More seize the moment marketing from Avaya

A few weeks ago, I blogged about a campaign from Avaya that suggested that using VoIP could recession proof your company.

As I noted in my post, I’m all in favor of capitalizing on things that are happening in the real world if your products and services can actually do something about them. (Gosh, I almost wrote “capitalizing on exogenous events”. The hazards of being married to an economist.) However, I don’t think it makes much sense and, in fact, undermines your credibility, when you overstate your claims about just how much your product/service can actually do about the current event. Thus, VoIP can be a money saver - always good in a recession - but it can’t exactly recession-proof your company.

Well, Avaya’ and Polycom came back again with another ‘ripped from the headlines’ approach. This time it was “Mitigate the Impact of Pandemic Risk in Your Enterprise,” a webinar held earlier this week during which attendees could learn:

• A/H1N1 swine influenza and its impact on your business
• Implications of “social distancing” requirements and the role of technology
• How to mitigate risk to employees and customers with mobile and virtual access to stay productive
• Where to start, and what to know when developing contingency/emergency preparedness plans

Now, disaster recovery is not a terrible reason for looking at conferencing/collaboration solutions, but I would say it’s way down on the list, well below everyday reasons like saving time, saving money, saving on travel wear-and-tear, enabling groups to easily work together. DR may be in the queue, but it’s not at the head of it. But the real backfire here is centering the event on the swine flu, which, let’s face it, has fortunately been something of a non-event. Maybe Avaya and Polycom know something that we don’t know, and that in a few weeks we’ll all be sitting in our homes wearing surgical masks and boiling our fingers after we touch anything or anyone, but at this point swine flu fear is a non-starter. (Not to mention, how, exactly, do you “learn” “A/H1N1 swine influenza”. I might not mind learning about it, but I actually don’t want to learn it.)

The caution here is: when you jump on something that’s a raging concern, you better hope it will still be a raging concern once you’ve launched your program, or you’ll end up looking a little foolish.

I think they could have made swine flu a talking point, as in “as we saw from the recent swine flu response in Mexico, can things can quickly shut down”. But making it a centerpiece? Didn’t quite do it for me.

————————————————————————————————————————————————-

Thanks, again, to Opinionated Marketer forever/marketer par excellence John Whiteside for sending this along to me. Keep ‘em coming.

---

Did you enjoy this post? Why not leave a comment below and continue the conversation, or subscribe to my feed and get articles like this delivered automatically each day to your feed reader. If you don't have a feed reader, you can always have these articles delivered to your email inbox every day. Click here to sign up.

The Opinionated Marketers | Powered by WordPress | ElegantBlue is a custom theme by Nathan Rice