Tip o’ the hat to Hill & Knowlton Global Technology Practice Director Josh Reynolds (bio, blog) for getting the ball rolling on how to approach the Hype Cycle. I met Josh early summer 2007 at Buck’s of Woodside (famed and quirky Silicon Valley hangout for venture capitalists and digerati) to discuss his ideas for influencing the Hype Cycle. Josh’s ideas were quite provocative and no doubt he can see a bit of their DNA in this piece of SageContentTM. I have not seen how Josh evolved his ideas into best practices, but perhaps he will post them on the H&K ARcade AR blog sometime in the near future.
As we mentioned in Thinking about Gartner’s Hype Cycle, the Hype Cycle is the most read piece of Gartner signature research by its clients, but it is often ignored by the vendor community because it does not directly rate vendors’ products or impact today’s sales opportunities. However, this is shortsighted as the Hype Cycle is influential on future IT strategies and budgets. As a consequence, vendors should be investing time into the Hype Cycle today in order to have an impact two to three years down the road.
There are three broad categories that AR teams have to work on: flattening the curve, speeding progress, and ensuring that their company is considered an exemplar for a particular technology, service, or technique on a Hype Cycle. This post will focus on the first category.
Flattening the Curve – One problem that vendors face when a technology or service is mentioned on one of the Hype Cycles is that the Peak of Inflated Expectations can get so high that there is a backlash. This can completely derail a promising market before Continue reading
Filed under: AR best practices, Signature analyst research | Tagged: analyst relations, AR, Cool Vendors, Forrester, Gartner, Hype Cycle, industry analysts, IT analysts, Magic Quadrant, market researchers, signature research | 5 Comments »
Sorry ‘Net searchers, you will not find a Forrester Magic Quadrant
We track the search terms people use that leads them to the SageCircle website and blog for SEO purposes. It is interesting the number of times that people search for some variation of Forrester Magic Quadrant. This reinforces our point that “Magic Quadrant” is a brand name that is become a generic description. However, this is very dangerous for vendors as we pointed out in Kleenex, Frisbee, and Magic Quadrant – what do they have in common? AR teams should always be on the lookout for colleagues that are using Magic Quadrant inappropriately and eliminate that usage before it causes you embarrasment in front of an analyst.
Filed under: Commentary | Tagged: analyst relations, AR, Cool Vendors, Forrester, Gartner, Hype Cycle, industry analysts, IT analysts, market researchers, signature research, Wave | Comments Off on Sorry ‘Net searchers, you will not find a Forrester Magic Quadrant