Strategic Marketing for High Technology Products : An Integrated Approach

This book delimits the concept of high technology and explores the characteristics of high-tech markets and the high-tech environment, with the ultimate goal of contributing to the formulation of effective new processes for product development and launching to the market, in the high-tech context. It highlights and promotes the integrated functional department approach, especially in relation to R&D and Marketing, It outlines and classifies the specific qualities and characteristics of the high-tech sector, while accommodating their use within the context of strategic marketing management and adopts a marketing oriented approach (consumer oriented, market oriented and competition oriented).

In order for High Technology (HT) companies to tackle contemporary demanding market challenges, they frequently deploy time-reduction strategies with respect to product launch. Marketing of technology related products – and especially cutting edge ones – involves a complex and multidimensional bundle of specific and unique characteristics, such as the complexity of products, the intensity of the competition, confusion and/ or fear of adoption among consumers, fast pacing changes in the external environment. The very nature of the interrelations that evolve as part of the dynamic process of strategy formulation contributes further to the formulation of a very challenging environment which is described as tumultuous, volatile and turbulent. These specific features, qualities and characteristics constitute the core of the innate need for an integrated approach that requires and depends on the cooperation and coordination of specific functional competencies. This book employs a systemic approach that accommodates the integration of specialized departmental capabilities as a fundamental prerequisite and a cornerstone for the successful navigation of high-tech organizations in their extremely competitive environments.

It provides a solid and extant context of compact and consistent cognitive background that is specific to the HT strategic marketing field, and a strategic tool that utilizes, relies and is built on the turbulent environment of HT rather than just overlooking, avoiding or ignoring it, and that assumes a proactive point of view, capitalizing on characteristics specific to this field, through the provision of a strategic managerial and marketing model that is overlaid onto a reliably assessed foundation of dynamic qualities, with a long-term orientation and scope, albeit one that would be easy to apply and which will generate immediate results.