Ernest Godsey on B2B marketing

Ernest Godsey has been involved in embedded systems since the advent of the microprocessor. Along the way, he’s served as vice-president of business development at Interphase Corporation and president of MEN Mikro Elektronik’s U.S. subsidiary MEN Micro Inc.  Godsey is currently the president of Godsey Technical Associates, a consulting firm that provides marketing services to companies in the embedded marketplace. He also maintains EmbeddedDIRT.com, a website with blog devoted to news, information and commentary on the embedded computing industry. OAR caught up with him to discuss some of the in’s and out’s of marketing for high tech companies in the embedded computing space. 

OAR: What are some prime examples of B2B marketing that worked great and ones that bombed?

Godsey: VITA’s a great example of B2B marketing that works. You and I remember when it was not much more than two printed directories a year. I always thought that VITA was primarily Lyme Hevle’s retirement plan, but Ray Alderman had enough vision to translate it into an ongoing enterprise that is still delivering value today. The landscape is littered with organizations that didn’t make that transition.

OAR: Like the Multibus Manufacturers Group?

Godsey: Yes, the Multibus Manufacturers Group would be an example of an organization that has disappeared, but I also had in mind the VXI-related publications and tabletop shows organized by Fred Bode et al. He was publishing a directory of VXI products and companies, more or less at the same time VITA was publishing the VMEbus product directories. Concurrently he was organizing the DATA shows, which were very successful tabletop VXI shows.

Today, all of that seems to have evaporated, even though companies are still deploying VXI-based machines in the test environment. I don’t know if this speaks more about the differences in the energy and inventiveness of the practitioners involved in the two groups or about the differences in the leadership of the two groups. Regardless, the end result is not a matter for debate. VITA and the VSO are still robust, providing an organizational framework for activities in a variety of endeavors.

OAR: All of VITA’s moments haven’t been golden. Remember the VFEA—VMEbus-Futurebus Extended Architecture–aka the Futurebus fiasco?

Godsey: You are absolutely correct. Not everything that Ray Alderman and VITA touched over the years turned into gold. But perhaps knowing when to move on is one of the hallmarks of real genius. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky said: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” That’s what technology leadership and good marketing are all about: correctly assessing where the market is going to be and then positioning yourself there.

OAR: Any other positive B2B marketing efforts worth mentioning?

Godsey: I also admire the guys who pay attention to the details of marketing, to the blocking and checking of everyday marketing in the embedded space. To follow the hockey analogy: It may be fun to skate free to where the puck is going to be, but once you start toward the goal with the puck, you’d better be ready for some serious body checking.

John Wranovics [of Curtiss-Wright Controls, Embedded Computing]  is one guy I know who pays attention to the details of marketing. All of the marketing from Curtiss-Wright Controls is on message, on target and easy to navigate. He does this day in and day out. Much of it’s not glamorous, but he’s getting the job done. But it’s more fun to talk about stuff that doesn’t work, perhaps because there’s so much of it.

OAR: Can you share some of your favorite negative examples?

Godsey: I once had an advertising agency tell me that their “client did not believe in landing pages.” They were planning an e-mail campaign and were using this as the explanation of why there would be no landing page, no unique URLs and no trackability. I wanted to ask them if their client believed in gravity.

Another piece of B2B marketing that doesn’t work is a website with no search function. Presumably the objective is to make the poor schmuck click thorough every piece of arcane navigation on the website. But the Internet does not have an exclusive lock on dumb marketing. The inside back cover of the Feb. 1, 2010 issue of eWeek has a 2D barcode for Microsoft Windows Server and Microsoft SQL Server. What a great plan! I have no doubt that 2D barcodes (and smart phones) have a great future interacting with mobile consumers in real time. But what mobile consumers in real time have to do with an ad aimed at data center managers and database administrators is beyond me.

OAR: What are your favorite marketing tools?

Godsey: I like trade shows. (I miss BUSCON and COMDEX.) I actually enjoy talking with real engineers, who have real projects and who could use my product to solve a problem. One of the really dumb things I see at trade shows is a booth arrangement that keeps people out of the booth. Typically it’s the guys in 10′x10′ booths. They position a long table right up against the aisle … like a bake sale. I highly recommend this arrangement if your objective to keep visitors out of your booth.

OAR: Trade shows, of course, aren’t what they used to be.

Godsey: Trade shows have been supplanted by Internet based social media like Twitter. So now marketers have more hi-tech ways to do dumb things. Like the guys who know they can’t spend 8-hours a day tweeting, but they read somewhere that to be effective they should make 6 to 8 tweets every day, so at 8:05 a.m. every day, they send 8 tweets out, one right after the other. Guess they haven’t heard of any of the scheduling tools like HootSuite. These are probably the same guys who never “listen” to what’s being tweeted about them (or their companies). It’s a shame, because Twitter is a neat tool for learning what is actually important to your users/customers.

OAR: What are the silliest and/or worst sounding product names you’ve encountered?

Godsey: Two of the worst are Wii and iPad. The Wii has been very successful, and I suspect the iPad will be very successful, but neither is because of the cool name.

Before I arrived at Interphase, they had been successfully marketing products with numbers and products with names. I was of the opinion that in the B2B market, it didn’t make any difference, so I started assigning names and marketing numbers to new products. For a while, we used the names of fast cats–Jaguar, Panther, Cheetah, etc.–for our disk controller products.

I remember one COMDEX where we were introducing one of these new “fast cat” disk controllers. We had done a good job getting press coverage before the show so we had a fair number of engineers come by the Interphase booth on the show floor and ask to see the board, to talk about it, etc. I kept an informal tally. About half asked for it by name, and about half asked for it by number. Since then, I haven’t lost any sleep over a product name.

OAR: That type of labeling for embedded products irks me. Does it really work?

Godsey: Sure it does because the engineers who specify and design-in products are people. So a lousy name can hurt, if it’s hard to remember, for example, or it conjures up something unpleasant. But you don’t need to spend $50k to figure out if a name is offensive. On the other hand, a great name won’t help if the product is too expensive, doesn’t have the performance that is required, isn’t reliable, etc.

OAR: I remember when Interphase was one of three high-end disk controller companies in the 1980s, sharing the stage with Ciprico and Xylogics. Only Interphase has survived. Why do you think that is?

Godsey: There were (and still are) a lot of smart engineers at Interphase. We realized that the “standalone” disk controller was going the way of the buggy whip, so we looked around for other places where we could apply our proprietary “BUSpacket” technology. The first area we tried was in various NICs [network interface cards]. Just as disk controllers are the interface between the processor bus and the mechanical clap-trap of a disk drive, NICs are the interface between the processor bus and an external data stream, with both physical layer and protocol considerations. So in many ways, much of the technology of NICs was similar to that of disk controllers.

We started with Ethernet controllers. (Yes, it took an entire 6U VMEbus card to implement a single Ethernet controller in those days.) Then we moved to FDDI controllers, where we eventually dominated the market. After that, to offload protocol processing from the main processor, we started putting additional compute bandwidth on NICs.

OAR: What was the rationale there?

Godsey: At that time, network bandwidth was being raised by a factor of 10X with each new generation, while processor clock speeds (and processing bandwidth) were inching forward by only factors of 1.5X or 2X per generation. So just when processor bandwidth would catch up to the network bandwidth, the network would ratchet bandwidth up by another factor of 10X, leaving the processors overwhelmed by the task of processing the network traffic. Thus, there was a market for NICs that furnished additional processor bandwidth, bandwidth that could be applied to handling the protocol stack.

OAR: What are today’s 3-5 biggest buzz words? Do they really mean anything?

Godsey: My favorite buzz word today is MID, which is Intel-speak for Mobile Internet Device. I love it! Do you know of a single product that has been introduced as a MID? I don’t. Now, plenty of Mobile Internet Devices have been delivered, but they’re called iPhones and, as far as I know, they’re powered by ARM processors, not Intel Atoms.

My next two favorite buzz words are “Cloud Computing” and “Green.” These are both great buzz words because they can (and do) mean almost anything. When you use them to describe your product, the listener will endow your product with all sorts of positive virtues, which may (or may not) have a basis in reality, but the important thing is that they put your product in a positive light.

There are, however, some buzz words that actual mean something. SaaS (Software as a Service) is one example. No ambiguity here. The listener immediately knows the licensing model without any long explanation. That’s why buzz words that actually mean something are useful. They speed up the information transfer, and it is almost always a good thing to improve the utilization of the available bandwidth.

OAR: If you could give only one piece of marketing advice to companies making embedded computing products, what would it be?

Godsey: I maintain that marketers in the embedded space not only need to understand the technology that they are marketing, but also need to remember that they are marketing to engineers who also understand the technology. This has two implications.

First, they need to use this knowledge to direct new product development. The successful companies in the embedded space will be those companies that have a “high view” of product marketing. In such companies, it’s the guys with the overarching understanding of the direction of the technology and of the market who set the direction for new product development. This is, after all, the direction of the company.

Second, they also need to let this knowledge impact their marketing message and the medium they use to deliver their message. This is getting harder to do. For example, how do you deliver a compelling marketing message on the latest deep packet inspection technology in 140 characters? The successful guys will figure out how to do it.