Hi Joe: I saw this article regarding John Slitz and his marketing program...(December 10, 1997)
HONG KONG, CHINA, 1997 DEC 10 (NB) -- By Larry Campbell, IT Daily. In a move that sees more marketing decentralization from its US headquarters, networking giant Novell [NASDAQ:NOVL] is ear-marking millions of US dollars for advertising that is specific to regions, "and even down to individual countries."
Poking fun at Novell's so-called "stealth marketing" - an internal joke about its lack of advertising in the face of increasing efforts by the likes of Microsoft - Novell Asia Pacific Vice President Arthur Ehrlich said 1998 would see massive global, regional and local campaigns targeting chief information officers and CEOs.
"There'll be nothing in the ads that will be totally US," he said,
adding that local country operations would have the freedom to
substitute material in their campaigns at will. Ehrlich zeroed in on
Novell's recent "Rock The Net" advertising campaign as an example of a
marketing effort "everyone outside the US hated."
"It was conceived in the US, designed in the US and foisted on the rest of us," he said.
Novell's new head of marketing, John Slitz, was specifically planning
things differently for 1998, with more attention being paid to reaching the decision makers reading financial and trade journals rather then lifestyle publications, he said. At the same time, Novell would be reducing its participation in events such as exhibitions and trade shows to "do fewer things but better," Ehrlich said.
Events such as Novell Brainshare - which Ehrlich was attending in
Beijing when he spoke to Newsbytes - would continue, but its
participation in the likes of Comdex would be cut back. The latter
particularly since it was very expensive and visitors had a notoriously low attention span, he said.
Besides boosting its marketing efforts in Asia, Ehrlich said Novell was becoming increasingly flexible in its pricing policies to sustain
business in the face of the region's economic downturn. While demand for the company's products have remained high throughout Asia despite
Novell's policy of billing customers in US dollars, the firm was
offering some key customers in Thailand, for example, "some pricing
relief."
"We are looking to have a different policy for each country," Ehrlich
said, but added prices could not be dramatically different from country to country or grey marketeers would take advantage of the situation to parallel import products.
Reported by Newsbytes News Network newsbytes.com.
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Should we be surprised?
EKS |
