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Cisco re-orgs marketing to hide the brand, EMPTY YOUR WALLET
Awareness? But everyone knows who we are!
Given a relatively flat few years, it's probably no surprise that Cisco has told the warm bodies in its marketing departments to become cold-blooded revenue-making machines.
Along the way, get ready for The Borg to try to out-Google Google in its data collection.
In a blog post, head of digital transformation and analytics Pascal Lendermann wrote that “the primary responsibility for the Cisco marketing organisation has shifted from brand awareness to revenue generation”.
Which might also be a nice way of saying that since there isn't a single human on Earth with IT purchasing sign-off who doesn't recognise the Cisco brand.
From that point of view – sorry to the world's big ad agencies – a major Cisco consumer TV campaign promising that The Borg can end traffic jams or deliver milk to cats might be considered redundant.
“Web-based marketing is less costly than prime-time television advertising”, he noted.
Instead, decreed Lendermann, marketing and IT have been getting cosy so as to “help customers find relevant information faster than if they had to search for it themselves”.
In other words, if you hit the Cisco website, the Borg wants to apply analytics as fast as possible, in order to put you in front of something to buy.
Put that, for example, into the context of its MaintenanceNet slurp: if Cisco's analytics can tag you as owning a Catalyst switch that's slated on the EOL list, or you have a license that's up for renewal, it should be able to guide you better to a "Click here to issue invoice" button.
“Cisco IT is using big-data analytics to predict which solutions each online visitor is likely to be interested in. Cisco IT plans to collect, store, and analyse this customer data from various sources to identify clusters of interest, such as Cloud, Data Centre, Switches, and Social. Our data sources include search history, webinar registrations, company demographics, and the solutions that other people in the same company are also researching”, Lendermann said. ®
Biting the hand that feeds IT
