Negative marketing in the internet era
Mark Hemingway’s recent article in favor of negative campaigning makes some good points, such as:
- Negative advertising highlights differences between candidates.
- Negative advertising undercuts opponents’ misrepresentations.
- False negative advertising can itself be debunked quickly online, and will likely backfire accordingly.
He’s right.
However, there are two big differences between negative marketing in politics and negative marketing in enterprise technology.
- If you say something negative about a technology competitor, it’s likely they can come back with the rebuttal “That’s not true any more.” Rapid product cycles are wonderful things.
- Whatever rebuttal you have to negative advertising in technology, you’ll have plenty of opportunity to present it. If it’s late in the sales cycle, your salesperson can deliver it. If it’s early in the cycle, internet-based marcom has time to take effect.
So should you go negative in enterprise technology marketing? If so, when and how should you do it? Here are my thoughts:
- Price is fair game for negative marketing. Your competition has a price; you have a lower price. Publicize the difference. There’s little downside to this tactic, unless you overdo to the point that you’re positioned as “cheap” or “not having anything else to brag about.” Just beware of the difference between list and negotiated-discount pricing.
- Other indisputable measurables are also fair game for negative marketing. If your appliance takes less space and consumes less power than the competition’s, there’s little reason not to brag about that.
- Don’t lie about the competition. Duh. It just makes you look bad when you get caught.
- Expose competitors’ lies, but take the high road. IT vendors often make highly misleading claims about features, performance, reliability, or customer success. They more commonly do this by abusing language than by outright lies. The best way to combat that is commonly to make your claims as unambiguous as possible, in ways competitors can’t match. If your competitor claims 200 customers, only 30 of whom have paid, maybe you should truthfully claim 120 paid customers. (Ditto “in production”, “for our core product”, etc.) If they make ridiculous throughput claims, clarify which features are turned on when you get great throughput for mixed workloads. And so on. Finish by saying you don’t believe any of your competitors come close to your figures.
- Expose competitors’ weaknesses the same way you expose their lies. As I just noted, you shouldn’t be directly referring to what they say anyway. You just should be making differentiated claims, in language so unambiguous that they can’t fuzz the discussion back up.
I can hardly emphasize enough the importance of unambiguous claims to differentiation. A huge part of technology marketing consists of redefining words, so as to blur product distinctions. If you benefit from being more “open” or “open source” or “parallel” or “streaming” or “event-driven” or whatever than the competition, their simplest answer is to find some dubious reason to claim the same word for themselves, countering their advantage. And counterfeit claims like that work; hence Monash’s First Law of Commercial Semantics, “Bad jargon drives out good.” Counteracting this trend and tactic requires the utmost care and vigilance.
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