One of the most telling indicators of the tech industry's entry into the age of natural monopoly-driven asymmetric marketers is today's announcement that Comdex is no more (at least for the time being). As someone who started attending Comdex in 1982 while I was still in corporate marketing at AT&T, I have to say that I will miss having an excuse to go to Las Vegas and behave badly, stay up all night, and inadequately shave an entire side of my face prior to a client meeting the next morning.
The decline and ultimate 2004 cancellation of Comdex is really a metaphor for the revolution underway in technology marketing, a revolution I refer to as asymmetric marketing. Like the revolution underway in the modern military of many nations, the revolution in marketing is culture and technology driven and focused on recovering from the destructive consequences of the tech bubble, while learning from and applying the best practices of natural monopoly market warriors like Microsoft, eBay, Cisco, Intel, and others in order to pre-emptively lock-in customers and lock-out competitors.
In this context, the diminished value of an event like Comdex is self-evident. Let's look at a few things asymmetric marketers and emergent market insurgents are doing with their marketing dollars and the human bandwidth of their sales, biz dev and marketing teams.
1. Customer & Ecosystem Conferences: Asymmetric marketers don't like sharing the attention of their prospects and customers with competitors. They invest in their own customer and partner ecosystem conferences where they can advance their own agenda and attempt to gain forward revenue visibility from key customers and partners. Even market leaders in relatively mature market segments engage in this practice, e.g. Phoenix Technologies, a leader in the PC and device firmware market. It allows them to meet regularly with key accounts, capture attendee trend data and consolidate their position in the ecosystem.
2. eBusiness Networks: Asymmetric marketers invest in e-business and e-commerce to maintain both direct and indirect relationships. They enable channel partners to login to secure 24/7 support sites, hold conversations with other partners, and provide a 1:1 framework for locking in a key relationship. Here's a link to Intel's Channel Partner website, one of the core exhibitors of Comdex for years who dropped out of the expo recently.
3. Web Conferencing: Webex' ongoing success and Microsoft's acquisition of Placeware are due primarily to the upsurge in usage of online conferencing tools by sales, marketing and service organizations. With frequent webinars on every conceivable topic, why do I need to sit in a room at Comdex and listen to a digital pundit when I can do it over the web while I'm actually multitasking and working on something else. Better use of human bandwidth.
4. Preware: The sales models of many companies in the software industry have been turned on their heads by the native ability of the web to deliver downloads of software, and trial subscriptions to web services on the Saleforce.com model. I call it 'preware', i.e. an inversion of traditional sales model from 'sell/distribute' to 'distribute/sell'. With pre-ware, you can pre-prove your product ROI and don't need a mega-show like Comdex to sign up a bunch of 'resellers'. Comdex, by the way, originally stood for 'Computer Dealer Expo', i.e. Comdex for short.
5. Continuous eMail Conversations: Legitimate email marketers and their service providers can maintain opt-in conversations with customers and prospects and gain valuable feedback that goes right back into a CRM database to create a continuously refreshed profile. How relevant is a really good looking 'booth babe' from a Las Vegas agency in that context. OK, I take that back. But seriously, this age of web-based market conversations is a gigantic 'creative destruction' wakeup call for folks in the general purpose marketing events business.
Asymmetric marketing has come of age, but I will miss the look-alike models at Comdex. Oh well there's always CES.
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