• My “How to pitch me” post was already arrogant enough.  I don’t want to repeatedly conflate “This is how I like to be dealt with” and “This is how you should deal with analysts in general.”
• The nature of my business is such that, by the time I’m having a particularly good relationship with a company, there’s probably something confidential going on, or at least something I should be careful discussing in public.

As an alternative, I’d like to share a particularly good example of outreach I just discovered in the political sphere. Last Tuesday, New York Times columnist David Brooks laid into the Obama Administration, writing

… the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.

Friday, Brooks wrote a follow-up column, saying

Within a day, I had conversations with four senior members of the administration and in the interest of fairness, I thought I’d share their arguments with you today.

Right there, you know something went very right.  An administration critic was pitched, and promptly chose to present readers with counterarguments to his own views.

Brooks didn’t entirely change his mind; that would have been too much to hope for. Indeed, he wrote:

I didn’t finish these conversations feeling chastened exactly. The fact is, after years of economic growth, the White House still projects perpetual deficits of more than $500 billion a year. That’s way too much, …

Plus, I’m still convinced the administration is trying to do too much too fast and that the hasty planning and execution of these complex policies will lead to untold problems down the road.

But he did change his tone, finishing with

Nonetheless, the White House made a case that was sophisticated and fact-based. These people know how to lead a discussion and set a tone of friendly cooperation. I’m more optimistic that if Senate moderates can get their act together and come up with their own proactive plan, they can help shape a budget that allays their anxieties while meeting the president’s goals.

More precisely, he reverted to and indeed went beyond one of the two tones he was vacillating between in his earlier piece, which ended

Moderates are going to have to try to tamp down the polarizing warfare that is sure to flow from Obama’s über-partisan budget. …

If they can do that, maybe they can lure this White House back to its best self — and someday offer respite from the endless war of the extremes.

In essence, Brooks changed his opinion — not on policy proposals per se, but about his perception of the Obama Administration’s approach. Instead of ignoring concerns such as his, they showed in fact they take such issues very seriously.  It’s not that Brooks is taking them at face value (and I suspect his skepticism would have come through even more clearly if he weren’t constrained by a print-page word limit).  But the mere fact that they’re engaging him in this dialogue, in this language, suggests — both to him and to me — that they deserve much more benefit of the doubt than he previously was giving them.

All things considered, that’s a highly successful example of spin.

• 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.

If that interpretation is correct, and I think it is, there are two major ways of explaining the phenomenon.

1. Hidden racism – people are ashamed to admit to being racists, but in the secrecy of the voting booth let their true feelings show.
2. The virtue of supporting a minority – people are eager to be perceived as pro-diversity.  But in the secrecy of the voting booth they pick the candidate they really want, with race being set aside.

Theory #1 is the conventional wisdom, but a key piece of evidence supports Theory #2 instead. According to commentators, the black poll-versus-results gap is a factor only in elections, not in caucuses. The difference is that elections are secret, while in caucuses you stand up in front of your neighbors and vote in a very public way. Well, every white person who voted for Obama at an Iowa caucus gave evidence of non-racism. But did voting for Edwards or Clinton lead anybody to be perceived as racist? I think not. Voting for a white candidate is the common thing to do; it proves nothing about your racism or lack of it. Only when you vote for a non-white person do you make a statement about your racial inclinations either way.

If I’m right in this analysis, then Barack Obama stands to gain by telling a “blackness” story, not to lose. Besides, as I noted before, Obama’s race is an important part of his change-centric messaging strategy.

I think so, for each of John Edwards and Hillary Clinton, albeit for different reasons. From his 2004 presidential race through at least 2006, Edwards’ highest-level messaging talked about “Two Americas” (bad – a problem that needs solving) versus “One America” (good – a goal that should be accomplished). But “change” has long been a top secondary message for Edwards. As far back as February, 2006, Edwards’ main slogan was “We want to change America and together we will.”

And so Edwards is now engaging in a classic marketing technique, seen in areas as diverse as politics and information technology. He’s saying “You know that ‘change’ my rival is getting so much attention for? I’ve offered that too, all along.” And because he’s laid the groundwork, he can do that credibly.

Saying “Edwards is like Obama” does create a need to show how “Edwards is like Obama, but better.” But there’s little downside there; to succeed, Edwards had to show how he was better than Obama in any case. Presumably, Edwards thinks the “better” will come from his policy focus or, in some cases, his persona (Southern, a little older, drug-free, etc.).

What Clinton is doing, by way of contrast, is saying “You know that ‘change’ my rival is getting so much attention for? I’ve all along offered a version of ‘change’ that’s actually better than his.” A classic sign of this technique is when somebody literally disputes the definition of a marketing term, as Clinton did in Saturday’s New Hampshire debate, and is doing ever more. This isn’t like Edwards’ strategy of saying “I’m offering the same thing that you like about him; decide among us on other grounds.” Rather, Clinton is saying “I’m offering something different than he is, and it’s actually more likely to do what you want than his version is.” Clinton is asserting that her experienced nuts-and-bolts approach to getting things done will actually produce concrete change results – and that’s what voters should focus on – while she portrays Obama as a great-talking idealist who hasn’t actually accomplished very much tangible, and also may not do so in the future.

Will this wholly blunt Obama’s message of change? Of course not. It won’t even come close to siphoning off most Obama supporters. But will it help Clinton supporters stay with her, rather than defecting to rival candidates whose main selling point is the promise of “change”? Absolutely.

So co-opting Obama’s change message is a good strategy for Clinton just as it is for Edwards, albeit in different ways and for different reasons.

Previous posts in this series:

• Part 1:  Different approaches to marketing “change”
• Part 2:  Competing definitions of “change”
• Part 3:  Implicit messaging in support of “change” positioning

Again, Obama leads the way. He at least creates the appearance of using a variety of modern internet technologies to communicate with his supporters, and ties this into a pledge to use technology to make government more transparent and responsive to its citizens. The photo section of BarackObama.com focuses on showing him with a broad range of “ordinary” people. He’s probably the only candidate from either party whose most visible endorser is someone other than a white male. He has a young (under 50), Tiger Woodsian post-racial appeal. And he’s at least partially successful in differentiating himself from politics-as-usual via a “high road” of not very negative campaigning.

When it comes to positive implicit messaging in the area of change, John Edwards focuses mainly on “walking the walk” of his anti-corporate, poverty-fighting populism. He declines lobbyist and PAC money. He launched his campaign in New Orleans’ Ninth Ward. He works visibly on poverty-related issues. Once again, his marketing is really about benefiting the poorer classes, and “change” is mainly a means of getting to those objectives.

Of the three leading Democratic candidates, Clinton does the least to market “change.” Her official online biography indeed emphasizes concrete accomplishment, and advocacy for change. But her website could – and should – go further. For example, some kind of chart or graph consolidating her accomplishments could convey the message much more convincingly.

Obviously, Clinton is trying hard to avoid the dread “liberal” label. Even so, the Clinton campaign could do a better job of combining messages of “change” and “prudent moderation.” Most of the Obama tactics mentioned above could and should have been copied; some would even work at this late date. And while there’s no time for this now, last year would have been a great time to sponsor some visible policy conferences, brimming with practical ideas about how to effect change. That would have been a great way to – well, to build a bridge to 21^st Century politics, but to do so in a classic Clinton policy wonkish style.

Clinton also gives a consistent messaging contradicting the change story by identifying herself with the Bill Clinton Administration. That is, after all, in the past. And it has been demonized by right- and left-wing commentators alike. Unless Hillary Clinton succeeds in establishing the Bill Clinton legacy as one of change rather than one of non-change, little else she tries in marketing the “change” concept is likely to succeed.

Perhaps most important, Hillary Clinton has a “change” trump card she is not playing at all well: Clinton is a woman, which automatically makes her one of the most unusual and differentiated front-running candidates in the history of American politics. As I’ll discuss in an upcoming post, Clinton is squandering that advantage, and missing a major opportunity to position herself as a change agent in the area of women’s rights.

When I visited BarackObama.com on Sunday, the first three slogans I saw were

• “Change we can believe in” (his overall campaign tagline)

• “New Hampshire – Our time for change has come”

• “I’m asking you to believe. Not just in my ability to bring about real change in Washington … I’m asking you to believe in yours.”

And it continues from there. Obama has been active in various return-the-government-to-the-people kinds of issues – campaign finance reform, a search engine of government information (which he presented on the debate as a big deal), and so on. His “Let’s be united, not divided” message is couched in terms of change. His recent book title “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream” is full of words with connotations of change. He calls himself a “progressive.” He even compares himself to Martin Luther King. And his campaign hardly shies away from the suggestion that Obama’s very skin color would, if he were elected, represent dramatic change.

John Edwards’ message is similar, but at its core he’s pushing a narrower, classically populist concept of “change.” While Edwards says he and Obama offer a joint message of change, what he’s talking about can be pretty well encapsulated in three simple concepts:

• “Defeat greedy and irresponsible corporations” (which unites his trial lawyer successes with his political life)

• “Kick the bums out” (which he extends from Republicans and lobbyists to include the Clintons)

• “End the Iraq war.”

If all these things happen, the working class and poor will (Edwards implies or says) benefit. A classic example of this approach is one of the oldest and most elaborate ones I found on a web search for Edwards’ “change” messaging, namely a “Change Wal-Mart, Change America” tour in 2006.

Hillary Clinton takes a very different approach to “change.” She certainly wants to change which party occupies the White House, along with many things about US public policy. But as she couches it, change happens one successful step at a time, and she takes credit for a number of such steps over her 35 year career (including the ones that happened on her husband’s watch as governor and President). While John Edwards says what’s most important is a passionate commitment to change, Clinton wants to focus voters’ attention on the actual process of making change happen, through legislation, implementation and — when necessary – compromise. And in many ways, she would be content with change that starts by bringing the United States back to the conditions it enjoyed during the Bill Clinton Administration – healthy economy, balanced budget, relative peace, and all the rest.

1. Change from the Bush Administration is paramount.

2. Change has something to do with helping the poor, the working class, and children.

3. Change in Iraq policy – specifically, bringing US troops home from Iraq – is mandatory.

4. Change in health care insurance is important.

No surprises so far – the first three are obvious Democratic positions, and the fourth has been a major Democratic theme since early in the Bill Clinton Administration.

But the debate also highlighted considerable disagreement and competition to further define what “change” entails. At least three major categories of change were brought up, each with a number of subpoints:

• Change in who’s in charge — e.g., somebody competent, a woman, or the son of a poorly educated, undeniably working-class mill worker.

• Change in who has influence — e.g., less influence for corporations, their lobbyists, or the rich, and more influence for “the people.”

• Change in outcomes — e.g., troops home from Iraq, carbon emissions cut, or more people with health insurance.

And that’s just one night’s haul, leaving out other major “change” themes in this campaign. Barack Obama in particular offers a multi-faceted message of change.