Marketing High Technology

**Author:** William H. Davidow

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:** How to think about technology marketing as strategic warfare, why complete products matter more than clever devices, and how to build market dominance through disciplined segmentation, service, and differentiation.

**Who This Book Is For:** Technology executives, product managers, marketing leaders, entrepreneurs, and anyone responsible for bringing technical products to market in competitive environments.

Most technology companies fail for reasons that have nothing to do with their technology. Their engineers build remarkable devices. Their scientists solve impossible problems. Their products work as designed. Yet the company still loses. The reason is simple. The company never learned how to market. This book exists because the technology industry has spent decades misunderstanding what marketing actually means. Engineers tend to believe that superior technology will naturally win in the marketplace. Build a better mousetrap, the saying goes, and the world will beat a path to your door. But the world rarely behaves this way. Better mousetraps fail every day while inferior products dominate their markets. The problem is not the technology. The problem is the thinking. William H. Davidow spent more than three decades inside the technology industry, first as an executive at Intel during its most formative years, then as a venture capitalist funding hundreds of startups. He watched brilliant companies destroy themselves with naive marketing strategies. He also watched mediocre companies achieve extraordinary success by understanding something their competitors did not. That something is the subject of this book. Marketing, Davidow argues, is not a department. It is not advertising. It is not lead generation or brand awareness or social media presence. Marketing is civilized warfare. It is the process of inventing complete products, driving them to commanding positions in defensible market segments, and defending those positions against relentless competitive attack. The stakes are high. Technology markets move quickly. Winners compound their advantages. Losers fade into irrelevance. The difference between dominance and failure often comes down to a handful of strategic decisions made early in a product's life. Most technology companies struggle with marketing because they approach it as an afterthought. They build the product first, then ask the marketing department to figure out how to sell it. This is backwards. Great products are invented in the marketing department, not the laboratory. The laboratory invents devices. Marketing invents products. A device is a piece of technology. A product is the totality of what a customer buys. It includes the device, yes, but also the service, the support, the distribution channel, the brand reputation, the documentation, the training, and the confidence that the company will stand behind what it sells. Customers do not buy devices. They buy products. This distinction matters…