You will never get ink from a magazine to burn mind share with your company’s name. Advertising is the only way to reach beyond the people you can’t meet with face to face meetings. MRC is a company who once dominated PVD and ultimately failed because they failed to recognize this principle. They had missed in the eighties with several product missteps. But as the decade turned they were ready to make a comeback with a new system named the Eclipse. But in the chaos of the eighties, they had allowed their company name to disappear from the minds of customers with cuts from marketing budgets. As time passed, customers who knew them moved up or retired. As new process engineers moved in to replace them, they had no knowledge of MRC’s capability. I will never forget the day when I was helping some process engineers at Texas Instruments on a PVD tool decision. They didn’t even know MRC existed, much less that they had a great solution. Surprising, since TI had always been the flagship account of MRC and there were loads of MRC tools in TI’s older fabs. Worried that MRC could not support them simply because MRC had failed to court them, TI went with someone else and MRC got tossed in the trashcan of history.
By G Dan Hutcheson Copyright © All rights reserved.
