Monte Zweben - profile of chief executive officer, Blue Martini Software Inc., marketing strategy - Brief Article - Statistical Data Included

Brandweek, March 26, 2001 by Todd Wasserman

After shaking up the software community, a NASA vet's company stirs up the market.

It certainly doesn't take a rocket scientist to be a marketer. Then again, NASA vet Monte Zweben, 37, has much more marketing savvy than your typical gearhead.

Zweben, the CEO of Blue Martini Software, made headlines last year when he briefly entered the ranks of billionaire Silicon Valley-ites after a successful IPO. Like most tech companies, Blue Martini's stock price is way down and Zweben is, alas, a mere centimillionaire at this writing, at least based on his Blue Martini shares.

But the whims of the market are far from the last word on Zweben. In two years, by exploiting market opportunities and branding his company in a memorable way Blue Martini has come from nowhere to catapult past industry leaders Vignette and BroadVision, scoring clients like Benetton, Harley-Davidson and Saks Fifth Avenue--which pay in the six-figure range for the software--and cultivating a presence in Latin America, Asia and Europe.

Blue Martini's back-end software enables companies to manage e-commerce transactions with their customers. The idea for the company came about while Zweben was serving as "entrepreneur in residence" at two Silicon Valley venture capital firms in 1997 and 1998,a title that involved fielding pitches from startups. Repeatedly he'd ask what software they were using for merchandising, and they'd answer that there was really nothing on the market. "If these companies can't find anything," Zweben asked himself, "what are the big brands doing?"

Zweben was no stranger to software development. After a six-year stint working on artificial intelligence (AD software for NASA's Ames Research Lab, he started his own company Red Pepper Software, in 1992. Red Pepper adapted Al software used for the space shuttle to manage supply-chain transactions. PeopleSoft, the enterprise software firm, liked Red Pepper's software so much that it licensed it and then, in 1996, merged with the company

Zweben's biggest accomplishment at PeopleSoft was to "deposition" competitors SAP and Oracle. Those companies offered enterprise resource management (ERP),a method of tracking materials as they roll off the assembly line. Zweben created a new category enterprise resource optimization (ERO), which broadened the scope of traditional ERP to include customer demand, suppliers and manufacturing capacity

In 1998, he discovered a market void for so-called B2C (business-to-consumer) applications. After interviewing some 50 potential clients to get a feel for what the market demanded--namely an ability to interact with customers on the Web, via call centers, in stores, over wireless devices and on trading exchanges--Zweben cobbled together his own software and formed Blue Martini.

The vivid moniker sprang from Zweben's success with Red Pepper. "We knew we wanted something blue," he said. Searching the Web for some 200 blue names, he found all the URLS already taken. Despondent, he, his wife and a friend went out and ordered Cosmopolitans at a bar in San Francisco's Mission district when his wife came up with the name. "We raced home to see if [the URL] was taken," he said.

The name provided a brand icon that lent itself to consumer advertising. Blue Martini launched a small print campaign in 1999 and then a flashier $5-10 million TV and print effort via Young & Rubicam, San Francisco, in 2000. The initial ad showed a bullet shooting through a blue martini with the caption, "Get them through us. The "them" referred to retail customers.

The campaign came from Zweben's clear vision of the brand, said Paul Hastings, svp/account director for Y&R. "He's very decisive, but he definitely solicits opinions--he wants to hear your opinion," Hastings said. "At the end of the day he was like, 'I like it, let's move forward; He didn't waste a lot of time."

That resolve is currently being tested by a chilly climate for techs. Zwehen said the company isn't planning more TV because investors frown on such spending during tougher times. Still, another wave of print ads are on the way Meanwhile, Blue Martini has started to use its own software, a practice known in tech lingo as "eating your own dog food." Ever the aesthete, Zweben takes issue with the term. "I've always hated that expression," he said.

How did I get this job? I came up with the idea at a venture capitalist firm. I'd ask 'What are you using for merchandising applications.' They said 'There's nothing well-suited for the Internet.' And a light bulb went off in my head.

The best part about my job is...Delivering value to our clients so that they can build new ways to interact with customers live.

Favorite brand: I can't say. We have so many branded customers and I don't want to get in trouble.