Effective Product Marketing Rule #6

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

Effective Product Marketing Rule #6: You need a positioning document for each buyer you want to influence.

In marketing, as in every other thing I can think of, things fall in and out of favor, and for a while one of the things that seemed to fall out of favor in B2B technology marketing was providing any indication about what a product actually did and how it worked.

No, the reigning wisdom for a while was "people buy benefits, not features."

Sorry, but us geeks buy features - if they come with benefits, that’s great. But we want to know what it does, what it’s made of, and how it works.

At Genuity, I participated in an "education" session conducted by the company’s ad agency. They showed us all sorts of ads, and we were supposed to say which ones we thought were effective. I was the lone participant from Product Marketing - the rest of the folks were from MarComm - so I was the lone participant who uniformly selected the "bad ads" - i.e., the ones that gave lots of information and technical detail.

No, no, no, I was told. These are terrible. No one would want to read them.

Well, no one except the techies who were a big part of the audience for our services, that is.

But somewhere along the line we had convinced ourselves that the only ones who mattered were the "C-level" execs who could not care less about the functional details.

While I realize that we’re talking about positioning documents here, not ads, the underlying message is pretty much the same: you have to know something about the different audiences you’re selling to - users, influencers, approvers, and the guys with the checkbook - and have an understanding of what their characteristics, wants and needs are. Only then can you figure out how to create a message that will appeal to them and satisfy their need to know.

If you limit your positioning document to an umbrella story, you’ll lose the different flavors  - and probably lose sight of the fact that in many B2B technology purchases, there are multiple links in the buying chain, all of who want and need different information.

The main concern of the CEO may be encroaching global competition, and not give a hoot whether the product lets you turn rows into columns and columns into rows. The finance guy may want to justify every purchase in terms of ROI, but not particularly care where the competition is coming from. A department manager may be interested in anything that makes them look good to their boss - and justifies their departments continued existence. The end-users, who’ve been tediously cutting and pasting columns and rows all these years, may be interested solely in getting their hands on the column-row features. (Cool!)

If you don’t do the positioning work up front, when it comes to the next step - developing your core messages, then your external messages - you’ll either end up with a mish-mosh of a story. (Why are they telling me this stuff?) Or neglect the information needs of a key constituency. (Why aren’t they telling me that stuff?)

The last thing you want is someone critical to the decision process - however high or low in the organization - getting the idea that  you don’t understand them or, worse, that you really don’t matter.

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(I’ve peeked ahead at the next Rule, to be covered next Monday, and part of it states that you shouldn’t confuse positioning with messaging. In my book, positioning should include core messaging for every category of human being who will have an oar in the water during the purchase cycle. Core messages are the black and white, just the facts, ma’am, essential elements of the story. But we’ll get into this during the next post.)

 

 

 

 

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