Re: WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO BRING NEW CUSTOMERS TO THE ISERIES

[G Armour <garmour400m@xxxxxxxxx>]

--- Hans Boldt <boldt@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I think we just have to disagree on the effectiveness of advertising. 
> This may be a facet of some basic cultural differences across the 49th 
> parallel: I can't find a reference on-line, but I read some blurb a few 
> months ago about an opinion survey taken of Canadians and Americans. It 
> turns out that more than half of Americans surveyed believed that if a 
> product is advertised more it must be better. Fewer than 30% of 
> Canadians agreed with that.

Not hard to believe, Hans.  I've seen Canadian television (Windsor Ch. 9).
 Excepting the beer ads, there's just no match for the type of advertising
I see on my side of Ponds Huron and Ontario. <g>

> Sure, advertising is important. But where do you place the ads, and what
> exactly are you trying to sell? The latter question gets back to the 
> basic issue that Unix customers buy boxes and iSeries customers buy 
> applications. That, in a nutshell, is why you have two different brands 
> (iSeries and pSeries) even though under the covers the hardware is 
> practically identical. And so two different advertising strategies.

I side with (I think) Booth on this one.  Advertising iSeries wouldn't so
much sell the box as much as create a presence in the mind of executives
who are presented with options: "Hmmm, package runs on Microsoft, uh-huh,
package runs on Linux, uh-huh, package runs on iSeries, HUH?
<thought-bubble: Never heard of it, discard from further consideration>". 
Simplistic, perhaps, but not unthinkable, IMO.

Of course, it all comes down to rationing out the ad budget.  Assumming we
(meaning IBM and the iSeries user community) have the same goals for
iSeries, I would hope IBM's marketing wonks would know what they're doing.
 Seriously, I have doubts on both counts.  I.e., I'm not sure we share the
same goals for iSeries and, if we do, I don't think IBM marketing knows
how to.  IMO.

GA

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