Scan the headlines on Business Wire and PR Newswire for a few weeks and you’ll see hundreds of news releases that feature the words “the leading,” “first,” and “leader.”

 

This alignment with leadership and first occurs every day of every week of every month of every year in our industry. This isn’t a surprise to technology communicators. Many executives still love the sound of these words:

 

·         Breakthrough

·         World class

·         State-of-the-art

·         Pioneering

·         Best-of-breed

·         Killer app

·         Special sauce

·         Bleeding edge & cutting edge

·         Next generation

·         Major advance

·         Unparalleled

 

“First” seems to have been trivialized. While I can understand why companies desperately need to make it absolutely clear how they – and no one else!! – came up with the idea, does being first really matter to customers? Doesn’t the right idea gain traction only when the time and product are right?

 

The Apple Newton was one of the first PDAs, yet the Palm Pilot won that battle. Apollo was first with workstations, but Sun became the leader. The Diamond Rio was years and years ahead of the iPod. The first mobile phone was invented in 1947 but didn’t start selling commercially until 1983. Digital Equipment Corporation was decades ahead with its 64-bit computing chip.

 

In an article entitled “The Perils of Being First,” Jeremy black of Sambazon Inc. told The Wall Street Journal “the first guy on the beach usually becomes shot.”   

 

The notion of “leadership” has become, arguably, somewhat trivialized too.

 

Leadership claims are particularly ill-advised when self-anointed. Saying a company is “the leader” doesn’t make it the leader. The claim is frivolous. No wonder tech companies clamor for inclusion in brilliant marketing concepts like the Gartner “Magic Quadrant.”

 

Leadership claims are challenging because they’re so transitory. Today’s gorilla can become tomorrow’s scurrying monkey. Industry examples abound. AOL was on top but big portals like Yahoo and MSN took over. Dell lost market share to HP. Corel went the way of Adobe. Lots of Sun business went to IBM. Siebel lost its edge to Salesforce.com.

 

It’s doubtful the tech industry will ever lose its hunger for first and leader because it’s so fundamentally rooted in innovation. This always invites “breakthroughs” and “dramatic advancements.”

 

The best we can do as professional communicators is to urge senior management to emphasize how a product/service can help customers do what they want to do. As HBS’ Ted Leavitt said years ago in Marketing Myopia, “People don’t buy a quarter-inch drill. They buy a quarter-inch hole. You’ve got to study the hole, not the drill. The drill is just a solution for it.”