Why Tech Marketing Fails

Paul Kedrosky at Infectious Greed offers some interesting comments on a recent Gartner Group Interview with Clayton Christensen, the lauded Harvard professor who authored The Innovator's Dilemma. Christensen shares why he thinks marketers wrongly apply consumer products principles to tech markets, leading them to value buyer characteristics over buyer needs -- and leading them to focus on sustaining innovations over disruptive ones.

"At the Harvard Business School, the god of marketing 30 years ago, was a guy named Ted Leavitt, who wrote this article called Marketing Myopia and so on. He taught this in his classes. He said, 'People don't buy a quarter-inch drill. They buy a quarter-inch hole. You've got to study the hole, not the drill. The drill is just a solution for it.'"