‘Qualcomm’s Developer First’ campaign by Code and Theory won Gold in B2B Technology at The Drum Awards. This campaign pivoted Qualcomm’s focus from high-touch mobile and telecom sectors to a developer audience for IoT and AI, transforming its website to meet developers’ technical demands with interactive, informative, and streamlined features.
Historically, Qualcomm served the mobile and telecom sectors with semiconductors and software. With so few companies in these categories, business relations were high touch. These companies received white glove service directly from Qualcomm.
Now, with mobile at a saturation point, Qualcomm turned its focus to a developer audience working on IoT and AI. These are growth categories that stand to one day eclipse mobile. To succeed, Qualcomm had to pivot from a high touch model to a low or no touch model, where millions of developers from small companies could (on their own) research Qualcomm products, read documentation, compare products, and ultimately make the decision to use Qualcomm chips to power their products. This wasn’t just a website challenge for Qualcomm, it was a business and operations challenge that demanded transformation.
From a self-service perspective, developers demand a depth and breadth of information that Qualcomm had never put forward in a web experience. Meeting developer expectations with robust and accessible information across their entire product catalog was a huge challenge. The appeal of this experience would either build trust with this new audience or break it immediately. The technical task was large and the audience was fickle and demanding
Research was conducted with 150 developers. The top insight: developers are allergic to marketing. Developers felt that websites with slick imagery, headlines, and sprawling visual design created blockers to finding the technical information they desired. It signaled that the brand did not understand their priorities. Time is a scarce resource, and anything that blocked the efficiency of their research was perceived in a negative light.
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Additional research was conducted in the form of concept testing. Innovative technical features were prototyped and tested with developers to ensure developers found them useful and essential to their delicate process.
Our north star became the phrase “Developer First.” Multiple groups at Qualcomm were concerned with the new experience that was about to take over their primary web destination, many of which were marketers. With the rallying cry, “We must be developer first,” we were able to confidently quiet the tendency to be flashy marketers. This was an exercise in trusting the research and having empathy for the audience.
Three pillars emerged to support our Developer First idea. The first was Intelligence. Our site had to be as smart as the smartest developer. Depth and breadth of information was paramount. Even the most obscure documentation became essential for our product pages. The second was Immediacy. If time was the most scarce resource for developers, we needed to give a sense that everything they needed was always close at hand. Last was Interactive. Developers are a smart, lean-in audience. They don’t just want to read, they want to sort, filter, save, organize, discover, etc.
The first signal to developers that Qualcomm was prioritizing them was elevating “developer” to the top level of navigation. When one of the largest companies on the planet puts your group right in the navigation (not investors, not partners, etc), it means something. From there, the rest of the navigation became organized by developer categories, hardware types, accompanying software, and other aspects of how developers viewed their discipline.
Highly interactive comparison tables were elevated to the forefront of the experience, giving developers powerful filters and sorting functions that let them sift through massive amounts of product data quickly in a technical way that they understood and preferred.
We created a feature called the Developer Workspace that allowed developers to save hardware and software from a product page into a personal and persistent drawer on the site, where they could group saved items into projects and do additional comparisons and check for compatibility.
Related products, kits, documentation, hardware, and software we consolidated into hubs where our pillars of immediacy and interactivity were paid off directly. Products were now displayed in a suite of elements, which matches a developer's mental model of a “product”. What is a chip without its documentation?
Pathing to related blog articles and community forums were strategically woven into the experience, giving developers access to supplemental information that reflected their values and the voices of the community.
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A logged-in experience was streamlined, taking multiple steps out of the registration process and adding new functionality to a logged-in dashboard/profile experience.
New Qualcomm branding was introduced in an unobtrusive way to subtly signal to developers that this was new Qualcomm, one tailored to their needs and priorities.
The complete overhaul of Qualcomm.com to meet the needs of a new audience was a success. The following are the key metrics we saw in the year following the release of the new site:
Awards:
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This website was a signal to the market that Qualcomm was serious about moving into a totally new category. It was a tool for developers, but it was a message to partners, investors, competitors, and the press that major business transformation was underway at Qualcomm.
By creating an authentic home for developers, Qualcomm also began to establish itself as a partner to the developer community. This, in combination, with a rebranding effort allowed the market to see Qualcomm in a fresh light. The increase in developer traffic to the site is just the beginning. Ultimately, it will be the IoT and AI products of the future powered by Qualcomm chips that will prove Qualcomm has become an essential part of the developer community.
It’s one thing to market technology; it’s another thing to market technology to experts who are themselves making technology. Developers demand an interactive product discovery and comparison experience online that transcends basic technology and traditional B2B marketing. They have a lot on the line. Select the right chip and that AI-enabled drone you’re building could be a massive success for your startup, enterprise, or personal hobby. Make the wrong choice, and you may never make it to production. Excellence in technology marketing means having an excellent understanding of technology. With a developer audience, there was nowhere to hide, Qualcomm.com had to be substantive, accurate, and inspiring at every touchpoint.
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Code and Theory
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