PSS and the Four P's

The marketing machine continues to creak forward – check out the latest press release on Plant State Suite v5.0.

This release is an interesting reflection on where PAS was with respect to marketing and how we are finally catching on…

Plant State Suite – or PSS as it is more affectionately known – has been developed over the years as the framework to unify and enhance our alarm management applications (also recently re-launched).  As such, it gave great advantage to our Alarm Management products versus the competition – after all, having the richest set of functionality all in a single package is an attractive value proposition – both to the customer and to PAS.

But, without any real emphasis on marketing (remember, our marketing machine was pretty much in mothballs), no outsiders were really aware of what PSS actually contained – or even what our Alarm Management solution was really called!

Sure, word of mouth powered our 39% growth in 2005, and customers ended up with more than they may have bargained for in an Alarm Management solution – including a full Event Historian to log all process events, an OPC Server for data transfer from any system, and more. 

Nice give-aways, but bad marketing.

The four P’s of product marketing dictate that one pays attention to product packaging, pricing, positioning and promotion – none of which we did well, if at all (ouch!).

So now we’re finally getting busy on targeting the application of the 4 P’s of product marketing to our world. 

As I see it, it’s never too late to correct any mistake, and in this case, even more customers can now be aware of what they’re really getting.  This is good too as it levels the playing field for comparing our (richer) solution set to that of the others.

Now as long as we don’t get too carried away on too much too fast with the 4 P’s so that we confuse everyone along the way, things should just get better for us all.

Stay tuned, and later I’ll share where PSS is going.