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 |
The ethics of white papers
In a recent post, I made certain assumptions about what is or isn’t ethical in vendor-sponsored analyst research. I’d already discussed the triggering incident briefly (i.e., in Twitter direct messages and the like) with a couple of analysts I respect, namely Merv Adrian (the one most directly involved) and Ray Wang. It’s safe to say we’re in at least rough agreement.
However, a couple of comments on that post took me strongly to task. Perhaps not coincidentally, one came from a vendor, and another from somebody whose main role in the “analyst” community is to produce and publish – you guessed it! – vendor-sponsored content. One option was to just blow those comments off as nonsensical, since they weren’t really responsive to the actual post. But I think those rather surprising remarks also suggest it is time to reopen the subject of vendor-sponsored analyst research.
Vendors typically pay for white papers, webinars, podcasts, in-person speeches, etc. for some combination of five reasons:
- They want to connect with sales prospects. If Merv or Claudia Imhoff or I speak on a webinar, registration will be higher than if only company execs spoke. Similarly, you can capture more registration information from prospects who want to download a white paper if it was written by a third-party analyst.
- They want general endorsement from the analyst. If a well-regarded analyst is associated with a firm, that’s good for the firm’s image.
- They specifically want endorsement from the analyst for their marketing claims. Many of the ethical challenges with vendor-sponsored research or other content lie in this area.
- They want the analyst to do a better job of explaining something than they think they could do themselves. This is the ethically purer version of the prior point. Realistically, they often can’t be separated. E.g., most vendor-sponsored white papers will involve a combination of the two. The same could be said for webinars such as the ones I did for Aster Data last year.
- They want to give the analyst some money to enhance the relationship, and this way they get something other than advice in return. Personally, I won’t do content-creation business with a vendor unless they first buy actual consulting services (via the Monash Advantage), but I’m in the minority, and in fact didn’t always have that policy myself.
In my opinion, #1, 2, and 4 cause relatively little in the way of ethical problems. #5 is an unavoidable fact of life. But #3 raises problems that can and should be addressed head-on. Read more
The ever-blurring analyst/consultant line
Continuing the discussion about IT analyst business models:
In the traditional model of IT analysis, vendors and users alike buy subscriptions to published research that are bundled with a certain level of retainer-like consulting. You can also buy additional consulting from analysts on an ala-carte basis. Indeed, analyst relations gurus suggest it’s a best practice to do so, both because you might learn something and because the process of your doing so might strengthen your relationship with them, in reality and euphemism alike.
In the 1990s I subverted that model somewhat. Anybody could buy my subscription newsletter for $347/copy/year. Only two vendors that I recall (Oracle and Informix) ever bought > 10 subscriptions at once. In addition, I had some faxed published product that frankly didn’t add all that much to the newsletter. But it was part of a $15,000/year service – almost always sold to vendors only — that also included a day of consulting and related prep and follow-up, a price point I stumbled into and later in various ways validated.* Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
So who is an analyst anyway?
Recently, there have been several high-profile (at least within the independent analyst community) posts and initiatives relating to analyst business models. Each at least implicitly suggests a definition of what an “analyst” is. Interestingly, no two of the definitions seem exactly the same – even though similar people are involved in several of the efforts. 🙂 Notwithstanding my well-documented skepticism about category definitions, I think it might be interesting to pull some of these ideas together in one place.
| Categories: Analyst relations, Oracle, Technology marketing | 12 Comments |
Obfuscate clearly!
Quite frequently — sometimes even in so many words — I find myself compelled to give clients some classic advice from Strunk and White:
Obfuscate clearly!
Actually, I have not succeeded in finding the edition in which I recall seeing that phrasing. Probably it was the second, which I presume Paul Kedrosky also had. But in a a subsequent edition somebody (presumably White, as Strunk was long deceased) wrote similarly in their name:
Be clear.
Clarity is not the prize in writing, nor is it always the principal mark of a good style. … since writing is communication, clarity can only be a virtue. And although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one. Even to a writer who is being intentionally obscure or wild of tongue we can say, “Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand!” Even to writers of market letters, telling us (but not telling us) which securities are promising, we can say, “Be cagey plainly! Be elliptical in a straightforward fashion!”Clarity, clarity, clarity.
What makes me think of this dictum most often is not marketing collateral per se, but rather product naming and description. Worst of all can be the names of particular portions of a marketecture diagram. Now, I am on record as believing that all product category names are flawed. But while some vagueness or ambiguity may be unavoidable, there is no reason for names to be meaningless or downright misleading.
| Categories: Marketing theory | 23 Comments |
Often the best press release is the one you DON’T issue
I recently received an email that started
ENTERPRISEDB CEO ED GOES WITH THE BUFFET AT LOCAL SIZZLER FOLLOWING SPEECH AT OPEN SOURCE BUSINESS CONFERENCE
SAN FRANCISCO — EnterpriseDB CEO Ed Boyajian rejected a wide array of fixed, rigid, printed menu options at a local Sizzler this week in favor of the restaurant chain’s sprawling buffet.
“It was clear that the open, free, unconstrained nature of the buffet was the right choice,” Boyajian said.
This is not an April Fool’s joke. I really received that email a couple of weeks ago. True, it was a spoof, and came from somebody unaffiliated with EnterpriseDB. But the real EnterpriseDB press release it was spoofing was almost as bad, starting Read more