Why Marketing and Technology Are a Hot Mix

The best talent in the marketing industry today works in technology, according to Philip Clement, ’93, chief marketing officer for Aon. For instance, Tom Siebel, founder of the influential Siebel Systems, Inc., merged some of business’ best sales techniques and database marketing to launch a new discipline of tech sales and marketing over the last 15 years.Clement was among panelists who discussed marketing in the high-tech world on May 11 at the Charles M. Harper Center during the TechVision Conference, hosted by the student-led led High-Tech Group. Other speakers included C. S. Park, ’84, a member of the board of directors of Seagate Technology, who gave the afternoon keynote on private equity. “Technology and marketing is no longer a boring B2B event,” he said. “When I started in this industry, you had to pay attention to what was happening in technology that could deliver marketing. Every year it would change and you would have to evaluate the new stuff. Now you just come up with your ideas and you look for the technologies to enable it. Pretty much anything we can think of in marketing is available.” Although NAVTEQ digital maps is a business-to-business company, marketing is not an oxymoron there, said the company’s director of marketing Robert Gourdine, who oversees marketing, pricing, business development, and retail. Navtec is unique because it is the only purely content company in the technology business today that is marketing to an audience beyond its direct customers, Gourdine said. “For all practical purposes, we sell to the guys to who sell to the guys who sell to the guys who eventually sell to you,” he said. “We’re almost lost in the equation. But we decided to take our fate into our own hands. We not only market actively to the customers in front of us in the value chain, we also step around our customers and market to the folks further up the value chain. We think this way we’re able to maybe control our fate, because we allow the people further up the value chain to make the decisions to choose us and push it back completely through the value chain.” To enter tech marketing business students need to merge creative, technical and, analytical skills, said Rajneesh Gaur, ’97, director of marketing for Cavium Networks. “From a start-up standpoint, I would add one more thing,” Gaur said. “Given that you are dealing on a day-in, day-out basis with your engineers, as well as the decision makers and your customers, who are also very, very technical people, striking a balance with good knowledge of technology is absolutely critical. There is no time to learn this quickly, but I know there are people who have made the bridge from marketing to technology.” Jim Welch, corporate vice president of Motorola, said he looks for tech marketers who are team-oriented, resourceful leaders. “I don’t know how to cultivate the ability to be resourceful, but you can give a project to five people and somehow the resourceful person figures out who to find in the organization and in the ecosystem and comes back with the answer every time,” he said. “A bad team member will kill the best technology— fast.”