High Technology Marketing Part 3

High investments in research and development

Percentage of spend on R&D by telecom service providers is 2% in 2001 and on telecom equipment manufacturers is 9%.

Market specificity

In the telecom sector or rather any technology sector one can indicate that when dealing with an advanced technology product, specific markets should be approached first, particularly, markets that consider performance to be the most important criterion when purchasing a product. E.g. when Nokia introduced its E series handsets it was targeting only the business users who could leverage on the various features of the phone including the easy to email application and a real internet browser. Similarly the N gage was made especially for the particular gaming segments of the students who were hooked on to gaming.

A key success factor on this market is to use marketing strategy actively to leverage their intellectual properties and patents.e.g. Qualcommm. Qualcomm was the company that developed the CDMA technology. And now any where in the world, when this technology is to being used by any operators they have to pay a huge sum as royalty to Qualcomm. Hence Qualcomm has made the huge profits by not only developing the technology but also protecting the patent and making money out of it as well.

Product Diversity in Telecommunication Sector

The DWDM system used in the exchanges is used to connect two cities and the instrument that are used to connect two people is the telephone. Hence marketing of the DWDM would be an industrial marketing subject while that of the telephone would be consumer marketing subject. Telephone can also be called as a high technology product because more and more innovations and new features are being added to the telephone and is being compact day by day e.g. TATA Indicom WLL phones are having features like sms, ringtones, internet etc. this TATA phone connects to the nearest exchange to the DWDM systems for connecting to different cities. Also the phones developed by Siemens have the capacity of connecting the entire office with a single phone using PBX.