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| December 1991 | ||||||
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| WSJ ads test OOP strategy by Eliot Bergson Mountain View, CA: NeXT Computer unveiled a new, two-tier advertising and marketing strategy in October and November specifically designed to "leverage on the media Apple and IBM have gotten" from their recent announcement to develop an object-oriented operating system, according to Karen Steele, NeXT's marketing/communications manager. Previous advertising efforts centered on the arrival of new products for the NeXT, such as WordPerfect or the Motorola 68040 chip. The current strategy, developed and implemented with CKS Partners in San Francisco, focuses on the NeXTstep user interface, which allows users to develop custom, object-oriented applications in a very short time. In the first phase, ads that ran for six weeks in the Wall Street Journal targeted decision-makers in business and finance. "We're building an awareness campaign, awareness through viability. We have customers with success stories, and we want to get that out," said Steele. The ads included an 800 number readers could call for more information. Callers are told of a series of seminars, scheduled through resellers and regional sales offices, to give potential customers hands-on experience with the machine. The strategy seems to be paying off. "About 40 percent of our calls are what we call "qualified leads," customers ready to buy within the next three months," said Steele. "We're getting responses in financial services, higher education, government, publishing. . . even legal and medical are up." The second phase of the campaign was launched in mid-November. Ads targeting programmers and MIS managers appeared in Unix Today, Communications World, and PCWeek, specifically designed to "go into the details of object-oriented programming for those who understand it best," said Steele. | ||||||