Juniper has a link on its Web site that encourages buyers with a proposal from Cisco to submit it to Juniper for, ostensibly, a better deal. This is how an interesting video interview of Juniper CMO Lauren Flaherty with Forbes begins…
From there, Flaherty goes into the challenges of a David marketing against a Goliath, how she can bring her experience at IBM (and Nortel?) to bear, and how, in these challenging times, companies like hers must stress value over anything else.
Technology-driven companies like Juniper usually have little marketing success, despite — in Juniper’s case — market success. Juniper’s enterprise business looks to be marketing challenged right now; and consider the marketing plights of technology-rich companies from the past, like Digital Equipment and Cabletron. Granted, other missteps played larger roles in eventually killing these companies — but so too did an inability to market what many believed was superior technology to the market leader’s. We’re not implying that Juniper is heading that way, quite the contrary; all we’re saying is that marketing doesn’t come very easily to technology-driven companies.
So here’s wishing Ms. Flaherty and her charges much success. They made the right call in killing those obnoxious comics. But they still have their work cut out for them, if history (and Juniper’s enterprise business) is any indication.
Then again, it seems Juniper’s technology sells itself. Maybe they can do without an army of slicked up hunks and hotties finessing us with platitudinal markety double speak. That would be a refreshing deviation in and of itself.
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