The post that kicked this all off, by Gideon Gartner and Barbara French, basically asking whether and how small analyst firms could rise to challenge the big ones like Gartner Group and Forrester Research. An extremely rich comment thread ensued. Implicit in the original post was a definition of “analyst” work that seemed to include both proprietary published research and quick-hit advisory services, fitting the traditional big-firm subscription model. More diversity, however, was shown in the post comments.

Long ago, Gideon probably based his model on his prior career at stock research firms, which to this day model their business somewhat like big IT analyst firms. Some of the main differences are:

• Payment levels and services provided sort of just happen, rather than being precisely negotiated.
• Payment style is wonky, mainly consisting of a certain share of a client’s high-margin rather-commodity-service stock trading business.
• SEC regulations insist that you not say anything material in personal advisory services you haven’t first put out in writing (there’s been decades-long uncertainty as to just what is or isn’t “material”).

Note: I used to be a stock analyst myself. Indeed, I once was ranked #1 on the Institutional Investor All-Star Team. This may be only the 3^rd year in the past 29 that I get $0 revenue from investment research – and it’s not over yet.

My immediate reason for writing this post is that Ray Wang of Altimeter Group asked me to retweet his post on the best way to set up a new analyst firm, broken down into “7 Tenets”. The implicit model he’s using of analyst firm seems to be one that does a lot of advisory services, probably sells subscriptions, has “proprietary IP”, and gives a lot of research away via blogs and other public outlets. I.e., it’s similar to Gartner/Forrester, but not quite as rigid. Anyhow, I know Ray isn’t really that dogmatic, because – as he tweeted recently – he’s exploring a possible “trade association” of independent analyst firms, and I’ve talked with him about who might be in or out.

In my own business, I follow a more extreme form of the “freemium” model. In line with my stock analyst background, I feel anything I know that’s sufficiently important should be published openly, technology insight and general methodology alike. Advisory services are for:

• Teaching people how to use the information.
• Being the middleman for 1-to-1 NDA vendor/user discussion.

I’ve figured out how to offer quasi-subscription retainer vendor services even so, but find it easier to sell user services on a project basis.

Of course, I don’t really publish EVERYTHING openly, for three main reasons:

• Nobody has time to write up everything they know.
• Much of what I know is NDAed.
• My best advice is reserved for my paying customers.

But that held-back advice is not apt to be a market trend or analytic methodology. Rather, it is likely to be a more specific “Due to threat, opportunity or trend X, you should do Y,” where X is something I’ve actually been writing about publicly for a while.

Jonny Bentwood, meanwhile, goes to the opposite extreme from Gideon et al., defining an analyst by

if someone is independent and directly influences technology procurement then they are an analyst

That leads, for example, to him ranking Dennis Moore as a top-100 analyst tweeter. Now, I have no problem with mentioning “Dennis Moore” and “top-100 analyst” in the same sentence. But if Dennis has any analyst business model at all, it’s one of the stealthiest ones in the whole IT industry.

Finally, there was a webinar by French, Bentwood, Ray’s partner Jeremiah Owyang (who’s #1 on most of Bentwood’s lists, except for the ones Ray’s #1 on), and Carter Lusher on analysts’ use of social media. I haven’t listened to the recording, but two of the four bullet points listed below it say analysts can or should:

Develop personal networks, career brands, that carry with them further than reports under an umbrella brand.

Finally realize they are also media in addition to their traditional roles.

I agree, and in fact believe analysts are a huge part of the media ecosystem, already now and even more going forward.

So what are the implications? If you’re a vendor, I think:

• Analysts (defined broadly) are an increasingly important part of the overall set of influencers. In particular, as traditional media business models collapse, we’re playing some of the role trade press reporters used to.
• You need flexibility in how you deal with influencers. Everybody is different. (Quick worst-practice story: Oracle tells me it won’t give analyst-relations support to anybody who doesn’t let it see what they write before it goes out – a process they use both for fact-checking and general last-ditch opinion-lobbying. But I know they enforce that rule selectively. And I’m not getting good PR support from Oracle these days either.)
• Understand that different analysts can give you good advice in different ways. E.g., numerous clients tell me that they go to Gartner to find out what mainstream enterprises are saying, and to me for actual marketing or strategy advice. (Conveniently, that lets them also be giving money to and getting attention from what they judge to be two of the top influencers in their area.) Other analysts might assist them in yet other ways, even beyond general influencer-relations value.

If you’re a user, please note that:

• There are numerous good providers of free information and insight.
• Many (not all) providers of free information can also be hired as consultants.

Sorry if those bullet points at the end — or for that matter the rest of the post –  sound a bit self-serving, but this overview is in fact informed by thinking about my own business.

Or, to put it another way:

• What I think about the analyst business in general
• How I structure my own business in particular

are, for rather obvious reasons, closely in alignment.

• 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.

1. Pitch “change” as a top-level message.
2. Claim that being a pro-change outsider is more conducive to getting things done than being an experienced insider.
3. Adopt similar policy positions to his rivals, so as to reduce the chance for differentiation there.
4. Show that he’s not “too much” of an outsider, by collecting insiders’ endorsements.
5. Claim that primary electoral success demonstrates both that he’s likely to have general election success in the fall and also that he’s likely to lead effectively once elected.

So Clinton desperately needs to differentiate herself from Obama, beneficially, more than she already has. But how?

She’s already tapped out the domestic policy vein. Everybody knows Clinton has immense expertise on health care, and that’s an advantage for her. But otherwise, she and Obama express similar priorities, propose similar programs, and similarly hope that the Republicans won’t convince voters that the Democratic numbers don’t add up.

So Clinton needs to shift the discussion as far back towards foreign policy as she can, simply to create the chance for favorable differentiation versus Obama. But this strategy has further potential advantages as well. They include:

• Defense and foreign policy are the areas where voters historically value experience – certainly more than they do on domestic policy, where since Jimmy Carter they’ve favored outsiders who will try to end business-as-usual.
• Clinton’s experience advantage over Obama is largely in the area of foreign policy, specifically in her globe-trotting as First Lady and her Senate Armed Services Committee work.
• Obama has made a strong “electability” pitch around his consistent opposition to the Iraq War. If Clinton can reestablish perceived superiority in foreign policy, she could recover that aspect of the “electability” story as well. Since McCain will obviously make national defense the cornerstone of his campaign – and by extension foreign policy too – that’s a big deal.

I think there are three specific areas of foreign policy that offer Clinton particularly good chances for competitive advantage.

1. Health care, children’s rights, etc. — emphasizing her traditional advantages and commitments.

2. Women’s rights – she can get inspirational on women’s rights, but too rarely shows it during the campaign. What’s more, it’s an issue that obviously resonates with her core (very large!) constituency.

3. Free trade.

The third item on that list may be rather surprising. So let me explain. Clinton is unlikely to win the nomination unless she out-wonks Obama in a convincing way. And free trade is an issue where he happens to stumble. In Thursday’s debate alone, he twice showed himself to be confused on trade issues. First, he told a story about a steel plant losing out to Chinese competition, and blamed it on NAFTA. Second, even though he’s negative on NAFTA, he spoke favorably of helping the Mexican economy strengthen, create better jobs, and so forth.

Clinton’s calls for a “trade time-out” show that she doesn’t want to run as pure free-trader. Even so, if she aggressively delved into trade details, she could:

• Show command of economic issues.
• Show command of international negotiation issues.
• Remind voters of her and her husband’s accomplishments.
• Remind voters of an important pro-Hispanic position (i.e., pro-NAFTA).
• Co-opt a good point Obama made – she can say he’s right to want to strengthen the Mexican economy, and she’s been long working on that.
• Point up areas where Obama is confused or panders.

This strategy has obvious risks, but I can’t think of another one more likely to succeed.

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My major points were:

• Hillary Clinton should stress her status as a woman. Yep, that sure was right.
• Clinton should tell this story by emphasizing her unique advantages versus other women’s lots in life. Hmm, maybe that one isn’t so necessary. She seems to have told it just fine her way. And my suggested strategy has some risks.
• Clinton should play defense but not offense in trying to redefine “change.” That’s pretty much what she’s doing now, and it seems to be working. Nobody’s making fun of those “Ready for change” signs waved at her rally.
• Clinton should stress her track record of achievement. This one may not be needed, and it carries some risk of making her seem wooden or not-for-change again. Even so, I think it would be wise to have an aide get the more objective story ready, in case it turns out to be needed after all.
• Clinton should continue to hammer at Obama’s lack of experience. Yep. That seems to be working.
• Clinton should push likability. That was obvious. And she has done a beautiful job of it.
• In particular, Clinton should reach out emotionally to younger women. I absolutely still believe that.
• Hillary Clinton should use Bill Clinton as a surrogate. Actually, much of her New Hampshire win is ascribed to distancing herself from the Bill Clinton legacy, so I’m less sure of this opinion than I was a day ago. Even so, as Super-Duper Tuesday approaches, it will be necessary to fan out as many teams of powerful messengers as possible. And Bill Clinton can surely lead one of the strongest such teams. Maybe it should be a Bill-plus-Chelsea Clinton team, to reduce any back-to-the-past negative reactions.

Links:

• How to market Hillary Clinton more effectively
• The women’s strategy I had thought up for Clinton
• The extent to which marketing “change” makes sense

]]> http://www.strategicmessaging.com/updating-my-marketing-prescriptions-for-the-clinton-campaign/2008/01/09/feed/ 2 http://www.strategicmessaging.com/how-hillary-clinton-regained-authenticity/2008/01/09/ http://www.strategicmessaging.com/how-hillary-clinton-regained-authenticity/2008/01/09/#comments Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:04:38 +0000 Curt Monash http://www.strategicmessaging.com/how-hillary-clinton-regained-authenticity/2008/01/09/ A huge fraction of what I do as a marketing consultant is advise on how to be credible. In consumer marketing – including politics – analysis often focuses on the closely related factor of authenticity instead. Hillary Clinton’s stunning New Hampshire win is in large part being attributed to a sudden recapture of authenticity.

I agree with that top-level analysis. Specifically, I think there were four main factors driving the sudden change in Clinton’s image. First, she started running and presenting herself as a woman. Second, she stopped overdoing it when co-opting Obama’s message of “change,” and scaled back to a level that was credible. Third, she told a very John-Edwards-like “It’s personal to me” story about why she’s campaigning, and didn’t take it to a false-sounding extreme. Fourth, she banished the Bill-Clinton-era human stage props, starting with the ex-President himself. It now seems evident that the presence of Bill Clinton and his advisors had been seen as evidence of her being both an old-school candidate and, even worse, her husband’s puppet.

Most interestingly, I’m not sure that political analysts have yet grasped how completely Clinton can play – and for now is playing — the female role. It’s not just the explicit mentions of the point, plus a few tears. It’s also the choice to show up for her big speech in idiosyncratic yet tasteful clothing, rather than yet another boring costume of suit-and-pearls. It’s the very feminine waves from the podium to individuals in the audience. Hillary Clinton’s staffers have said that she is warm and maternal to them in private. If she can tap into that streak in her public persona as well, I expect that she will indeed be the next President of the United States.

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.

Implicit in this critique is the idea that one should test messages via polling. Now, up to a point I agree that’s a great idea. But political campaigns aren’t just about pitching to people’s preconceptions — they’re also about changing people’s minds. If Obama wins, it will only be because many people, cynical about change, started to believe it was possible. Ronald Reagan changed US politics for decades by convincing people to give up on the idea of government accomplishing much — and also by convincing them that the benefits of a vigorous-but-insecure entrepreneurial economy outweighed the drawbacks. If the Republicans upset the Democrats in November, it will probably be because they convinced many swing voters that various real or imagined threats (terrorists, immigrants, whatever) are dangerous enough to require more counter-aggression than those voters now think is called for.

The Clintons take a lot of grief for being highly poll-driven, and up to a point it’s served them well. So I imagine the critique has considerable validity. But I think it also misses a larger point — the best strategic marketing communicates what you can lead people to believe, not just what they already think.

Edit: Apparently weBranding has a capital B and also is named Tommy. This may be a more stable link to the same article.

The temptation will be to make a classic marketing error: Excessive focus. And if they fall into that trap, they will lose.

If Hillary Clinton is to win the Democratic nomination, her campaign now has to simultaneously follow all (or at least most) of the following strategies:

• Pitch her experience, positively (and in more detail than they have been).
• Attack Barack Obama’s lack of experience.
• Pitch her “change-through-accomplishment” story, even though that will accomplish little more than stemming defections from her existing base of supporters.
• Open a new conceptual front, by stressing Clinton’s role as a womens’ rights icon.
• Continue to advance on the likability front (she’s a wonderful, moving speaker, when she lets herself be).
• Unleash Bill Clinton on the campaign trail, with the dual assignment of highlighting policy differences with the opposition and – even more important – giving examples of specific Hillary Clinton accomplishments behind closed doors.

Classic women’s rights politics of the past 40 years have focused on two main issues – abortion, and blatant workplace discrimination. But Clinton avoids stressing those issues, and she’s wise to do so. Abortion is now a political issue that tends to favor conservatives, and the cruder forms of discrimination are now believed to be behind us.* Meanwhile, Clinton herself was one of the targets of a backlash against “women’s libbers,” including Rush Limbaugh’s memorable “feminazis” label.

*Nor is that belief absurd. #3 and #5 in the succession to the US Presidency are currently female, as are a much higher fraction of the senior executives I deal with in the software industry than 25 or even 10 years earlier.

Most American women today, unless they’re older and/or unusually successful, have never run into serious glass ceilings or overt discrimination. Rather, women’s continued disadvantages versus men are focused in two areas:

1. Women –- married and single alike — are expected and often want to do a disproportionate share of the work in homemaking and child-rearing. But the resulting lack of experience or extra workplace effort puts them at a career disadvantage, with all the financial and status shortfalls such disadvantages produce.
2. In a variety of subtle ways, men are often still “taken more seriously” or viewed as more “authoritative” than women. Classic anecdotal examples of this are differing reactions at a meeting when a woman or a man makes a suggestion, interrupts somebody, and/or shows a flash of temper.

Some people think these problems, to the extent they exist, are minor. But many others think they’re substantial. Indeed, many believe — or could be easily persuaded — that these (especially the first one) are the largest factors still disadvantaging women versus men in the United States today.

Hillary Clinton has spent her life experiencing and overcoming these disadvantages.* Of course, she was holding some aces. Not every woman gets to have a Yale Law Degree and a husband who is President of the United States. But using her own life story as a point of departure, Clinton should be explaining how she’s going to help other women overcome the same challenges she knows so well.

*Yes, I know she had a major legal career – certainly by Arkansas standards. And she was on the board of Wal-Mart, whose CEO told my father that she was their smartest board member. Even so, when her husband’s and her own career objectives conflicted, it’s pretty clear whose took priority. And while I doubt either parent spent a lot of time baking cookies for Chelsea in the governor’s mansion or White House, it’s a safe bet that one did more parenting than the other, and it wasn’t the male one who did more.

I’m not sure exactly what Clinton should be proposing: Child care as good as she enjoyed? A bit of assertiveness training? Beefed-up mid-career education, perhaps delivered online? Maybe she can’t propose much, and should just be giving vague, Obama-like pep talks on the subject. She’s good at those, when she lets herself be – I had a mid-20s employee who was inspired to tears by a Clinton speech in the 1990s.

But speaking as an expert on marketing and positioning, I’m convinced that this is the most powerful arrow Clinton can add to her marketing quiver — in the primaries and probably in the general election as well.