A Message from the Wayback Machine

By Geoffrey Moore

Author – The Infinite Staircase: What the Universe Tells Us About Life, Ethics, and Mortality

Regis McKenna ’s The Regis Touch was first published in 1985.  It more or less created the discipline of high-tech marketing.  For those of you who weren’t around at the time, let me recap its core theme and how it applies as much today as it did then.

High-tech buying decisions, particularly ones that come early in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, entail risks.  Promotional messages celebrating the virtues of the new product, while compelling to technology enthusiasts and visionaries, do not address pragmatist buyers’ concerns about these risks.  Instead, they want to hear from credible references about their experiences. 

Here’s how this plays out in a typical high-tech product launch.

• Prospective buyers get much of their information from the media.  Technical buyers gravitate toward technical media while executive management looks to the business press.  Insight #1: Brief the business press in advance of approaching your prospective buyers.
• The press, too wants to check in with credible references—that’s a key part of their job.  Technical writers seek out influencers and industry analysts, whereas business writers turn to opinion leaders and financial analysts.  Both are trying to assess the current adoption state of the category—is it safe to buy now?  Insight #2: Brief the analysts before you brief the press so that they can present your story in its best light.
• Analysts in turn (OK, you can see where this is going, but in 1985 it truly was a revelation) want to talk to reference customers as well as other players in the industry who may be partnering with you to provide the whole product.  Insight #3: Brief your partners and line up your reference customers before you brief the analysts. 
• Finally, customers and partners get most of their information from your market-facing employees, with the systems engineers taking the lead on the technical side, the account executives on the business side.  Getting them all on the same page with your new story is critical to ensure that it is coherent, not garbled.  Insight #4: Internal communications should precede external communications.

Regis put all this together in an actionable framework he called the Infrastructure Model.  Here is a version I have used in the past:

The whole point of this model is that prospective buyers work their way down the triangle to help validate their buying decisions.  To ensure they get the kind of reinforcement they need, vendors need to work their way up the same triangle.  This is how you organize a product launch calendar.

The challenge with this approach is that technology markets can evolve so quickly, it often feels like there is not enough time to do this right.  If you skip over one or more rows in the triangle, however, you create credibility gaps.  These gaps may not be show-stoppers, but they are almost certain to be show-delayers, and in a fast-moving market, that is just another way to die.

So, as the Italian proverb advises, Festina lente!  Make haste slowly.  Each product launch gives you one—and only one—chance to make a first impression.  Taking your time to make sure you have your ducks in a row can be unnerving, but wasting a product launch is much worse.

That’s what I think.  What do you think?

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