May
18
MarketingNREN Services - SURFNet and ARNES
May 18, 2008 |
TNC 2008
SURFNET - Netherlands
Currently product managers are responsible for marketing their services including marketing mix, budgets, encouraging take up etc. Have more recently coordinated comms and marketing work to help consolidate calendars of activity and scheduling.
They are trying to address questions of when in the life cycle comms should be included and what sort of marketing should be considered
ARNES – Slovenia
General attitude has been that they are not selling anything and so they don’t need marketing and anyhow it’s somehow an unclean activity. ARNES only used to appear in the press if there was a major problem. The strategy was more like ‘if we do a good job someone will notice’, and the notion of a strategy form marketing was seen as alien. The result has been that they got some feedback that wasn’t too bad, they have friendly but not professional relations with users and after 16 years they thought that their users still liked them.
But this approach doesn’t scale so ARNES is only in contact with a fraction of its users, they know very little about their users. They became aware that marketing costs and it is difficult to allocate resources and budgets. They currently only have 8000 euros pa (excluding the annual conference)
So they now need to combine the personal touch of the previous approach with some efficient but low costs marketing activity. ARNES now trying t cover some marketing basics within the constraints that they have.
