Alcatel-Lucent's Market Advantage is a 2008 Winner of the Marketing Excellence Award

Launched in 1998, ITSMA's Marketing Excellence Awards focus on the largest segment technology: services and solutions. The awards program is based on a comprehensive approach to marketing, recognizing that business success today requires marketers to move beyond the traditional realm of communications into such areas as developing new solutions, increasing sales effectiveness and managing the customer experience. The program looks at the three most critical aspects of success: innovation, execution and business results.

Business Challenge

Traditionally, Alcatel-Lucent competed for telecom service provider purchases using technological arguments. But the high cost and complexity of projects such as converging voice and data networks have required service providers to be confident that their investments will attract end users and produce a sufficient ROI quickly.

This required Alcatel-Lucent to look at its customers' customers to identify end-user trends and refine value propositions to meet the needs of a changing marketplace.

Program Execution

From its inception 10 years ago, the Market Advantage program has built the elements needed to support customers:

• Market research. Primary market researchers study trends, user data, and regionspecific end-user preferences for new technologies. Six people are deployed in this function.

• Customer marketing consultation. A key element has been customer marketing consultants who develop business cases and go-to-market programs. A dozen senior consultants are deployed, with a central team focusing on tool development and a regional team focused on customer deployment and engagement.

• Business modeling. A subset of our Bell Labs business modeling team provides four highly skilled statisticians to develop models that include payback periods, ROI, and sensitivity analysis.

• Youth Lab. This is global panel of "millennials" (ages 13-25) helps identify how young adults are using communications features. Sixty-three of Alcatel-Lucent service provider customers are engaged.