Smart Services Adopters are Bullish on Brand

If product support is going to fulfill its promise of providing an OEM with new competitive advantage, then the brand must embody the service message. To make certain that a new Smart Services offering is favorably received in target markets, most OEMs would be well-served to organize a cross-functional brand strategy team – comprised of representatives from marketing, service, and sales – tasked with determining the most effective packaging and positioning.

Here are a couple of tactics this brand team should consider:

1. Tap R&D budget: Some level of investment will be required to define and execute a Smart Services branding strategy. Marketing dollars are the obvious source of funding, but increasingly, leading OEMs are claiming research and development funds that historically have been reserved for product-related initiatives.
   
   How can this approach be justified to a CFO? In essence, Smart Services can be “productized” and heavily leveraged to drive additional product sales. And in product categories approaching commodity status, investments in new product features and capabilities will yield far less returns than investments in new higher-margin, faster-to-market, and more competitively differentiable service offerings.
   
   
2. Create unique Smart Services brand: Most OEMs have been selling numerous flavors of service agreements for years, from extended warranties, to preventative maintenance, to dedicated call center and field service support. Among these legacy service approaches, Smart Services stand apart, able to deliver unprecedented improvements in asset uptime, business continuity, and overall performance within the asset operator’s enterprise.
   
   But one of the obstacles is that over the years, product-driven sales representatives have conditioned the market to under-value post-sales service by gifting service offerings to prospects during late-stage negotiations in order to ink a product sale.
   
   To differentiate Smart Services from vanilla service agreements and to begin to undo end-users’ misperception of the value of service, OEMs must create a new premium brand for their Smart Services offerings. Many leading OEMs have created clever acronyms, logos, and department names for their Smart Services programs.
   
   ABB Robotics uses "ARM," which stands for ABB Remote Monitoring. Respironics chose "Respi-Link" for its smart service solution. And Gardner Denver is positioning its "ESP 20/20" offering as perfect machine visibility.
   
   Let’s face it. Smart Services are not your grandfather’s maintenance agreements. Build a bold brand and stand by it.

Where's your company at in the Smart Services branding process? Post a comment and share your marketing lessons learned.