Changing purchasers´ attitudes: the key to software engineering marketing

A persistent feature of the market for bespoke software has been that many potential customers are ill: they may not be familiar with the types of services the industry can offer nor with the companies offering them; they may not understand the importance of the software elements of a system; they may not realise what their responsibilities in an external procurement will be; they may not understand what differentiates good quality software from bad; and they may have a better idea of how much money they want to spend than of what they want the software to do. Even where the end users are well informed, inflexible and inappropriate procurement procedures and contractual regimes may still prevent them from getting the right product at the right price. Our conclusions are that the difficulties of marketing bespoke software to uninformed customers are great enough to justify suppliers structuring both their services and their marketing by industry sector, even perhaps to the extent of withdrawing from parts of the market in order to be able to focus marketing effort more effectively. Furthermore, participation in trade associations and professional activities, and support for regulatory and standardisation authorities, should all be seen as important elements of the marketing mix