May 22, 2016I bumped into an old friend earlier this month at RFID Journal LIVE! 2016, while in the hotel lobby. We chatted a bit about how everything is going for both of us. I asked how his colleague Larry (not his real name) was doing. "Larry got canned," he said.
"Wow," I replied. "He's been with you guys for more than eight years. What happened?"
"Investors were leaning on the CEO to generate faster growth," my friend said. "The CEO had to do something, so Larry was the fall guy."
"This is not a sales problem," I said. "It's a marketing problem."
My friend nodded. "You know that, and I know that, and our CEO knows that," he said. "But the investors don't want to hear that. They want a return on their investment."
I've seen this kind of thing before. Investors back an RFID company and then, when the sales don't suddenly materialize, management comes under pressure to change the marketing approach, marketing personnel or marketing strategy. The problem is that this almost always does more harm than good.
Years ago, when RFID first went into the chasm and news stories turned negative, some vendors shied away from calling themselves RFID vendors. They used vague terms like "sensor networks." I didn't think marketing RFID as sensor networks would boost sales, and history has proved me right.
More recently, I've heard RFID companies calling themselves Internet of Things companies. The IoT is hot right now, so I get the logic. But the IoT is going into the chasm just as RFID did—just as all new technologies do—so it's quite possible that an RFID company could reposition itself as an IoT provider just as that technology goes into the chasm and RFID starts to catch on.
RFID Journal has experimented with different marketing approaches, various business models and so forth, but we have never waivered in our positioning as a provider of information about radio frequency identification and related technologies. There are two reasons for this.
The first is that I have always believed—and continue to believe—that RFID will one day be a very big, important technology that all companies will use. The second is that I read Geoffrey Moore's seminal book on the adoption of new technologies, Crossing the Chasm, and I understand that there is an evolution that new technologies undergo, from entering the chasm to crossing it to reaching mass adoption.
RFID providers that call themselves something other than an RFID company will be unable to capitalize on past successful implementations. You can't talk about a successful RFID deployment if you are positioning yourself as an IoT company.
The key to selling more is to use the success of companies such as lululemon athletica, Delta Air Lines, Johnson Controls and Oracle (all of which presented significant success stories at LIVE! 2016) to convince more businesses that RFID can deliver similar benefits for them. Winning over one new customer at a time helps move the industry toward the tipping point and mass adoption, as does providing solutions that are better, easier to deploy and less expensive.
I know this approach isn't appealing to those eager to achieve a quick ROI. But history has shown that the alternative—floundering around, trying a variety of approaches—will not be successful.
My advice to investors is to remain patient. Give RFID companies the resources they need to develop better products, and market them to businesses likely to adopt within the next 12 months. We know who they are (see A Question of Life or Death for RFID Companies). Then focus on building critical mass. Once we finally get there, the payoff will be significant.
Mark Roberti is the founder and editor of RFID Journal. If you would like to comment on this article, click on the link below. To read more of Mark's opinions, visit the RFID Journal Blog, the Editor's Note archive or RFID Connect.
