Martin May, African Director at Enterasys, says, "With the IT market dropping off so drastically in the last two years market spend has decreased. This has forced marketing to hit twice the amount of mind share with half the budget."
Enterasys own a game lodge out in the Brits area. This is nothing new in business circles but May says that Enterasys are the first Networking Vendor to go this route.
The lodge has proved useful as a venue for training as well as brainstorm sessions with both resellers and business partners. But the weekends at the lodge became very much the same old routine for Enterasys employees and May decided to add something a little different into the mix.
A band called Nevermind was invited out to the lodge and kicked up such a storm of a party that May decided to brand the band. Hence the band became Enterasys and are receiving assistance with cutting a CD as well as getting corporate gigs.
The company are now getting branding with their name reaching a part of the community they never reached before. The band play to anything between 200 and 1000 people per week.
A further piece in the ongoing marketing jigsaw puzzle was the donation of 5 million US Dollars worth of equipment to the Nelson Mandela Children's Trust. This is in the form of a roll out with which Enterasys hope to build 250 community centre IT training facilities across previously disadvantaged areas.
Obviously there is a return for the company as they will take the cream of graduates and bring them into company and industry structures. By assisting the next generation with Enterasys, the company is also achieving further branding in an even younger market segment than the band is reaching.
"This is evidence of our allegiance to South Africa," says May, "as IT infrastructure and skills are desperately needed if Africa is to make NEPAD a workable venture."
According to Bronwen Kausch, who heads up Innovative Media Productions and currently handling PR for Enterasys, says, "The marketing mix which Enterasys has thrown together has given us the opportunity to move laterally with the exposure we create for them."
"Working with a team that moves quickly with ideas has proved to be quite a challenge. Enterasys are constantly pushing boundaries and as their media strategists we have to work hard to make sure there are enough avenues and ideas from our side to compliment and direct their business strategy."
Marketing plans and mixes are by their nature very relative and afford a variety of different perspectives. To succeed there must be elements of continuity as well as an appreciation for the dynamic and changing nature of business.
For this writer the key elements that emerge from the Enterasys battle plan are investment and focus. May talks continuously of marketing in relation to investment thereby stressing a quantifiable return on expenditure.
By stressing the word branding to describe the marketing strategy, May also shows where the marketing focus lies and why there is a continuity as well as a dynamic built in to the Enterasys approach.
