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's 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's 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's 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's 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.