As Amazon Web Series (AWS) celebrates its 15th birthday, it wraps the most significant year in its operations to date. According to industry analyst Canalys, investment on cloud infrastructure services has increased by 33%, up to $142 billion, with AWS taking the major share of the revenues. Hats off to Andy Jassy and team who spotted and relentlessly executed on its first-mover advantage.
I wanted to point out, however, the race towards broader brand recognition and commercial success in the cloud is nowhere near finished. In fact, it’s only the beginning.
My colleague Martin Sparey pointed out in this detailed media coverage performance analysis of Big Cloud, market share success does not equate to the same level of brand recognition. To its credit, Google Cloud carved out its communications focus and used its customers to do the talking on a consistent basis. There is nothing more compelling, during a generational crisis when your boardroom is asking you to be more operationally agile, than to see how your industry peers are dealing with a similar problem. There are other ways where cloud-first organisations can create the space to land their communications platform.
Here are some ways to kick start your thinking if you feel your business is in a congested market with little to no differentiation:
- Focus on your business impact – When sketching out communications objectives, work backwards from the end goal that you would like to achieve. Determine the stakeholders and barriers which you may come across. Business impact does not necessarily mean commercial gain so look at other ways in measuring success in terms of service recall, partner commitment and behavioural shifts.
- Is this a PR-thing, or not? – Pitching a new Kubernetes offering to your enterprise IT media targets is not the only tactic to increase brand recognition. A thought-out, integrated plan which includes paid, shared and owned activations will reach your audience is a more direct and compelling way. Think video, meme and audio when creating your anchor content asset as it’s appetising for the attention-starved generation who are moving into decision-making roles.
- Dig deeper, and then deeper again – Voltaire wasn’t wrong when he said “judge the person by their questions rather than their answers”. Reflect on your client and agency interactions to ask whether the right set of questions were asked to give both sides enough confidence that a communications programme will be designed to deliver an agreed business impact. It completely natural if questions were left on the table in the first meeting. But make sure you follow up.
Opportunity is aplenty for those who can carve out their space. IDC predicts the rise and rise of cloud will lead to the $1 trillion market in the next three years. It’s a great time to pick up those metaphorical shovels and dig into the heart of what made your customers and partners fall in love with your business like Thierry Henry did with the Renault Clio. How can you find your va va voom?