• Do people believe you?
• Do they care?

It’s easy to meet one or the other of those criteria. What’s tricky is satisfying both at once.

Many marketing consultants, me included, would phrase the core messaging challenge in terms such as:

What’s the most compelling claim you can make that people will actually find credible?

But what I think many marketing experts overlook is that you don’t just have to make a claim – you need a whole marketing argument.

Marketing theorists love to point out all the different ways decision-making is non-rational. But even so, a market messaging strategy winds up taking the form of one or more rational or pseudo-rational arguments. For example, “Barack Obama went to an Islamic school for a few years, therefore he hates America” isn’t very logical. But its form resembles that of a rational argument, and adherents to the argument may indeed think it makes logical sense.

In particular, enterprise IT purchasing has huge elements of rationality. It is done by (formal or informal) committee. Many participants in the decision are trained in rather rational disciplines, such as programming or accounting. And there often are fairly objective grounds for analyzing what the results of any particular purchase decision are likely to be.

So what does it meant to construct a marketing argument? To a first approximation, the template looks like this:

Yummy product

• Tasty claims
• Persuasive connection
• Proof points

For example, in the enterprise IT market I consult to, that takes two main forms. The first is simply:

Enterprise IT product

• Tangible benefits
• Compelling stories
• Great references

But that by itself is rarely enough, either because your competitors have references too, or because you’re so new that you don’t. So there usually also needs to be a second kind of argument, claiming that your customer-pleasing product is better than the alternative customer-pleasing products. This usually takes a form like:

Enterprise IT product

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics

But it’s not quite that simple either.

If you can write a feature list that supports a benefit list, your competitors can write exactly the same things. What’s more, you’ve already conceded that anybody who offers the right features will, ipso facto, convey all the great benefits. So the sales/marketing battle often comes down to convincing prospects that your feature list is credible, while your competition’s very similar feature lists are not.

How do you do that? Well, the traditional way is through one or both of two other three-layer templates:

Enterprise IT product

• Features and metrics
• Persuasive details
• Convincing references (yep – those references again!), other evidence of customer traction, or proof-of-concept tests

or

Enterprise IT product

• Features and metrics
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture

References are particularly good at proving you have the features now. Proofs-of-concept are also great for validating your current product, especially in terms of performance metrics. Architecture is how you show that you’ll keep a feature lead in the future.

Putting this together, we have the two fundamental templates of layered technology marketing:

Enterprise IT product (proof-today messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics
• Persuasive details
• Customer traction or proof-of-concept tests

and

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics
• Technical connection
• Fundamental product architecture

In companion posts, I will:

• Generalize the layered messaging model and apply it to political campaigns
• Test the layered messaging model against specific enterprise IT examples such as Netezza and Attensity
• Discuss the extent to which the layered marketing model actually matches how influencers analyze enterprise IT products and vendors

Note:

For most of the past year, I’ve based my consulting on a particular model of strategic marketing and messaging. This weekend, in a series of posts, I’m beginning to spell it out. It’s just in the early stages; indeed, I haven’t even settled on a final name, the main candidates for which are layered messaging, which seems to make more sense in context, and layered marketing, which seems to be clearer if the subject is raised from a standing start. I certainly don’t have any crisp definitions yet. But I do have a whole lot of marketing consulting and analysis experience that suggests I’m going in more or less the right direction. Comments, criticism, and questions are warmly encouraged.

Also, I apologize for there not being supporting graphics right out of the gate. Such things are not — to put it mildly — one of my areas of strength. But anyhow, these models are meant to be read in, er, layers, with higher ones resting on the foundation of lower. The role of the layers depicted in italics is primarily to draw strong connections between the layers above and below.

Why is it possible to have such influence in these two arenas, but not – or at least not so much – in many other markets? There are many reasons, including:

• Candidates and high-end technology are both complex offerings.

• Both markets offer wide avenues for direct debate. In politics, this is literally true. In technology, sales cycles are complex enough that each contender must respond directly to the other’s salient points.
• There is a large group of analytical commentators and influencers to whom rivals can pitch their messages. (Hi! I’m one of those in the technology area.) There’s also a large press contingent – albeit shrinking in the technology case — to whom one can pitch simpler soundbites.
• In both markets, the choice between rivals can seem highly important. (Buying enterprise technology can be a career-defining decision.) So a great deal of effort may be invested in making the decision.
• In particular, the consequences of a bad choice can seem dire to consumers. Marketers’ fear tactics often work.
• Candidates and technology vendors each have track records that can be opposition-researched. Or, if they don’t have much of a track record, they may seem dangerously unproven.

I literally draw the parallel between technology marketing and campaign politics multiple times a year, generally when I’m warning a consulting client that their story needs to be better fortified against opposition research than it currently is. And when I use this blog to lay out some theoretical observations about strategic marketing, messaging, and positioning, I expect technology and politics to provide the two richest troves of examples.

• I know a lot about technology, especially software used by large enterprises.
• I have a lot of insight about business strategy, especially the marketing and positioning of complex products.

I already write several blogs about technology, such as DBMS2 (database and analytic technology, mainly), Text Technologies (text mining, search, and some general internet stuff), and the Monash Report (everything else). This, however, is going to be the primary blog in which I write about strategic marketing.

I will start by focusing on two specific subjects for marketing — software products and political candidates. That may seem like an odd juxtaposition, but they actually have a great deal in common. Never mind the new cliches about marketing being a “conversation” — in politics and enterprise technology alike, marketing is a debate. (I’ll expound on what I mean by that in future posts.)

Before I launch into a marketing critique of the 2008 campaign, it seems fair to disclose something about my own political leanings. Many of my views were formed at the Kennedy School of Government, where I was a Research Fellow from 1979-81. Thus, I think government has an important role to play, but I recognize the difficulties of almost any large-scale government activity. I often find myself in agreement with The Economist. Specific examples of my views — on the technology-related subjects of network neutrality, economic development, and privacy — can be found in the public policy and privacy category of the Monash Report.

I actually considered myself an independent in the 1980s — I voted for John Anderson for President, and seriously considered asking my KSG colleague Chris DeMuth to take me with him to Washington to serve in the Reagan Administration. But as the United States moved right, in relative terms I moved left. By 1988 I was an Al Gore “raging moderate.” Ever since Pat Buchanan’s convention speech declaring a “religious war” in this country, I’ve voted a straight Democratic ticket. And while I’m not so sure about where he ranks vs. one particular counterpart, namely James Buchanan, I believe that George W. Bush is not one of the 41 best presidents in the history of the United States.