I've been watching ALT closely for a while. I really like the tech and the space - but have been concerned about the marketing challenges. Here's my thinking, and I'd love to hear from people who have closer understanding of the company:
My biggest concern is that everything that's being pushed to the market at the moment is all about how "the marketing plan" will be the saviour. There's a real tone of "trust us" - the marketing will take a long time but we know what we're doing.
The recent set of releases (4C, shareholder newsletter, response to 4C query) makes me less convinced the company knows what it's doing, and more convinced that there's a fair degree of spray and pray going on right now.
To be clear, they're trying to run BOTH a B2C and B2B marketing campaign across multiple geographies concurrently. That's a challenge for even an organisation the size of P&G. It's more of a challenge when you have no idea what channels work yet.
The shareholder newsletter lists an astounding 29 marketing channels the company is currently developing.(16 in B2C, and 13 in B2B markets). It's far, far too many things to be doing in a company of this size.
And digging into Linkedin it really doesn't seem like the company has the requisite experience in house to get this go-to-market right:
> Geoff Daly comes from a heavy ops background at Resmed - not sales and marketing.
> Jane Scott (Analytica's Global Sales and Marketing Manager), has medical marketing experience, but it's at best patchy. Checking out her resume on Linkedin, it seems like she's struggled to hold a marketing position for more than a year (until she got to ALT).
I'm also concerned about the marketing agency that the company refers to as the global medical device experts - Jacobstahl - they were mentioned by name twice in the response to the 4C. If they're global experts in marketing medical devices, there's no evidence of it on their website
http://jacobstahl.com/ It looks like a dead agency that hasn't done much real business since 2012 (their last blog update).
