Marketing Is Everything
HER
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1991
Marketing
Is Everything by Regis McKenna
he 1990s will belong to the customer. And that is great news for the marketer. Technology is transforming choice, and choice is transforming the marketplace. As a result, we are witnessing the emergence of a new marketing paradigm - not a "do more" marketing that simply turns up the volume on the sales spiels of the past but a knowledge- and experience-based marketing that represents tbe once-and-for-all death of the salesman. Marketing 's transformation is driven by tbe enormous power and ubiquitous spread of tecbnology. So pervasive is technology today tbat it is virtually meaningless to make distinctions between technology and nontecbnology businesses and industries: tbere arc only tecbnology companies. Tecbnology has moved into products, the workplace, and the marketplace with astonishing speed and thorougbness. Seventy years after tbey were invented, fractional borsepower motors are in some IS to 20 bousebold products in tbe average American home today. In less than 20 years, the microprocessor has achieved a similar penetration. TWenty years ago, there
Regis McKenna is chairman of Regis McKenna Inc., a Palo Alto-headquartered marketing consulting firm that advises some of America 's leading high-tech companies. He is also a general partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield &) Byers, a technology venture-capital company. He is the author of Who 's Afraid of Big Blue? (Addison-Wesley, 1989) and The Regis Touch (Addison-Wesley, 1985].
DRAWING BY TIMOTHY BLECK
T
65
MARKETING IS EVERYTHING
were fewer than 50,000 computers in use,- today more than .50,000 computers are purchased every day. The defining characteristic of this new technological push is programmahility. In a computer chip, programmability means the capability to alter a command, so that one chip can perform a variety of prescribed functions and produce a variety of prescribed outcomes. On the factory floor,
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1991
Marketing
Is Everything by Regis McKenna
he 1990s will belong to the customer. And that is great news for the marketer. Technology is transforming choice, and choice is transforming the marketplace. As a result, we are witnessing the emergence of a new marketing paradigm - not a "do more" marketing that simply turns up the volume on the sales spiels of the past but a knowledge- and experience-based marketing that represents tbe once-and-for-all death of the salesman. Marketing 's transformation is driven by tbe enormous power and ubiquitous spread of tecbnology. So pervasive is technology today tbat it is virtually meaningless to make distinctions between technology and nontecbnology businesses and industries: tbere arc only tecbnology companies. Tecbnology has moved into products, the workplace, and the marketplace with astonishing speed and thorougbness. Seventy years after tbey were invented, fractional borsepower motors are in some IS to 20 bousebold products in tbe average American home today. In less than 20 years, the microprocessor has achieved a similar penetration. TWenty years ago, there
Regis McKenna is chairman of Regis McKenna Inc., a Palo Alto-headquartered marketing consulting firm that advises some of America 's leading high-tech companies. He is also a general partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield &) Byers, a technology venture-capital company. He is the author of Who 's Afraid of Big Blue? (Addison-Wesley, 1989) and The Regis Touch (Addison-Wesley, 1985].
DRAWING BY TIMOTHY BLECK
T
65
MARKETING IS EVERYTHING
were fewer than 50,000 computers in use,- today more than .50,000 computers are purchased every day. The defining characteristic of this new technological push is programmahility. In a computer chip, programmability means the capability to alter a command, so that one chip can perform a variety of prescribed functions and produce a variety of prescribed outcomes. On the factory floor,