Hello Maurice,
/"I know Autodesk Marketing is often hard to fathom"/ Then you (AD) have
a serious comunication problem.
The way AD advertise on SI just creates a panic climate. I'm not sure
this will increase the sells.
All your ways of communicating on SI looks like you're going to
interrupt it (Less visibility, minimizing it's capabilities, proposing
it as a third party software, firing off some of its "iconic" developers).
SI is not half package. It's complete. It's scalable and self sufficient.
My 2 euro cents
Le 12/09/2012 01:07, Maurice Patel a écrit :
Rolling up my sleeves :)
If you don't know me, I (still) head Product/Industry Marketing for M&E and
have posted a couple of times on the forum about our strategy.
First. I'd like to respond to the link to the campaign item that started this
thread http://yfrog.com/h0t6exxtj:
Although I can't say I am particularly fond of that diagram myself (it's rather
ugly), it actually came out of a study commissioned from a third party research
company that hired 3ds Max and Maya animators to evaluate what (if any) value
Softimage, MotionBuilder and Mudbox offered to Maya and 3ds Max users as a
means of determining the value of Suites - so we used it in the Suites Campaign.
The specific purpose of the campaign is to encourage 3ds max and Maya users to
buy Suites; so yes it focuses only on the areas of these applications that
offer significant value above and beyond what Maya and 3ds max can already do.
It is not meant to be an exhaustive description of those applications
capabilities.
I know Autodesk Marketing is often hard to fathom - heck it is for us too, but
if we want Softimage to survive we (the marketing team) need to work with the
system not against it. We are not going run a campaign to switch Maya or 3ds
max users to Softimage - that would kill our business and create a massive
customer outcry for no real gain. Any expectation that we would do that is
unrealistic. So, if we are not going to do that, then we need to find a better
way to get people to adopt Softimage and, while not perfect, Suites has been
our best bet yet.
Given that, take a pause and ask objectively "where is Autodesk's real opportunity
here?" Is it to run a campaign encouraging Softimage users to add Maya (or 3ds max)
to their toolset? Or vice versa? Which would (1) be the better business decision and (2)
get Softimage in the hands of more users?
You will probably reach the same conclusion we did.
In terms of overall exposure, I am not going to deny that Softimage is less visible than
when it was part of Avid. Then Softimage was run as its own entity and there was 100% focus
on one(ish) product (ish because there was actually a few more than one). That is not the
case now. Autodesk runs its business pretty much as one centralized operation for the sale
of efficiency and scale and so M&E competes with hundreds of other Autodesk products
for mind share when it comes to marketing investment and visibility - and M&E is not
the largest part of Autodesk's business. This dictates exactly how much coverage M&E
gets and how many and what products we can feature on things like the home page. Oddly
enough though, the bulk of our web traffic actually goes directly to the product pages so
it can be argued that this specific point is moot anyway. But yes, visibility is reduced
and suffers as a function of a given product's ranking in the Autodesk product stack.
Believe me, I have similar discussions with Flame users who also believe we
have abandoned marketing Flame. Deep down most of this is related to our
centralized marketing processes discussed above and not to any individual. This
is not going to change nor is it clear that any alternative could be successful
and/or profitable. Or at least not in the sense one might expect. In the long
run Suites and Cloud Services are changing the way Autodesk views products but
not in the traditional sense. My team's constant challenge is therefore to
figure out how to increase visibility within the systems we have - be it
through more aggressive social media strategies (why we launched the Softimage
Facebook page) or other methods. While the good old days have nostalgic value
(and yes we remember when Discreet Logic had its own website, as did Alias and
Softimage, with their own dedicated Marketing resources), we have long realized
we can never go back to those days. The battles have moved on to new
battlefields - but it does continue!
Maurice
Maurice Patel
Autodesk : Tél: 514 954-7134
