• 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.

Creating a successful business requires effective persuasion. This study shows that great persuasion sometimes occurs when people don’t expect it. This means that you should always be selling—you may persuade people when you least expect it. This is also a good argument for the potential power of tools such as Twitter and blogs. These new approaches can open doors for people who haven’t thought about a new concept.

If you think about it, what Kawasaki really means is: You should always be marketing.

Looking at him briefly from afar, I’d guess that Kawasaki’s priorities are something like:

1. Keep building awareness.
2. Stay on message.

Judging by the recent election season, most political campaigns would agree. In enterprise IT, however, I’d tweak and flip them, to:

1. Stay on one or more of your messages.
2. Build awareness in the right audiences — prospects and influencers alike.

General layered marketing template

• Tangible benefits
• Credible causal connection
• Measurable characteristics
• Credible causal connection
• Fundamental nature

Clearly, the second of my the two enterprise IT layered messaging templates I proposed,

Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

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

is just a special case of that more general model.

Another special case seems to work well for the other market I tend to write about in this blog, namely US politics. Namely, the template

Political candidates

• Tangible benefits
• Credible effect
• Promised actions in office
• Logical and/or emotional connection
• Biography, character, and values

seems to cover a lot of today’s campaign marketing.

For example, by applying this model to some of this year’s presidential candidates, we could get

John McCain (general election)

• Safe country, economic growth, lower taxes, less corruption, return to good ol’ American values
• Conservative political theories say you’ll get the desired outcomes
• Hawkish policies, low taxes, corruption-fighting, conservative judges
• He’s done it all his life, it’s what he’s all about
• Country-loving pugnacious Republican war hero

Barack Obama (general election)

• Peace, fewer enemies around the world, better times for the poor and middle class, sane public policies, social freedoms, progress on global warming, general change
• Liberal/moderate political theories say you’ll get the desired outcomes
• Dovish policies, leadership-through-inspiration, logic-based policies, liberal judges
• He’s done it all his life, it’s what he’s all about
• People-serving high-IQ Democrat from an outsider background who’s a brilliant orator

Ron Paul

• More money in your pocketbook, more personal freedom, less war
• Libertarian policies would surely deliver what they promise. And libertarian theories say the side effects wouldn’t be nearly as bad as conventional thinking claims.
• Radical reductions in spending, taxes, international involvement, and miscellaneous impingements on freedom.
• He sure sounds sincere. Besides, he’s not really going to get elected anyway, so only his ideas matter, not his actual competence.
• Congressman and doctor who’s talks a pure libertarian line.

Hillary Clinton (late in her campaign)

• Better times for the poor and middle class, sane & non-naive public policies at home and abroad, gender equality
• Clintonian policy-wonkiness in the 1990s gave us our best times in half a century
• Moderate but firm foreign policy, health-care reform, other smart public policies, liberal judges
• She’s done it all her life, it’s what she’s all about
• Long-time liberal/populist/moderate, policy wonk, health-care specialist, woman, fairly experienced

All of these templates seem to be well-accepted by a large group of supporters. “Large” is of course a somewhat relative term, with Ron Paul’s story ringing true with a lot fewer people than Obama’s, McCain’s, or Clinton. But then, not as many people believe in Paul’s libertarian dogma as accept general US right-wing, left-wing, or centrist political approaches. By way of contrast, it’s hard to come up with a layered messaging stack for Rudy Giuliani that would impress many voters; “Subject-Verb-9/11” was never fleshed out in a detailed way that very many people bought. And the same goes for presidential candidate Joe Biden’s “I’m a working-class guy like you, except that I’m smart about foreign policy.”

Much of what has happened in the campaign could be explained starting from templates like these. Not all, of course. For example, field organization – and particularly Obama’s huge advantage in same in most states, and Clinton’s advantage in a few – goes a long way toward explaining the Democratic primary outcome. But on the whole, I think it’s not too inaccurate to say that candidates tend to do well to the extent voters and influencers buy into all the layers of their messaging pitch, but not so well to the extent one or more layers are seen as being seriously lacking.

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.

Please subscribe to our feed!

US politics is heavily about engagement too. The traditional centers of engagement – unions, churches, and so on – have no been joined by the Internet as well. The Washington Post has a great article today about old-style engagement in the Clinton campaign. Micah Sifry makes the case that this time it’s different, and in the process describes the crucial role of internet-based engagement to this year’s presidential campaign.

And of course the same thing’s happening in software. Open source is greatly about engagement, up to the point of co-development. (I don’t want to admit how long I’d gone without programming until I hacked around a bit in WordPress.) And as Sun’s recent purchase of MySQL illustrates, open source is a very big deal.

It goes even further than that in software. The base of the open source pyramid is people who download something for free and experience it at their convenience before buying, but don’t try to extend it themselves. And, as I noted today in a write-up of Coveo, that extends well beyond open source. (A couple of other closed-source examples are Attivio and Coral8.)

What does this imply about messaging strategy? Two generalities jump quickly to mind.

1. Increasingly, you need to target people who are ripe to learn about you, not just ones who are ripe to buy.
2. Whatever claims you make to them had better be true enough so as to hold up through long engagement.

• 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.

Buyers of enterprise information technology operate pretty much the same way. They buy technology because of what it can do for them. They avoid purchases for fear of project failure, or of the products not living up to their promises, or of difficulties in the products’ use. Indeed, in its heyday, IBM was said to sell largely on the basis of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD), in a memorable phrase sometimes attributed to analyst Ulrich Weil.

Voters do much the same thing. Hence the constant tension between “Voting your hopes” and “Voting your fears.” But the voting example illustrates a subtlety, in that they are voting on at least two different kinds of fears:

1. Fear of specific threats, like terrorism or widespread job loss. (An analogy in the IT case would be buyers of security technology.)

2. Fear of non-performance. Inexperienced candidates are feared for their naivety or inability to execute. (Thus, not having a track record is bad.) Experienced candidates are feared for their past propensities to do things the voters don’t like. (Thus, having a track record is also bad.) Most IT fears fall into this category, and of course most investment fears do as well.

That, ladies and gentlemen, is why opposition research and negative marketing are so powerful. It doesn’t take much to induce fear of non-performance.

They need to find the thirty bloggers matter, and months before they need them, give to them. Post comments, link to them, talk to them, engage them as a member of the community, and then when they roll something out those bloggers trust you. An example is Boing Boing, which is one of the three most popular blogs in the world, and there is a piece of software that just came out that helps you track appointments and stuff like that.

Cory Doctorow wrote a rave review of it yesterday on Boing Boing. Why did he do that? Because they showed up an hour ahead in time and begged him? No, because he’s known the founder for a long time, and the founder actually asked him a lot of advice about how to make the software better, and he gave it to them. So, he has a sense of relationship and ownership, so when the software comes out, of course he is going to say something about it. That time investment, and that respect is an asset that people at a traditional company might not have earned.

Certainly the company/analyst relationship fits into that paradigm.

Godin went on to take a related point to an extreme:

The thing that’s going to be hard for a lot of people is it represents a shift in power, that the reason most people become marketers is because it is fun to be in charge. It’s fun to put on a show; it is fun to have influence that comes from money. What we are seeing in the new marketing is that the opposite is true. People who are succeeding tend to be the ones with no money, because having no money makes you humble and being humble makes you work with the marketplace better.

But while extreme, that’s not entirely wrong. For example, the technology industry has advanced to the point that large firms have huge economies of scale, and startups keep succeeding even so. (E.g., see my coverage of Netezza or Qliktech.) And this year’s presidential campaign has, so far, been friendly to insurgent candidates such as Mike Huckabee, Barack Obama, a rebounding John McCain, or even Ron Paul.

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.