Creating the right marketing message is always a challenge. As part of my work around petabyte sized data problems I’ve run across three different blog postings this week that talk about being crystal clear in positioning and messaging high tech products. The lessons learned are good reminders to all of us of how important it is to create a believable story that shows prospects and customers the value of what you deliver.
Curt Monash
Analyst, advisor, and marketing consultant Curt Monash asserts in his blog posting Enterprise IT – a layered messaging model that there are two things that matter about marketing messages:
- Do people believe you?
- Do they care?
He goes on to give great examples of how companies answer one or the other of these questions, but not both. When considering your own messaging, do people believe you? Do they really care about the value of your products or services?
Merv Adrian
Merv Adrian is another well recognized analyst and marketing consultant who focuses on big data solutions and analytics applications. In his blog posting Tech Marketers Need Friends With Benefits. No, Not That Kind Merv laments how he constantly sees generic messaging (e.g., “Our software responds to your organization’s needs.”) that means nothing. Merv challenges us with these questions:
- Who is this for?
- What problem will it help them with?
- What is solving that problem worth?
- How will success be measured?
- Why you?
Joel Spolsky
I’m a big fan of Joel Spolsky and his Joel on Software blog and books. Joel is founder and CEO of Fog Creek Software and believes passionately that for software engineers to excel you have to create the right environment where they can challenge themselves and each other. In his blog posting, Figuring out what your company is all about Joel simply states that you have to answer the following about your company:
“… if you can’t explain your mission in the form, ‘We help $TYPE_OF_PERSON be awesome at $THING,’ you are not going to have passionate users.”
It took Joel nine years, but he finally figured out what Fogcreek does:
“We help the world’s best developers make better software.”
Whether it takes you a month or a decade, do the right people know what your organization does for the world?
