Last week the Sunday NY Times Real Estate section ran a story Adjectives get Evicted, which described how the language is changing in real estate based on the economic climate:
Not only are there fewer buyers today, but they are more apt to have a yard sale attitude, demanding sharp discounts on top of reduced prices… The new propriety frowns at luxury, lifestyle and the fetishistic focus on designer brands… Instead, brokers say they are trying to recast their listings in terns of responsible spending, comfort, and most especially, value.
CFO Magazine covered the fact that it is now a buyer’s market in IT, in the article Have they Got a Deal for You.
So perhaps we can draw an analogy between what is happening is housing (and more broadly, the economy) and the state of marketing related to the glass house, or data center and other IT technologies.
I blogged last November (A New Mood in Tech PR) that tech marketers need to revise their messages in line with the tenor of the day.
Tricking out lavish new data centers is out, making the most out of your current IT assets, in.
The focus is no longer on pushing the envelope, it is now on protecting what you have and cutting costs.
Protecting data and applications is Job 1, ambitious development projects with no immediate benefit are out.
Power saving and green is in.
Soft benefits are out, and so are nice-to-haves that might seem extravagant like scalability and speed for the sake of scalability and speed.
As we move from the data center to the front office, news articles have been looking askance at Web 2.0 plays that have no apparent business model or hard benefits for enterprise users. Now is a great time for companies in this space to be focusing on cases that do show hard benefits like increased sales and customer satisfaction, and emphasizing these attributes in their messages.
