RE: WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO BRING NEW CUSTOMERS TO THE ISERIES -- MIDRANGE-L

I think a simple commercial would do the trick.
CIO's, CEO's, CFO's and CTO's would all be calling. One during a Superbowl,
one during the 18th hole of the Masters and one during the World Cup finals.
Of course, it would have to be after the Unix on iSeries announcement that
we all know is coming at some point in the near future.
Here is the commercial.
A man in front of hundreds of servers with rows of Dell, Gateway, Sun and
Compaq servers. Wires laying all over the floor connecting to the patch
panels on the side walls (hanging down onto the floor) with people all
moving around behind him working.
The man says, "This was our data center."
He walks to one side past a fake wall revealing an exactly duplicated room
with a single iSeries in the center with wires drug on each side going up to
the patch panels. A single woman in the middle with a desk working away and
no one else in the room.
"We replaced all of our servers: Unix, Linux and Windows with one machine.
Universal business adapter? We have one. It's called the iSeries." 
Fade to the iSeries logo.

It will never happen. It would work.
John Brandt
This I'll send it to IBM and see what they say. Evil grin.


-----Original Message-----
From: Hans Boldt [mailto:boldt@xxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Wednesday, November 05, 2003 2:12 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO BRING NEW CUSTOMERS TO THE ISERIES


Booth Martin wrote:

> I am not convinced we disagree. 

I agree. I'm sure we agree more than we disagree. The fact that I really 
enjoy playing "devil's advocate" probably confuses people too! ;-)

> 
> The survey reflects what people believe, not what they do. The point is
> about what consumers do.  Does anyone else have trouble getting teens into
> Wal-Mart brands? 

Well, for me, I'll experience that first-hand in about 12 years. In the 
meantime, I'll just have to try to teach my daughter about the motives 
of advertisers and about value for the money. I can certainly try to 
lead by example - practically everything I'm wearing now, shirt, pants, 
socks, etc., is a store brand product, not a name brand. ;-)

> 
> The facts of life are that advertising pays.  Otherwise soap and tobacco
> companies would never waste billions on advertising.

And for these classes of products you mention, nothing distinguishes 
between them otherwise. ;-)

> 
> I would agree that IBM, Sun, Oracle, Cisco, and Novell won't gain much
from
> prime-time TV advertising, but there's a lot of other kinds of
advertising. 
> 
> 
> I know lots of people will grit their teeth at this but Dr. Frank Soltis
is
> a Personality.   If IBM's PR people would play him up it'd have huge
impact.
>  Hell, isn't he the one that has the on-board computers in his cars and
> trucks modified to his own specs?  Is his garage really bigger than his
> house?  Did he really get his tail feathers trimmed with his comments on
the
> iSeries that MS owns?  This guy turns the staid iSeries into a personal
> adventure.
>  

Dr Frank mods the chips in his cars and trucks? Now *that's* a geek!

But then you're still preaching to the choir. Dr Frank is well known 
within this community, but not to the outside. I agree that there could 
be some truly great ads featuring iSeries personalities like him. But 
would such a campaign really play well to the target customer set? That 
is, those buyers who are looking for applications, not a flashy image. 
Image sells commodity items, like soap and breakfast cereal and Unix 
servers. But I'd like to think the buyers of iSeries machines and 
applications are a bit more discerning.

Cheers! Hans


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