Honest Marketing for SOA? Naah lets go cosmetic

Via Mr Creswell I picked up on a new set of posts around "Honest Marketing" and it made me think again about the best way to market a service. I still think its critical to market from the consumers perspective but quite clearly there are two choices here

1. Market honestly and say just what it does
2. Do Air Canada poor marketing
3. Go Cosmetic on the marketing

Now the later is best exemplified by the people at Clarins with their "Faraday Cage in a bottle" which is really just a water spray, but they couldn't charge £25 ($500) for it if they just said it did that.

Now the point here is that the problem that Air Canada have is that they are marketing something very direct, its real and its obvious, therefore its really hard to make up silly things and have them relevant. With the cosmetics industry however its all pretty much the same set of products so they need to make up for that with impressive marketing claims.

So which one will SOA fall into? We already know that Software vendors, particularly those in the Pacific North West, tend to make exaggerated claims of what their products can achieve, and I think that SOA is going to be the same.

You have a choice of two credit card clearing companies, one says "we clear credit card payments and do some minor fraud detection" the other says "using advanced einsteinium processors we analyse credit card payments for irregular heuristically defined patterns and give you the piece of mind that all credit card payments are processed without being tested on animals". Now if you are smart you'll just pick the first one, but how many people will do that? After all the interface is the same, the ingredients are the same, the result is the same... but one has a marketing budget, probably some pictures, and seems to promise a bit more.

IT is littered with these sorts of claims "the end of programming", "business people directly developing complex systems using a point and click interface", "Perl for all your enterprise needs", "Secure PHP", "Parallel computing made easy", "backed by our expert support team", "its all XML so there is no programming", "J2EE is dead", etc etc. There is really no reason to think that SOA and SaaS will change it.

Now this pessimism means that there is only one logical position to hold, namely that some other bugger will use the Clarins' marketing people, so you'd better get in there first....

SOA not only transforms your business and IT to be more efficient, more effective and more enjoyable, it also makes you feel younger, reduces your risk of heart disease, makes you more attractive and reduces your carbon emissions.

Honest marketing is a good idea in principle, but when has IT demonstrated any of those?

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