Las citas en el proceso de comunicación científica

In our proprietary version of the influencer marketing model, we call the marketing with influencers step Recruit. The idea was that firms Marketing with influencers 125

would enlist the services or input of influencers and embed them in marketing output. So we were using the term Recruit in its loosest form. It turns out that we were more prescient that we thought.

Recruiting influencers onto your payroll is a pretty good way of embedding them in your markets, as well as your strategy and oper-ations too.

Recruiting influencers happens all the time. In 2005 the top influencer in the Business Intelligence (BI) software market was Howard Dresner.

Dresner was a Gartner vice-president and research fellow, meaning that he was extremely influential inside Gartner as well as outside.

He was so influential that he is credited with coining the term BI that defined the market. As such, he was courted by the BI software vendors:

as Dresner himself said at the time, ‘I’m well acquainted with the strengths and weaknesses of every company in the field’. In October 2005, Dresner left Gartner to join Hyperion, a major player in the BI market.

Hyperion’s competitors were livid. The other top players had invested considerable time and budget in briefing Dresner on their future plans and strategy, giving intimate details of their product’s architecture and design.

In a trice, this valuable competitive information was in the hands of their major competitor.

Now, issues of commercial confidentiality notwithstanding (and we’ve no reason to think that Mr Dresner betrayed any confidences), we think Hyperion (now part of Oracle) pulled off a coup. It hired the most influential person in the industry, continued to benefit from his wisdom and insight and removed the prospect of Dresner influencing the market in favour of a competitor. And while Dresner’s influence in the market has undoubtedly diminished, because he now lacks independence and has a vested interest, he remains influential to some degree and 100 per cent in Hyperion’s favour.

Another example of recruiting an influencer is Huawei’s hiring of Mick Reeve as an advisor and public representative. Reeve had been group technology officer at BT until his retirement in 2006. He carried huge influence in the European telecoms market, sitting on the boards of important industry forums (including the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). On the other hand, Huawei is something of an upstart in the telecoms equipment market. It has grown quickly from its Chinese roots to be a substantial player in the global market, yet a low-cost tag still sticks. It needed to enhance its credibility with phone companies and large corporates. Hiring a senior specialist gives them the insight and profile they desire.

Key points in this chapter

1. Embed influencers’ messages in your marketing collateral. It has a greater chance of reaching your market, of it being heard and of it being believed.

2. Align your influencer-led collateral with sales objections. Do this by eliciting your typical objections, creating counter-arguments, then mapping appropriate influencers to those counter-arguments. Try to use a broad spread of influencers, so as to keep them fresh.

3. Influencer-led collateral can include pre-existing material, so it can be cheap to gather. This can include articles, books, webcasts and so on.

It does not have to have your brand on it. But pay attention to copyright and such like. If in doubt, ask.

Case Study H – a top three mobile handset manufacturer De-risking a product launch

The mobile handset market is fiercely competitive, nowhere more so than in the business sector. Phenomenally successful in the consumer marketplace, a top three mobile handset manufacturer is fighting hard to displace a competitor as the enterprise market leader. The firm had developed an innovative device capable of defeating its rival in a features battle. But perception is everything, and the firm had relatively weak awareness amongst its target business customers.

Influencer50 was commissioned to identify those individuals most influencing the enterprise sector in Germany, in readiness for the firm’s forthcoming new product line. Influencer50 worked together with the firm’s global marketing agency, which was responsible for all aspects of the company’s WOM go-to-market strategy.

The research uncovered the huge influence and buying power exerted by Germany’s government-housed Ministry for Economy and Technology and the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft research facility.

Corporates were shown to follow the buying advice of such groups to a far higher degree than in the UK or US. With the growing trend for large organisations to outsource their IT infrastructure, the systems integrators were seen to be increasingly influencing the bulk purchasing of smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDAs). And not just the major SIs, but many niche or ‘boutique’ firms. In contrast, infrastructure

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giants such as IBM and HP, trade magazines and industry analysts exerted less than expected influence.

Using this insight, the firm targeted the top 100 influencers on business-orientated handsets in Germany. It sent each influencer a pre-launch handset and supporting material. It also created an online forum to gather influencers’ views on the product’s feature-set, price-points, launch strategy and choice of resellers. Using the forum, influ-encers could contribute their own experiences and suggestions, and see the opinions and comments from other influencers.

The feedback was used to make last stage modifications to the device, to the user documentation and to the launch strategy. Importantly, high visibility of the handset was established within the influencer community.

Influencers had trialled the product, fed back on its capabilities and each had read the inputs of the wider influencer group.

The firm was able to launch the new handset into a market whose influencers were already aware of it and its features. These influencers started influencing the market, and the handset sold quickly and in volume.

As the firm’s spokesperson commented, ‘The addition of influencer identification and marketing into our WOM rollout campaign for the new handset has been invaluable. We could already target our expected consumer-base through our ongoing marketing, but identifying and working with the top-tier of market influencers was beyond our reach – and we knew it’.

Importantly, identifying and targeting influencers had substantially lowered the risk in launching the handset. Mobile devices are expensive to develop and market launch is a critical point in the commercial success, or otherwise, of each product. Pre-influencing a market prior to launch minimised the risk to the firm and underpinned a successful product release.

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Evaluating influencer