Hi Mary, RE: "It some thing that is much more subtle and much more nuanced - something that engineers are not trained to see."
A CEO doesn't have to be a marketer, but he or she needs to have the skillset to know who to trust on areas they may not be trained in, like protecting the brand which is a marketer's job.
Barrett's an excellent CEO - he has the ability to go after new markets and was instrumental in turning things around in the 80's for Intel - I understand he studied Japanese companies with an intensity in order to determine how Intel could be competitive with them, meanwhile, American auto companies were getting slaughtered with their passiveness.
So, in the big picture of things, Barrett is an excellent CEO because he realizes that taking risk - even with a big company - is better than passivity.
But protecting the brand is important too and having executives underneath them that protect it is key. The source of Itanium's early perception problems is due to the media blitz (published interviews) on Itanium in 1997 that eventually resulted in hurting Intel's brand. The engineering issues weren't really any different than other comparable products in the industry, but the media blitz generated an exciting buzz in the industry and as any good marketer knows, a poorly timed blitz turns into poison that is destructive to the brand. Marketing owns protecting the brand and timing - and that means resisting pressures to blitz before a launch. Maybe it even means reigning things in, quieting things down, or embargo'ing until product is commercially available. Some of the best early phase enterprise marketing is done quietly, behind the scenes at large customers, in a reliable, non-hype fashion.
Blitzing before solid launch is taboo. As you once said, it's all about managing the soft stuff.
Regards,
Amy J |
