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 Alcatel-Lucent's Market Advantage is a 2008 Winner of the Marketing Excellence Award
Launched in 1998, ITSMA's Marketing Excellence Awards focus on the largest segment technology: services and solutions. The awards program is based on a comprehensive approach to marketing, recognizing that business success today requires marketers to move beyond the traditional realm of communications into such areas as developing new solutions, increasing sales effectiveness and managing the customer experience. The program looks at the three most critical aspects of success: innovation, execution and business results.
Business Challenge
Traditionally, Alcatel-Lucent competed for telecom service provider purchases using
technological arguments. But the high cost and complexity of projects such as converging
voice and data networks have required service providers to be confident that their
investments will attract end users and produce a sufficient ROI quickly.
This required Alcatel-Lucent to look at its customers' customers to identify end-user trends
and refine value propositions to meet the needs of a changing marketplace.
Program Execution
From its inception 10 years ago, the Market Advantage program has built the elements
needed to support customers:
• Market research. Primary market researchers study trends, user data, and regionspecific
end-user preferences for new technologies. Six people are deployed in
this function.
• Customer marketing consultation. A key element has been customer marketing
consultants who develop business cases and go-to-market programs. A dozen
senior consultants are deployed, with a central team focusing on tool development
and a regional team focused on customer deployment and engagement.
• Business modeling. A subset of our Bell Labs business modeling team provides
four highly skilled statisticians to develop models that include payback periods,
ROI, and sensitivity analysis.
• Youth Lab. This is global panel of "millennials" (ages 13-25) helps
identify how young adults are using communications features. Sixty-three of
Alcatel-Lucent service provider customers are engaged.
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