Intersection innovation

PASSING THROUGH: Mohanbir Sawhney

Brands are about consistency, technology about change, say traditionalists, and never the twain shall meet. This is precisely what makes Mohanbir Sawhney such a sought-after professor. And so it was while he breezed in from Chicago on 7 October to address an All India Management Association (AIMA) convention in Delhi, before flying off to Zurich.

Officially, Sawhney is the McCormick Tribune professor of technology at the Kellogg School of Management, Chicago. But being the IIT-IIM-Wharton man he is, his mind operates in the intersection of technology and marketing.

Not only does he cheerfully reconcile the two via his Vector of Differentiation (think Apple's user-friendliness, a transcendental attribute), he likes to focus on branding power unique to technology markets.

Thanks to negligible variable costs of software replication and the resultant winner-takes-all characteristic of the competition scenario, "You need to establish standard based dominance." This means that winning mindshare precedes winning market share.

Which means holding aloft a vision "" "to mobilise the entire eco-system" "" that goes hand-in-hand with one's internal strategic intent. "It's Proto-marketing: Marketing Ahead of Markets," he says, citing the title of his forthcoming book.

"You need to brand a vision." Like Oracle and Sun tried with Network Computers (NCs), and Sony is trying now with Blu-Ray, though Sawhney's current favourite seems to be Salesforce.com's pitch of software as service. "It's the 'uncola' position," observes Sawhney, "even its toll-free number is 1-800-NO-SOFTWARE."

The marketing tools of proto-marketing are different, involving plenty of evangelism, and if the idea is disruptive, then it takes more than a little nerve to see through, since the resistance will understandably be intense.

Established brands, though, need not fear an instant erosion of profitability if they command reasonable presence in consumer mindspace.

Take Google, the most fascinating brand emergence of recent years. "It's not the best search engine," shrugs Sawhney, "but it's a brand." It makes all the difference in the market out there. Say "search", and Google springs to mind.

Likewise, for "processors", it's Intel. The world's No 1 chip-maker has responded to market flux by switching vectors. Intel has switched, over the Millennium, from faster clock speed as a differentiator to end-user benefits entailed in such innovations as duo-core (think logic gate logic at the transistor and chip-design levels).

And what about Indian tech brands? Well, so far, their vision has been recessed, this largely being a low-margin industry of suppliers, but at least they have switched from simple labour arbitrage to knowledge-process domains, even research and analytics (R&A).

"On the curve of four Ps "" people, processes, projects and products "" Indian firms are somewhere in the middle. But to bring down variable costs, they need to productise."

American software packages, meanwhile, are sweating to ward off commoditisation.

Is that a brand game opportunity?