Have you ever wondered why marketers always seem to be beating you over the head with new
buzzwords, sometimes even for products that you can’t even buy yet? I think I may have stumbled upon something that helps explain why.
I was doing my usual trolling on LinkedIn and I saw a post that talked about something called the Gartner Hype Cycle and it actually made me think about some of the biggest disconnects between tech marketers and the actual IT pros that I’ve talked to. The idea behind the Hype Cycle is to illustrate the typical pattern that happens whenever new technologies start to come to market and how they get adopted by buyers.
Here’s an example of the hype cycle of 2018, so you can get a picture of what people thought was the “next big thing” back then, and where they actually all landed 6 years later:
I think one of the main disconnects between tech marketers (and the media they consume) and where IT pros actually prefer to sit in the buying cycle, as my nifty illustration at the top shows.
I think a lot of folks, both marketers and just non-IT normies alike, think IT pros are tech heads that are always buying the hottest new gadgets on the street before the rest of the world can get their hands on them. In reality though, I think IT pros as an industry are incentivized to be as risk-averse as possible. In other words, they get paid to keep the lights on, not be the coolest kid on the block.
Moreover, because many IT pros aren’t being brought into early business strategy planning, they don’t even have the opportunity to provide input on new technologies that could potentially provide a competitive advantage for their companies, even if they felt like there was one. Not to mention how many IT pros have been burned by something new being brought into their environment that ended up jeopardizing everything else that already works.
As a result, while marketers think IT pros want to be looped in during the Peak of Inflated Expectations, I think most IT pros actually prefer to be well out of the Trough of Disillusionment and well onto the Slope of Enlightenment before they really feel comfortable enough exploring new technologies as an option.
(Side note: why do these all sound like Harry Potter/LOTR/Princess Bride locations?)
What do y’all think? Do you agree with this take? Where on the map do you actually like to start researching technologies? What would make you want to explore something potentially earlier? And what do you actually want to know about overhyped technologies that are still on that first upward curve? (Anything at all?)
