February 1, 2008

Negative marketing in the internet era

Mark Hemingway’s recent article in favor of negative campaigning makes some good points, such as:

He’s right.

However, there are two big differences between negative marketing in politics and negative marketing in enterprise technology.

  1. If you say something negative about a technology competitor, it’s likely they can come back with the rebuttal “That’s not true any more.” Rapid product cycles are wonderful things.
  2. Whatever rebuttal you have to negative advertising in technology, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to present it. If it’s late in the sales cycle, your salesperson can deliver it. If it’s early in the cycle, internet-based marcom has time to take effect.

So should you go negative in enterprise technology marketing? If so, when and how should you do it? Here are my thoughts:

I can hardly emphasize enough the importance of unambiguous claims to differentiation. A huge part of technology marketing consists of redefining words, so as to blur product distinctions. If you benefit from being more “open” or “open source” or “parallel” or “streaming” or “event-driven” or whatever than the competition, their simplest answer is to find some dubious reason to claim the same word for themselves, countering their advantage. And counterfeit claims like that work; hence Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics, “Bad jargon drives out good.” Counteracting this trend and tactic requires the utmost care and vigilance.

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