Technology and Your Business Image

Technology doesn’t only play a role in your company’s productivity or in the services your company sells. How you use technology plays a role in your company’s image as well. The role it plays and the impact on your business depends on what your company does.

Marketing specialists will tell you that marketing material must be sensitive to the target market. How you represent your company in the marketplace takes into account how and when your market seeks what your company sells, and what they expect to see. Your image is also built on whether or not your market perceives that you understand them. To put it bluntly, you’ve got to demonstrate that you belong in that market space.

All this is also true for companies that do business with or in a technology industry. But since technology is so often a poorly understood field, it’s no surprise that many companies also misunderstand the expectations and sensitivities of the technology marketplace. The relationship between technology and your company’s image is just as important as your company’s logo. In fact, in some respects, if you are marketing to or in the technology market, how your company uses technology can be more important to your image than the name or logo.

For example, a technology company seeking an accounting firm probably doesn’t care as much about the firm’s logo as it does about whether the company can communicate with their accountant via email. A firm that doesn’t use email is nonetheless sending a message to the tech company that they may not fully appreciate their needs.

There are several aspects of technology’s role in your marketing strategy that are easy to address, not very expensive, and hugely reflective of your image in the technology marketplace. Although many of these examples relate to the Internet side of technology, there are other technologies that play a part in building your company’s image.

If your company advises other companies on marketing and selling on the Internet, what does it say about your company if you don’t have your own domain name? (That’s the ".com" part of a website or email address.) What does it say about your experience with the Internet if your email address is "wehelpyoursales29854@PROVIDERNAME.com" ? Not having your own domain and/or using your Internet provider’s email address conveys that you don’t know much about marketing on the Internet.

Why? Because someone in such a business is expected by the marketplace to know about the costs, complexities, and issues with regard to being on the Internet. By not dealing with an Internet presence themselves, it’s hard to take such a company seriously. Thus, their image is that they probably don’t understand what needs to be understood about marketing on the Internet. Furthermore, the image of using a provider’s email address instead of your own domain is that you don’t even know enough about the Internet to use your own address. This is a sure fire way to turn off prospects in the very field you’re trying to market into.

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All Contents © Copyright Entinex, Inc. All rights reserved. These works may be freely reproduced, distributed, or transmitted solely for non-commercial, personal, or educational purposes, provided that they are not modified and any reproduction or transmission contains this copyright notice and the author’s complete bio and company information as provided. Nothing else may otherwise be used, reproduced, published, or disseminated without prior written permission.

By Hillel Glazer, © 2003 Entinex, Inc.