There's a growing trend in consumer marketing, and high-tech marketers would be wise to take note. An offshoot of the general movement towards "one-to-one marketing," examples can be seen selling high-priced products ranging from sport utility vehicles to fine jewelry. Look beyond the products themselves, and you'll find a strategy that can easily be applied to high-priced, high tech solutions from web servers to enterprise application software.

I call the strategy "Sell the offer, not the product." To illustrate the concept, let's explore two ads by Tiffany and Merrill Lynch.

Known for their distinctive blue boxes and for a particular Audrey Hepburn movie, Tiffany & Co. sells high-priced, high-quality jewelry and gift items (my positioning, not theirs). Their ads are what you'd expect: simple and classy. In a recent small-space ad promoting their line of engagement rings, Tiffany featured not a diamond solitaire, but a booklet entitled How to Buy a Diamond.

Now, Tiffany could easily fill an ad with all the wonderful qualities that make a Tiffany diamond ring special. But they know something that probably hasn't occurred to other diamond merchants: that selling $10,000 diamond rings through direct advertising is a tough proposition at best. An engagement ring is a considered decision, after all.

So Tiffany got smart. Let's not try to sell the ring, they decided. Let's simply try to identify people who are thinking about buying a diamond ring and get them to call us - classic database marketing strategy. Follow up with respondents, get them into the store, and let the sales consultants do the selling.

Merrill Lynch is just as smart. Sure, they could litter their ads with five-year performance figures like the rest of the pack, but they know that well-heeled consumers don't base investment decisions on advertising alone. So in a recent ad headlined, "How Are Taxes Affecting Your Investments Today?" they feature a photo of a book called 98 Tax-Planning Ideas for Investors. "Call for our free 77-page book," the ad exclaims, "before making any important decisions about reallocating your investment portfolio."

By placing offer first and product second, Merrill Lynch achieves two things. One, they stand out from the crowd. Two, they attract a much larger pool of potential customers. The company captures not only investors who are currently reallocating their portfolio (and who offer immediate sales potential), but also other, more long term prospects who are at minimum looking for ways to decrease their tax liability.

So what the heck does this have to do with high-tech, you may ask? Lots. Take the buyer of a $100,000 enterprise sales automation solution. Is a VP of Sales going to look at an ad or read a direct mail piece, no matter how effective, and immediately offer you his or her Visa card? I think not. Yet this is precisely the assumption high-tech marketers make when they spend millions of dollars on direct marketing campaigns that are little more than product brochures in sheep's clothing.

Rather than carrying on about your product ad nauseam, wouldn't it be better to offer a compelling, informative booklet entitled, say, How to Increase Sales Productivity in Today's Global Market, or even Seven Key Issues in Selecting a Sales Automation System? The VP of Sales already shopping for a SFA system will respond automatically. But in addition (and here's the key), the vendor will also attract executives who at minimum are dissatisfied with their current levels of sales productivity. And what software sales rep wouldn't jump at the chance to talk to a prospect with the problem that his/her product can solve?

What makes this strategy so ideal for the high-tech marketer is that high-priced technology is not a commodity product. If you're dissatisfied with the performance of your investment portfolio, you go shopping for a better mutual fund. If you're not meeting your sales quota, do you automatically go shopping for a $100,000 piece of software? I don't think so. In fact, most managers are probably hostile to the notion of solving problems by buying high-priced technology.

Solution: don't talk about the technology. Or talk about it, but don't try to convince someone in the space of an ad or direct mail piece that your product is the best thing since Windows. Use your campaign to simply identify someone with the problem your product can solve, then let your sales force do the selling. After all, isn't that what they're paid to do?