Enterprise IT product (sustainable-lead messaging stack)

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

because it’s a pretty good representation of how I think. But what about other influencers? Do they view things in somewhat the same way?

Well, I’m clearly at one extreme in my focus on careful, detailed analysis. At the other extreme is that portion of the trade press (and it’s not a small one) accurately described in Dave Kellogg’s rant

most of the IT trade press had degenerated to the following formula:

• Hire 20-something English majors as IT trade journalists
• Have them filter vendor press releases deciding which to cover
• Write stories based on the press releases, one live analyst interview, and one to two customer interviews
• Make money by selling advertising to the vendors
• Don’t rock the journalistic boat too much because of the prior point

Net: they didn’t add much value.

But most analysts, bloggers, and journalists are somewhere in between.

Sure, there’s a school of thought that goes “Oh, it works? Customers say so? Then it must be great stuff.” But many observers really do try to do serious analysis. I talk all the time to journalists who ask “Is this for real?”, and they’re not just looking for customer stories. Gartner Magic Quadrants and Forrester Waves, whatever their faults, do respectively have categories for “Completeness of vision” and “Strategy.” And while some Gartner or Forrester analysts may be dumb enough to accept any kind of incoherent fairy story as credible future plans, most do at least some critical thinking as to whether those stories could realistically come true.

Among bloggers there’s a similar mix. Some – including some of the most famous – are surely at the “Oooh – shiny!” level of credulity. But the blogosphere, especially when discussing enterprise or other highly-scaled IT, also contains a lot of in-depth, carefully-reasoned technical analysis.

So far I’ve argued that influencers perform more or less careful logical analysis, including of vendors’ forward-looking technology strategies. But I’ve begged the question as to whether such analysis closely matches the specific models I’ve laid out. Let me now address that head-on.

It seems beyond dispute that many influencers use at least the more simplified layered model

Enterprise IT product

• Tangible benefits
• Technical connection
• Features and metrics

The top layer answers the question “Is this good for buyers?”, and the other two layers answer the question “Is this better for buyers than the alternatives?” No other common template seems to do as good a job.

But how do influencers decide whether products really have the features and metrics claimed? Demos, hands-on use, publicly-validated benchmarks, and general vendor claims only go so far. In most cases, influencers have to look further for support. The influencers I talk with are much more likely to believe something if they hear it from customers than if the vendor is the only one saying it. They’re also more likely to believe something if it grows out of a clear technical differentiation – e.g., “MPP/grid” or “columnar” or “FPGA” — that if it arises from no clear technical source that they can understand.*

*These specific examples are all taken from the red-hot market for specialty data warehouse appliances and DBMS.

Bottom line: The two enterprise IT layered messaging templates I laid out really do describe a significant part of how influencers form and support their opinions.

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.

• 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.