Technology marketing
Advice about the marketing of enterprise technology, based on 30+ years of experience, and most particularly upon our flagship Monash Advantage program.
Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics explained
Edit: Monash’s First Law is special case of Monash’s Third Law of Commercial Semantics: No market categorization is ever precise.
Below is a three-year-old post of mine from a long-dormant blog, quoted in its entirety:
Maria Winslow notes that “Open Source” is an example of
Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics:
Bad jargon drowns out good.
Now, I won’t pretend that’s really original with me — but then, it’s based on Gresham’s Law, for which Sir Thomas Gresham apparently doesn’t deserve the credit he gets either.
The idea behind the “Law” is this: If a term connotes some kind of goodness, marketers scarf it up and apply it to products that don’t really deserve it., making it fairly useless to the products that really do qualify for the more restrictive meaning.
“Predictive analytics” sounded cool, and now covers a fairly broad range of statistical analyses, most of which don’t involve any kind of explicit prediction. Some “native” XML data stores are dressed-up tourists from either the relational or object-oriented worlds, while a lot of “thin clients” actually do their shopping at Lane Bryant. “Transparent” connectivity layers tend to be cloudy, and “portablilty” commonly involves considerable heavy lifting.
By the way, Monash’s Second Law of Commercial Semantics is much more technologically oriented: Where there are ontologies, there is consulting. I first said that at the Text Mining Summit, and it seemed to win immediate, widespread agreement.
| Categories: Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 16 Comments |
Always be marketing
Guy Kawasaki argues that you should always be selling. Specifically, he suggests:
Creating a successful business requires effective persuasion. This study shows that great persuasion sometimes occurs when people don’t expect it. This means that you should always be selling—you may persuade people when you least expect it. This is also a good argument for the potential power of tools such as Twitter and blogs. These new approaches can open doors for people who haven’t thought about a new concept.
If you think about it, what Kawasaki really means is: You should always be marketing.
Looking at him briefly from afar, I’d guess that Kawasaki’s priorities are something like:
- Keep building awareness.
- Stay on message.
Judging by the recent election season, most political campaigns would agree. In enterprise IT, however, I’d tweak and flip them, to:
- Stay on one or more of your messages.
- Build awareness in the right audiences — prospects and influencers alike.
| Categories: Marketing theory, Political marketing, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Do influencers think along the lines of the layered messaging model?
I originally came up with the more techie version of the layered messaging model
Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)
- Tangible benefits
- Technical connection
- Features and metrics
- Technical connection
- Fundamental product architecture
because it’s a pretty good representation of how I think. But what about other influencers? Do they view things in somewhat the same way? Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Layered messaging models, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 3 Comments |
Enterprise IT marketing — a layered messaging model
Two things matter about marketing messages:
- Do people believe you?
- Do they care?
It’s easy to meet one or the other of those criteria. What’s tricky is satisfying both at once.
Many marketing consultants, me included, would phrase the core messaging challenge in terms such as:
What’s the most compelling claim you can make that people will actually find credible?
| Categories: About this blog, Analyst relations, Barack Obama, Layered messaging models, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 13 Comments |
I’m not the only one who thinks vendors underdisclose
Here’s a real-life example of something I talk about all the time — the need to not just tell a story, but to give simple and persuasive reasons why it is true. David Raab is a huge fan of QlikTech’s QlikView, as both a reseller and blogger. Precisely because he is such a great advocate, he is frustrated by the company’s lack of technical specificity and disclosure. To wit (emphasis mine): Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
Restoring sanity to technology news embargoes
Technology news embargoes are a mess.
- Companies insist that news should be embargoed until press releases hit “the wire,” then don’t live up to their planned schedules as to when the releases will actually hit.
- Embargoes are commonly broken by bloggers working from home, online trade press working in non-US time zones, and the like.
- Companies are often maddeningly indecisive or vague as to what parts of a briefing are or aren’t embargoed.
Basically, a custom that worked fairly well in the age of heavily staffed weekly and monthly print media has not been adapted well to the up-to-the-minute, fragmented online age. Here’s what I propose to at least partially fix things. Read more
How to pitch me
Slightly edited June, 2010 to strike out passe’ parts.
In a good new trend, analysts are putting up explicit “How to pitch me” notes. (Carter Lusher has links to some of them.) Here’s mine. Read more
Know your audience
I just had one of the most ridiculous meetings I’ve had in a long time. A vendor about whom I and various other press/blog/analyst outlets had already written asked to meet with me. Three top executives schlepped out for a loooong dinner. Unbeknownst to me in advance, the company expected to hold the meeting under embargo. When I asked at the end of the meeting “So, what about that is embargoed”, they responded (in effect) “everything” — notwithstanding that they had received substantial coverage already, and that in 3 hours we hadn’t talked about any details of the sort that normally would be NDAed. No customer names, no product announcements, nothing. They just didn’t want coverage until their “launch date” 3 weeks hence.
Despite that investment of time in meeting with me, they’d obviously done little or nothing to prepare. Read more
Engagement marketing
More and more, consumer branding is about engagement. On the Internet, you’re most likely to see references to the social media aspects. But it goes further than blogs, chat, and diggery. For example, a huge fraction of the sports business now is apparel sales – replica jerseys and the like. This may be “tribal” in Seth Godin‘s lexicon, but it’s not particularly online-social.
US politics is heavily about engagement too. The traditional centers of engagement – unions, churches, and so on – have now been joined by the Internet as well. The Washington Post has a great article today about old-style engagement in the Clinton campaign.Micah Sifry makes the case that this time it’s different, and in the process describes the crucial role of internet-based engagement to this year’s presidential campaign.
And of course the same thing’s happening in software. Read more
| Categories: Marketing communications, Marketing theory, Political marketing, Technology marketing | 4 Comments |
Death to PowerPoints
I hate traditional PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, I usually flat-out refuse any briefing that involves sitting through a WebEx of PowerPoints. Instead, I insist that slides be emailed in advance. That way, I can see what the key points are, what I find most interesting, what I most want to challenge and drill down on, and so on. (Similarly, I rarely sit through entire sessions at conferences. If that be ADHD, make the most of it.)
Fellow analyst Seth Grimes’ recent post decrying PowerPoints confirmed that I am not alone. And come to think of it, Seth feels the same way I do about conferences; he complains when he’s the host and actually has to attend the sessions, because that gets in the way of conversations he’d evidently prefer. On the other hand, not all analysts agree with Seth and me. For example, it would seem that a couple of Forrester research analysts actually like structured pitches.
If nothing else, this is an illustration of my point that different (kinds of) influencers need to be communicated with differently.
Edit: Another analyst turns out to share my utter hatred for WebExed presentations.