Win by reconnecting: Big Bang

Successful channel strategy depends upon a properly connected business network which leverages the strengths of intermediaries and the supplier’s marketing power, argued Andrew Tallian at MarketFrames, drawing on Big Bang, a case study of a major HP product launch.

All too often, this business network becomes disconnected along one or more of three axes: history, strategy and tactics and cooperation with intermediaries. 

There are many symptoms of this. Internal departments start to converge and end up competing to do the same thing. Marketing relapses into a series of tactical exercises with no clear goals. And the dialogue with channel players becomes long-winded and inefficient. 

Firstly, Tallian places an almost mystical faith in the need to reconnect the past with the future: "History has an amazing power which can be redeployed."  However, because many technology companies are forward looking, they fail to use their past strengths. By asking, and answering, basic questions about the company’s business focus and its credentials, HP was able to comprehend just how powerful its position in printers was and build on that strength with Big Bang.

Second, he argues that companies need to reconnect strategy and tactics to ensure the one follows from the other, rather than operating in a void.  Again, the trick was to ask questions centred on the customer.  What symptoms and problems are they seeing, what is our offer and what are the benefits to the customer?

Tallian argues that often the planning process doesn’t fit with, or isn’t feasible in, the outside world.  At this point, the business network – the partnership between the supplier’s different internal divisions and its channel partners – fragments (see diagram).  Most of the benefits, that could accrue, evaporate.

As strategy fails and the business network breaks down, so companies fall back on unimaginative, irrelevant programmes. "With one retailer HP was giving away several pounds of ground beef with every printer sold.  This was a straight discount.  This is the mentality which has to be avoided."

For Tallian the way to avoid this is to rethink goals and to ensure that everyone in the organisation shares the vision.  "Before the network will work properly, it has to be reconnected."