Technology marketing
Advice about the marketing of enterprise technology, based on 30+ years of experience, and most particularly upon our flagship Monash Advantage program.
The fatal fallacy of modern technology marketing
In what is basically a great set of advice, David Skok evidently dropped the line
If a marketing activity does not create a lead for you, then it doesn’t belong in your marketing machine.
Or to rephrase that: Storytelling doesn’t matter.
Well, if you believe and execute on that, your company will die (at least if it’s in some area such as enterprise technology). I really mean that. Read more
Categories: Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 5 Comments |
A PR choice
- You can pitch a story that isn’t really news, for example calling attention to the success of a product you’d been shipping for a while.
- You can pitch a story with an embargo.
Choose one.
Asking for an embargo on information already in the public domain is really lame.
Public and analyst relations: An example of epic fail
I post from time to time about stupid PR tricks, but last night I had an experience that was a whole different level of appalling, for reasons of ethics and general incompetence alike. Within hours, the vendor’s CEO had emailed me that the offending PR person would be terminated this morning.*
*By the way, that means an intriguing New England startup needs a new PR firm. By tomorrow it should be obvious who I mean.
It started as an ordinary kind of bad pitch. The PR rep emailed offering a briefing with a mystery company. I immediately deduced that the company was one I was in fact set up to talk with today, and had indeed been writing about since 2009. Besides being annoyed that I’d had to scramble to set up my own last-moment briefing with a company I’d led the way in writing about, I also bristled at the fact that the pitch included quotes from a couple of my competitors, whom I shall unimaginatively refer to as Dave and Merv.* So far, no big deal.
*Both personally and professionally, they’re two of my favorites. Even so, I dislike being told that I should use them as authority figures to be copied in my own view formation.
But then it occurred to me that those quotes probably weren’t approved, but instead were just lifted in an unauthorized manner from conversations, and indeed probably didn’t reflect the analysts’ precise views. So I messaged Dave and Merv. Shortly thereafter, the PR rep emailed me:
Neither David or Merv have authorized the quote for publication. It was sent in error to you, as I had believed you had agreed to the sharing of confidential information.
The bulk of my response to that — and the essence of this post — was: Read more
Categories: Analyst relations, Ethics, Marketing communications, Public relations, Startups, Technology marketing | 31 Comments |
No market categorization is ever precise
I’ve been on a terminology binge recently, defining terms such as machine-generated data, analytic platform, internet request processing, and transparent sharding. So perhaps this is a good time to introduce
Monash’s Third Law of Commercial Semantics
No market categorization is ever precise.
The reasons this is true may be flippantly summarized as:
- Bad jargon drives out good. That, of course, is Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics.
- Hard cases make bad jargon. I borrowed that one from the law dictum “hard cases make bad law.” Replace “hard cases” with “edge cases” and “make” with “lead to,” and you should see the point.
- Nothing concise is ever precise. This principle applies far beyond the marketing domain — for example, it’s why reasonable judges can reasonably disagree.
A more sedate set of reasons goes something like this. Read more
Categories: Technology marketing | 35 Comments |
Quotes from analysts in vendor press releases
For the second straight post, I’m mixing the general and the personal. Sorry!
I jumped into an #ARchat on Twitter Tuesday, and set off a discussion about the subject of analyst quotes in press releases. Since that chat has been blogged, starting with a partly accurate* paraphrase of my views, I figure I may as well state those myself. Read more
Categories: Analyst relations, Ethics, Public relations | 6 Comments |
Money, analyst attention, and implied analyst endorsement
This was and is meant to be a generally-applicable post. It just turns out to be laced with examples from my own experiences. I hope those aren’t too distracting from the broader points.
It is widely believed among analyst relations professionals that one should engage the services of the analysts most influential in one’s industry, in the hope that the analysts one pays will speak well of one’s company, publicly or privately as the case may be. Thus, the best way for an analyst to make money is:
- Become influential in the industry s/he covers.
- Say nice things about the companies in it, especially the ones with larger budgets.
Categories: Analyst relations, Ethics | 43 Comments |
What technology influencers really think about certain PR tactics
The following is a transcript of an actual IM exchange I had a few hours ago.
Bottom line: PR shouldn’t be a pompous ass, either on its own behalf or the client’s.
Categories: Marketing communications, Oracle, Public relations, Technology marketing | 5 Comments |
Don’t try to emulate the Treaty of Tordesillas
I recently decried a very common kind of “partnership,” widely known as Barney, in which the marketing fluff far exceeds the substance. Some of my clients, however, are running headlong in the opposite direction, planning a substantive partnership surrounded by self-damaging marketing. This is pretty unusual, but it echoes a much more common pattern in which single companies with multiple overlapping product lines — whether through acquisition or otherwise — feel they need to position in such as way that the product lines never appear to overlap. The upshot is that they deny their products’ abilities to do things they’re perfectly good at, for no reason better than their fear of saying
Product A is great at X and pretty good at Y, and should indeed be bought for Y by some customers. Product B is great at Y and also does a pretty good job at X, and there are a few instances in which one should actually buy it even though X is the primary use case.
Folks — in a world where everybody else overstates their products’ virtues, it is rarely a good idea to actually sell your products short.
Categories: Technology marketing | 22 Comments |
Barney partnerships
Named after a certain ubiquitous, fictitious purple dinosaur, “Barney” partnership announcements are ones in which two or more vendors do a song and dance about how much they love each other, but offer little or no substance beyond that.
I use and even define that term fairly frequently, so I decided to create a URL where I explain it once and for all.
Due to their mind-numbing, vacuous repetitiveness, Barney announcements can be highly irritating to press and analysts. I understand that the original Barney has a similar effect on people.
Edit: Here’s a link to Barney’s iconic theme song.
Categories: Technology marketing | 7 Comments |
Further notes on ethics and analyst research
It’s been quite a weekend for discussion of analysts and ethics. A few more thoughts:
1. The terms “ethics” and “ethical” are used somewhat inconsistently, along a spectrum from:
There are procedural rules of good behavior, and if you violate them that’s bad. That’s the essence of ethics.
to
Unless the motive was impure, an act was not unethical.
Either extreme, in my opinion, quickly leads to nonsense.
2. Actually, I think calling that a spectrum is a bit misleading. I’d prefer to say an act is unethical if:
- It is (too) likely to have bad effect AND
- The perpetrator was guilty of bad behavior in not acting differently.
Thus, somebody can make an error in the area of ethics and still be fully ethical if, upon realizing it, they straightforwardly correct it. On the other hand, a pattern of such “errors” can suffice to convict them of unethical behavior.
3. In particular, I stand by the following views from the post and comment thread that set this all off:
- Oracle behaves unethically by repeatedly foisting off sponsored analyst content as independent research.
- Merv Adrian is a fine, ethical guy.
- One reason I believe Merv is an ethical guy is because when I pointed out a screw-up to him, he characterized it as an oversight (I believe him) and said he’d move quickly to correct it.
- Commenters in that thread who suggested I shouldn’t even have mentioned Merv’s error were out of line. When you make an innocent mistake, you may suffer some embarrassment as a result.
4. Merv’s analysis of white paper ethical issues was excellent, and supersedes mine. Continuing the oneupsmanship :), I’ll now try to synthesize by saying: Read more
Categories: Analyst relations, Ethics, Marketing communications, Oracle, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |