Okay, so you targeted 100 attendees at a special event, and your turnout was only 75; was the event a failure? Do you try something new next year? Your goal for disclosures last year was 65, but you received 60; is it time to re-examine your internal marketing tactics? IP marketing experts agree that the answers to such questions are usually not cut-and-dried, and that determining when it’s time to drop one marketing approach and try another can be the most challenging of decisions.

“It’s more art than science,” says James R. Zanewicz, JD, LLM, director of the University of Louisville Office of Technology Transfer. When evaluating a marketing activity, “you look at your gut feeling based on how much positive feedback you’ve gotten, especially on a direct marketing campaign,” he says. But beyond that, he adds, “was it genuine interest from people, or even if the feedback was positive and you had conversations, did the IP really go forward along a line of moving toward a deal, or was it like at fishing expedition where people were trying to get free information? That’s the art of balancing different factors with your gut feeling.”

“Once we’ve started down the path of marketing a technology, the upfront investment for filing a provisional is not that great,” notes Matthew J. McFarland, RPh, PhD, innovation strategy manager in the Office of Technology Commercialization at the Purdue Research Foundation. “For us, what typically ends our [marketing] efforts is coming upon some sort of barrier like the need to convert to a full utility filing or getting to the nationalization phase, which is especially expensive in life sciences. So, you get to the point where it is no longer possible to invest.”

Divvying up your best prospects into categories can help avoid pouring marketing dollars into the proverbial black hole. “It’s usually pretty obvious when you’re throwing good money after bad if you’ve identified and prioritized the key players,” says Laura A. Schoppe, president of Fuentek, LLC. Schoppe explains that her firm divides potential licensees into A, B, and C categories and commits resources accordingly. “Everyone might get an e-mail alert, but in terms of phone calls and proactively pursuing them, we commit our resources to the ‘A’s,” she explains. “If you go through that list of ‘A’s and none of them bite and you start moving into the ‘B’s, that’s your first alert of having missed the market, and that there may be something too risky about this.” In terms of cutting losses, “you absolutely do not want to get to the ‘C’s,” says Schoppe. “Usually when we get to the ‘B’s, we say let’s transfer this to passive marketing; the big investment has already been made, so we might as well let it stay on the web.”

A detailed article on how to make these tough calls appears in the November 2010 issue of Intellectual Property Marketing Advisor. For subscription information, CLICK HERE.

Posted November 23rd, 2010 under Intellectual Property Marketing

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