The indirect conversation

I'm slowly coming round to the fact that it's not always about the product.

I grew up in this field promoting the product. At first I would look long and hard at it, see what it did and didn't do, and draw my own conclusions.

That works for a lot of copywriters and just as many products, but in this business, you soon learn that the product is only half of the equation. IT is a solutions provider and the product sits in the middle of two very powerful forces that interact constantly with one another, pulling and pushing almost until they break.

On the one hand, you have the buying public, real people looking for solutions to very real problems. On the other, you have the sales channel that carefully monitors market trends, listens to feedback, and actively seeks out the most advanced and cost-effective technologies to satisfy an increasingly-demanding market.

When the product and sales channel are separated, each an individual business responding to its own, specific business agenda, the two work together naturally and symbiotically for the greater benefit of both. The result is, to use an age-old expression, bigger than sum of its parts.

It goes without saying that one cannot exist without the other, yet the relationship goes deeper than that. The more the sales channels listen to their customers, the more feedback they give IT vendors, and the more feedback IT vendors receive from the sales channel, the more rapidly and efficiently they can evolve to meet the market's needs.

The shelf life of "advanced" technology today is only as long as the wait for the next leap forward. Just look at how fast integrated webcams appeared on Acer notebooks after Skype made VoIP calls child's play, or how fast wireless connectivity was adopted by both business and home users.

Today's innovation is tomorrow's minimum system requirement.

When you're marketing someone else's product (i.e. not one you dreamt up at night), you inevitably join the conversation at some point in the middle of that tug of war. You have the job of promoting something users have been crying out for while at the same time fuelling the market's desire to pursue innovation.

At Acer, my job is made particularly easy. You see, every time someone purchases an Acer product, they buy it from that same sales channel. This indirect business model gives Acer priceless feedback and a simply unrivalled way to get closer to its customers' needs, and into their thoughts.

Those thoughts go a long way towards shaping the next product, which takes Acer on another significant step in the right direction.

Easy job? Hardly, but the conversation is truly stimulating.