Breaking Through The Brick Wall - Using An Interdisciplinary Strategy To Market High-Tech Products

Marketing high-Tech products poses challenges to classically trained marketers who may be unfamiliar with a product\u27s underlying science or technology. Often such marketing teams, lacking scientific backgrounds, find it particularly difficult to interface with R&D and truly understand a product\u27s inner workings - something we show to be critical to fully assessing a product for effective differentiation and marketing. By utilizing a novel marketing strategy, the Interdisciplinary Strategic Marketing Framework, we show the need to hire interdisciplinarians - marketers with science backgrounds - to champion marketing teams which are able to overcome the R&D-To-Marketing communicative brick wall and delve into a product\u27s technology, such that it can be marketed most effectively, fully assessing all potential science-based and classical aspects of a marketing campaign. Provided within the framework is a strategy for organizing a firm\u27s marketing functionaries (possibly even integrating them into product development), and a system with which the (interdisciplinarian) marketer can efficiently categorize high-Tech products, as well as corresponding methodologies which with to approach differentiating and marketing high-Tech products. An illustrative consulting case is also included to demonstrate an application of the marketing methodologies. © 2011 World Scientific Publishing Company