Marketing is Dead (long live product marketing)

Marketing is Dead*
*long live Product Marketing
April Dunford rocketwatcher.com

My Background
Big Companies
IBM (Launch and growth of InfoSphere)
Siebel (Global Marketing Financial Services)
Nortel (head of incubation)
Startups
Infobright
DataMirror (exit to IBM)
Janna Systems ($1.4B exit to Siebel Systems)
In-Between (as of a few weeks ago)
Solarsoft ($100M revenue)
2

Marketing Sucks
Untargeted and generic
Interrupt-driven
Way too pushy (most marketing doesn’t care if I’m ready to buy yet)
Marketers are yelling, and not even yelling at me in particular…

Plus There’s the Lying….

Nobody Believes Marketing Anymore
….and can you blame them?

The World has Changed
Vendors are no longer THE source of Information
Customers can broadcast to the world
Prospects can easily talk to each other
Product info is readily available
Prospects are far along the buying path
before vendors know about them

What Changes?
Buying vs. Selling
Earned vs. Bought Media
Customer Service
Visibility vs. “Branding”

Who Will Get us Out of This Mess?
You.
Yeah, Ms./Mr. Product Marketer, I’m looking at you.

Why Product Marketing?
We get segmentation
We understand the market needs of our segments
We have deep product knowledge
We know how those fit together

A New Marketing Framework

Key Elements in this New Environment
Content
Messaging
Visibility
Engagement

Messaging
Needs to answer 3 questions for prospects:
What is it?
Is it for me?
Why should I buy it from you?
Stories, stories, stories.

Paris Hilton Marketing
13
beautiful but makes no sense

What You Do?
14
Netflix – Watch as many movies as you want for one low monthly price.
SalesForce.com – the world’s favorite CRM software as a service.
Wikipedia – A free encyclopedia built collaboratively using Wiki software.

You do WHAT?
15
Sun Microsystems – Innovative products and services that power the network economy.
Sterling Commerce – helps companies optimize and transform their dynamic business network to accelerate revenues and reduce costs.
Any internet b2C startup – Personalizes the Internet!!

Step 1: What the Heck is it?
Keep it brief
Use simple language
Just come out and say it!
16

Segmentation is not a Dirty Word
17
Market to Everyone, Sell to No One

Explicit Targeting is Powerful
18
ThinkGeek: Selling geek t-shirts for programmers, linux hackers, and open source geeks.
VS
Customink: your t-shirt expert for companies and individuals.

Go Deep – The Janna Example
19
CRM for Investment bankers:
Use cases, day in the life of a banker
Demos, example data
Whitepapers, articles, opt-ed
Sales Enablement: the IB dictionary

Step 2: Is it for Me?
Be explicit about who you target
Use their language
Go as deep as you can
20

Why Buy From You?
The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school:
21

Why Buy From You?
The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school:
Customers Don’t Care about FEATURES
22

Why Buy From You?
23

(do that and you won’t need to lie)

Step 3: Why Buy it from You?
Value not Features
Focus on Differentiators
25

Bring it to life with Stories
Go ahead April, tell them a story…..

Content for Customers (not sales)
Content needs to be helpful
Requires a strategy
Map to steps in buying process
Provides the benefit of your expertise in the market (not necessarily about product)

Engagement
Community – an increasingly important communications channel
Bring customers & prospects together
Help/incent customers to carry your message
How can Marketing help Customer Service

Visibility
How non-users observe that others are users:
Product features
Shareable content
Reviews/awards
Independent analysis
Success marketing

Thanks!
RocketWatcher.com
Twitter: @aprildunford
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Marketing is Dead (long live product marketing)

by April Dunford on Nov 13, 2010

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Marketing is Dead (long live product marketing) — Presentation Transcript