Effective Product Marketing Rule #4

This is the fourth in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.

Effective Product Marketing Rule #4: Leverage and build marketing assets to overcome your liabilities and influence a specific audience.

Every product and company has them: those liabilities, large and small, that we’d just wish would go away. They are our stick-out ears, our crooked teeth, the run in our pantyhouse, the spot on our tie that we just wish wasn’t there. And sometimes we’re so self-conscious about them, we fail to see that the other guy’s got problems of his own, too.

So just how do you go about leveraging and building marketing assets to overcome those liabilities?

First, see if there’s a way to turn that lemon into lemonade.

If you liability is a hefty, above market price point, take advantage of the halo effect that a high price can confer. The advantage won’t last forever - eventually if your pricing is completely out of whack, the market will generally figure it out. When I worked at Genuity, our web hosting services were well above market. This was due to a number of different factors, largely around our operational inefficiency. Some of this was due to first mover disadvantage. As one of the first players (as BBN Planet) in enterprise web hosting, the company was figuring it out as we went along, using a lot of very smart, high priced technical whizzes to do the figuring out. Hosting companies that came along later did more and better investing in systems and processes. As web hosting became more and more commoditized, our competitors were in a better position than we were.

So we did what we had to do: tout our brainy guys, our expertise, our experience. You paid a premium for the privilege, but when you were working with Genuity you very likely had someone very smart and hands-on familiar with complex technical setups working on your problems, not a voice response system or someone sitting in Bangalore who’d never seen a data center.

Earlier on, I worked for a small software company with a product that was saddled with what turned out to be quite a liability. During the years when NT was becoming robust enough for the enterprise, our product required OS/2. We had to squeeze that lemon pretty hard, but OS/2 was still better at multi-tasking than NT was, so we hammered on this aspect. "For those who really need multi-tasking…." As it turned out, most people didn’t really need or want or have the capability of using multi-tasking for this particular product, but we nonetheless found enough folks who did to keep us going while we figured out how to get the hell off of this platform.

In both these instances, we built marketing assets - scenarios, case studies, ads - around why we were so different with respect to price or platform. (Obviously, in the case of price, we didn’t come right out and say "we cost more," but we used the words that conferred higher cost: complexity, robust, demanding….)

One of the keys to this rule is contained in its last few words: "influence a specific audience."

Whether we were trying to convince someone that our geniuses were worth it, or that multi-tasking was essential, we looked to influence that specific audience for whom it might matter.

When working the genius angle, we looked for large companies with complex needs. (Or which, because they were large, felt that their needs were more complex than they actually were.) When looking for people who gave a hoot about multi-tasking (as it pertained to our product, which was an application testing system), we looked for companies where there was a workflow application that needed testing, which (along with looking for companies that had already invested in OS/2) led us into financial services, where we were able to carve out a little niche-een for ourselves.

By the way, I used to think of liabilities as pretty much the province of small and/or underdog companies, but even the mighty and powerful have them. Nobody thought Microsoft’s desktop applications were all that great, but they managed to bludgeon the competition nearly out of existence. (What’s Lotus 1-2-3’s market share? Does it still even exist? Wordperfect? Ami Pro? I can’t even remember if there was ever a competitor to PowerPoint.)

Sure, there are people - and there will be more and more of them - who use the excellent (often free) desktop apps out there, and they’ll suit their purposes just fine. But it’s going to be a while before those people are sitting at desks in corporate. The enterprise, from Fortune 100 down to little old me, use Microsoft’s desktop applications. (When was the last time someone sent you a document that wasn’t in Word format  - or a pdf’d version of said?)

What were the marketing assets Microsoft used: a combination of their overall marketing machine and their hold on the operating system. Did they always fight fair? Nah. But that doesn’t really seem to matter all that much now, does it.

In any case, as marketers, we’re often stuck with having to work around some problem areas we’d rather not have. It’s seldom a good idea to ignore these problem areas - that’ll end you up in an emperor-has-no-clothes situation. And it’s sometimes even worth tackling them head on. Our emperor looks better naked than any other emperor alive. With our naked emperor, you can…. Well, use your imagination. You’re in marketing, aren’t you?

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