dell), but made everybody thought so. Why did they do this?

1. Because Vodafone + HP + Acer + Dell made the mistake of not launching an aggressive ATL campaign making everybody aware of what they have launched (they did some ATL, but only to specialized media and the news did not get enough coverage).

a. Being the first ones to the mass market launching the solution.
b. Taking all the credit for it.
c. Reinforcing each brand by getting associated with other prestige brand + a unique service.

To me, Marketing is perpception. So unless you create them and make everybody aware of it, you are to lose the perception game.

Comments

Dear,

Interesting articles, will these cases also be part of courses at exchange programs that I will follow?

Thanks,

If you Digital Marketing and Communication with Manuel Alonso Coto or International Marketing with me, for sure you will cover them... ;)

Seriously speaking, within all Marketing subjects we do our best to cover real and updated marketing cases, so it is very likely that you will see them thru your course.

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