Truthful Marketing

The title is a bit misleading this time, because part 3 is actually concerned with when a focus on differentiation is NOT premature.

When is that? When the people you are trying to reach have a high awareness your category (what it is you are selling) and a high and positive awareness of you as a vendor. If you are in this leadership position, you can focus almost exclusively on points of difference because the background information is already known. 

This is why Mercedes was able a few years back to put an ad in the New Yorker that showed only a brake assembly and talked only about the unique safety features of a Mercedes. Readers already understood what a car was, and that Mercedes has a reputation for making good ones. So the company was able to jump right in to what made them different.

If your category is well understood and customers already see you as a leader, you have earned the privelege of leaving things out. If you are in this fortunate position, it makes perfect sense to build even your core message matrix around your points of difference.

There are of course a couple of caveats. First, make sure that you are a leader in the customer’s mind, not simply your own. Take a very cold-eyed look at your position on the Awareness Continuum. Empirical market research is nice for this purpose. But even without that luxury, if we stop drinking our own Kool Aid for ten seconds, most of us have a pretty good idea how customers see us.

Second, remember that different customers are at different points in their awareness of both your category and of you. Message based on where you see the bulk of potential customers, but keep in mind that you will always need to do some Education, some Credibility, and some Differentiation. The Continuum is just a handy heuristic for where to focus most of your energy.

Happy differentiating!

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Even when potential customers understand your product, focusing too early on differentiation can hurt your sales. Even if people know what a car is, you still have to market differently if you’re Hyundai (at least in the US market) rather than Mercedes.

 

On the Differentiation Progression diagram, I call this market position Low Vendor Awareness. Potential customers understand the kind of widget you sell. But they but either don’t know your company, don’t know you make that particular widget, or just don’t see you as a category leader. Put in the customer’s voice, Low Vendor Awareness is just a fancy way of saying, “I know what a car is, but who the hell are you?” If you’re in this phase, your job is to create credibility and get considered. 

 

The most overlooked key to cracking a market from this position is letting potential customers know you’re in it! People can’t buy a mousetrap or CRM software package from you if they don’t even know you make one. PeopleSoft did a very pure example of this kind of “we exist” messaging when they added Customer Relationship Management software to their enterprise software suite. They took out large ads that I’m told contained three words: “PeopleSoft Has CRM.” They didn’t waste words claiming their CRM was better than Siebel’s. That would have been a tough fight to pick. But for PeopleSoft customers back then — confronting an expensive integration of third party CRM to existing systems — the simple fact that PeopleSoft had a CRM offering at all would have been great news.

 

You can create further credibility and presence through activities that aren’t overtly self-serving.  If you’re trying to establish yourself in procurement software, contribute articles to procurement magazines. Participate in conferences and panel discussions. Get quoted when the press needs a sound bite on e-procurement. All of these help establish your company as knowing something about the issues and pain points that keep customers awake at night.

 

If you’re working your way back from a negative perception, focusing on credibility over differentiation is even more important. Nobody cares that your car gets better gas mileage than competitors if they think the wheels will fall off. You don’t go for the throat with differentiation because the initial goal isn’t to win — it’s to be considered. Differentiation is about knocking competitors off the list. But you can’t do that until you’re on that list yourself.  If you get on enough short lists you’ll eventually win some sales by sheer numbers. And you’ll have a seat at the table later in the sales process to make your differentiators clear.

 

I’ve gone a bit over on the automobile metaphors, but there’s an actual car commercial that beautifully illustrates marketing for consideration. The tagline is, “You’ve got to put Mercury on your list!” Mercury isn’t asking for the sale, they’re just asking to be considered alongside Toyota and Honda. It sucks for Ford that the reputation of their cars has slipped to the point where that’s the right approach. But it’s very smart of them to recognize their position and message appropriately. If people really do put Mercury on their list, then the company at least has a chance to bring up their strong points and sell some cars.

 

Is your marketing that realistic in addressing how customers see you?

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“This positioning isn’t differentiated!”

 

I’ve heard this complaint dozens of times. Software’s a competitive business, and we all want to claim that what our product does is unique or at least better. And yes, at some point in the sales process you need to be able to explain why the customer should buy your stuff instead of someone elses. But does that mean that your points of difference should always be the first things you mention?

 

Hell no!

 

When and how much you focus on differentiation depends on what customers already know – both about the category of product you’re selling, and about your company in particular.

 

 Here’s one way to think about it. If people don’t know what you’re selling, you have to educate. If they know what you’re selling, but don’t know about you, you have to establish credibility. If they know the type of product you’re selling and they know you are a leader or strong contender in that category, then you need to differentiate early and often.

 

Imagine that you’re Henry Ford trying to sell a car a hundred years ago to somebody (me) who’s never seen one before. If you say, “Buy my automobile because it has the most efficient carbuerator”, there are only two possible responses:

1. “What’s a carberator?”
2. “What’s an automobile?”

By focusing prematurely on differentiation, you’ve completely lost the customer.  That’s because I don’t yet know the benefits of automobiles or that you are a credible vendor of them.

But if you educate me that a car is like a horse carriage that goes faster and doesn’t emit horse poop, now I’m interested. In fact the term “Horseless Carriage” was a deliberate UN-differention to connect the new product with the market leader (the horse). You aren’t telling me how great you are, you’re telling me how great it is to have a car. By educating the market, you may be able to grow awareness of the category and your company at the same time. That’s what Siebel did when they educated the marketing about CRM software. That allowed them to move straight from education to leadership, establishing their own credibility en passant on the way.

 

But what do you do if you are entering a market that is already established? Stay tuned for Part 2.

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“I’m a liar. I’m in Marketing.”

 

I knew before those words left my mouth that they weren’t really accurate. But when I was asked what I did for a living, those words popped out – as glibly and reflexively as an attorney might tell a lawyer joke.

This exchange took place on an honest-to-god mountaintop, or at least a mountain middle. Due to (incredibly) a sledding accident, My fiance and I were marooned over Christmas in a charmingly funky hundred year old hotel and health center in the Swiss Alps. Six thousand miles from my job with Oracle, I found myself doing kitchen cleanup alongside a German life coach. We exchanged bits of our life stories along with silverware and dishes. As people do when they first meet, she’d asked me what I did for a living.

After the fateful words popped out, I backtracked a bit. After all, I didn’t really think or want to believe that I lied for a living. That wasn’t why I got up to go to work in the morning. So while I finished wiping tables I got to thinking, “What is marketing really?”

It turned out that a number of people around me were equally interested in the answer. The life coach wanted more clients. The couple who headed the center wanted to put it on a stronger financial footing. Several other guests were in entrepreneurial businesses, and a professor from

Paris was just plain curious. Before I knew it I’d offered to teach a workshop on Marketing in its bare essence. Now I just had to figure out what that was – by the next day!

Somehow what I’d been taught in school didn’t quite cover it. Cornell business school gave me invaluable background in general business. But the marketing courses seemed a world away from how products actually get sold. For the next dozen or so years I’d learned on the job (a kind term for trial and error on someone elses dime) in a succession of high and low tech companies. Recently I’d been been running a positioning “SWAT team” at Oracle — helping colleagues boil masses of technical features down to simple, clear customer benefits.

 

But with this group in the

Alps, talking about message structure seemed like starting in the middle. They needed something more fundemental – not a technique so much as some simple guiding principles.  As I thought about examples of successes and failures, I became more convinced than ever that marketing based accuracy, not bombast, provides the best chance for long-term success.  If marketing isn’t lying, did that mean that the heart of successful marketing is actually telling the truth?Maybe so.

In a future post I’ll share the material from the mountain-top workshop.

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Seth Godin says so. But then he’s a marketer. So by his thesis you shouldn’t believe a thing he says. 

Brain…hurt!

Anyway, welcome to my blog. One of my colleagues says I should have a short first entry (check), with a picture of Pamela Anderson in it (umm, maybe not).

I’m going to explore whether making your marketing more accurate can actually help you sell more. Spoiler alert: I think it can.

Let’s find out.

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