Scottsdale, AZ and Los Gatos, CA – February 13, 2007. The marketing value chain is broken in today’s technology companies. Strategic components, including corporate strategy, product management, product marketing and marketing communications often report into different functional areas, creating silos that require strong management to coordinate campaigns.

The lack of an integrated approach to marketing has created an environment where key company employees often don’t understand the strategic goals, duplicate effort, spend significant time overcoming communication gaps and justify program investments with metrics that are meaningless. Compounding this problem, the vision for the market is often not owned and clearly articulated by the senior management team.

Two best-practice technology leaders are coming together to address this need. Rubicon Consulting and Pragmatic Marketing are combining forces to enable ‘Big M Marketing’, a training and consulting service that connects the value chain—from strategy to execution. For technology companies seeking more strategic relevance and a higher ROI from their marketing investments, ‘Big M Marketing’ provides services that align organizational strategies around clearly identified market problems, ensuring a market-driven focus for a company’s products.

Big M Marketing integrates all the disciplines of marketing into a cohesive operating unit that is more focused on winning markets and creating products people want to buy. A new logo is not “Big M” Marketing; identifying your buyer personas is. Identifying a target market of generic “small businesses” is not “Big M” Marketing; identifying a target market of “small body shops seeking rapid insurance reimbursement” is.

Rubicon CEO Nilofer Merchant said, "Rubicon was founded to help technology companies develop executable strategies needed to win markets. Distributing the strategy throughout an organization is always a key step. Now, in our alliance with Pragmatic Marketing, we have a partner who can help inject a strategic focus directly into the product team.”

Said Phil Myers, President of Pragmatic Marketing “Pragmatic Marketing has trained more than 45,000 people to tune in to their markets. The challenge is always how to align this market-driven product focus with business strategy, which is where Rubicon excels. We're very pleased to establish this relationship to better serve our technology company customers.”

Read more on Big “M” Marketing in The Secrets of Market-Driven Leaders e-book.

About Pragmatic Marketing
Twice recognized as one of America's fastest growing private companies by Inc. Magazine, Pragmatic Marketing provides training seminars, onsite workshops, consulting services, and an online community for technology product managers, marketers and executives. Over 45,000 people at more than 3,000 companies world-wide have been trained using the Pragmatic Marketing Framework, a practical, market-driven approach to creating and launching technology products.

About Rubicon Consulting
Rubicon Consulting works with start-up companies and global brands to successfully define new markets, launch products, establish pricing and channel strategies, fight off bigger competitors, and enter new geographies. Clients include Adobe, Hewlett-Packard, Logitech, Nokia, Symantec and VMWare. As industry thought-leaders, Rubicon executives have been syndicated by CMP, published in AdAge, Wall Street Journal, and have presented at AJAXWorld, RedHerring CMO, SoftSummit, and others. See www.rubiconconsulting.com.