High-End

Author: Dexin Kong
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-3831-5725
Structured and refined with assistance from ChatGPT
AI Automatic Translation (Unreviewed)

Event

Several years ago, something interesting happened at a company where the author once worked.

The company had always been deeply technology-oriented, but was never particularly good at marketing or external communication. Meanwhile, the CEO came from a media background and had long been dissatisfied with this situation.

So the CEO hired an external “marketing expert” at a very high cost, hoping to completely reorganize the company’s product communication strategy.

This expert was very good at “telling stories.”

It was said that many corporate fundraising presentations and investor pitch decks had been designed by him, and his consulting fees were anything but cheap.

At first, he was dissatisfied with almost everything.

In his view, the company’s existing product materials lacked highlights, had confusing structures, and completely failed to communicate the actual value of the products.

Since he had been personally hired by the CEO, nobody argued much with his approach. The team simply followed his working style and cooperated fully.

Later, things gradually became a little awkward.

Corporate fundraising packaging and technical product communication are actually two very different things.

Especially because the company’s products were not only highly technical, but also belonged to a niche industry with considerable professional barriers.

Complex policy backgrounds, industry experience, and domain knowledge could not realistically be understood within a short period of time.

But by then, the CEO had already arranged the overall project schedule.

So a subtle problem slowly began to emerge.

This “marketing expert” could neither fully understand the industry and products within such limited time, nor truly agree with the company’s original product materials.

In the end, he still chose the approach he knew best.

He reorganized the entire product narrative, strengthened the product positioning and industry value propositions, added a large amount of more marketable language, and paired everything with refined visual design, eventually delivering a completely new promotional deck.

The CEO was extremely satisfied with it and soon designated the deck as the company’s core material for future marketing activities.

But the strange part about this deck was:

The engineers could not really understand it.

The sales team did not know how to present it.

Industry experts felt that something about it was “not quite right.”

Potential customers, meanwhile, felt that it looked flashy but lacked substance.

And yet, the entire deck still appeared polished, sophisticated, and impressively high-tech.

Later, the head of sales quietly asked the author a question:

“Who exactly was this deck made for?”

Note:
This project is an ongoing independent research effort developed in spare time.
Because of limited time and maintenance capacity,
English documents may contain translation inaccuracies or semantic deviations from the original Chinese texts.
The Chinese version remains the primary reference whenever ambiguity exists.