Every day I hear more and more about the “sea of sameness” from founders, CEOs, CROs, and CMOs.
The dialog goes something like this:
- There are so many products out there,
- They are getting more similar,
- Customers are more confused than ever,
- Unable to see the differences between them.
- Thus, we are lost in sea of sameness.
I believe the first four statements are largely true, though I might challenge statement two. But the conclusion — that we are inevitably flotsam in a sea of sameness — is where I beg to differ most.
Somewhere along the way, we got lost. We’ve turned what should have been the problem statement into an invitation to a pity party. The correct response to differentiation challenges isn’t “woe is me,” but “that’s why we get paid the big bucks.”
That’s our job. That’s what we do here: differentiate similar products in the minds of customers. See Positioning. No, it’s not easy. But the day you think differentiation is impossible is the day you should turn in your marketing gun and badge. Differentiation is always possible. If consumer packaged goods (CPG) marketers can differentiate rice or yogurt, then we can darn well differentiate enterprise software.
While we’re at it, none of these arguments are new. Thirty years ago, when we were building Business Objects, most customers couldn’t tell you the differences between Actuate, Brio, BusinessObjects, Cognos, Crystal, Discoverer, Essbase, Forest & Trees, MicroStrategy, OLAP@Work, Panorama, ReportSmith, Spotfire, TM1, and a dozen other business intelligence tools. (Yes, markets were crowded back in the day, too.)
It was not because those differences didn’t exist. It was because you had to be a connoisseur to see most of them. But most customers aren’t connoisseurs and don’t want to be. They’re just businesspeople with problems that they’re hoping to solve.
Differentiation is a key duty of product marketing [1]. You do it in three ways:
- Essence distillation. First, you need to find the essence of what makes the product different. Sometimes those differences are general, sometimes they’re specific to given use-cases. The key questions are: What’s actually different? What’s not, but maybe the founders wished it were? What used to be different, but isn’t any more [2]? What’s different, but only in shades-of-gray and not in black-and-white [3]? You need to get to the heart of what’s both actually different and differentiate-able, in the sense that you can explain why pretty easily.
- Emphasis of differentiated features. Once you understand what’s different, you need to build a message that emphasizes your differentiation. One standard approach is to “set the agenda” by turning your differentiation list into your buyer’s selection criteria. One way to do that is to write an Evaluation Guide that explains the key features buyers should be looking for and which prominently includes your key differentiators and why they matter.
- Selling benefits and consequences. Every feature has benefits (the good things that happen when you have it) and consequences (the bad things that happen when you don’t). Great marketers market both. Think: alerting is critical to the successful deployment of your conversational intelligence system [4]. Or: God help you if your data governance platform can’t manage data assets from the modern data stack [5].
In short: if you’re shopping for a product in [category], then be sure to find one that includes features ABC. If you do, you’ll succeed and reap benefits DEF. If you don’t, you’ll fail and face consequences PDQ. See my post on how to build a marketing message for more.
Navigating the Sea of Sameness
So how do you navigate the sea of sameness? Good old-fashioned product marketing. But if the answer is so simple, one must wonder, why are people talking so much about the sea of sameness today? Why is the volume so high on this message?
Are products really getting so similar that customers can’t see differences among them? Or is it something else?
I think the sea-of-sameness conversation is less about changes in markets, and more about changes in marketers. That is, the staffing profile of today’s software CMOs.
Back in the day, nearly 100% of CMOs came from product marketing backgrounds. Today, that’s no longer true. Because pipeline generation is now the sine qua non of marketing, the vast majority of today’s CMOs come from demand generation backgrounds.
So, when faced with a challenging differentiation problem, it’s a little too easy for them to blame the market and tell the CEO that we’re lost in a sea of sameness.
When you’re only tool’s a hammer, problems that don’t look like nails are for someone else to solve. Many CMOs are, in effect, saying that the problem isn’t marketing’s lack of skills in finding and emphasizing product differentiation, but that such differentiation does not exist.
Hogwash. The fault lies not within our stars but within ourselves.
What’s a founder/CEO to do about all this?
- Beware knee-jerk brand spending. If you follow this line of reasoning, you then say “well, since we can’t differentiate our product, we’re going to need to differentiate our company. Ergo, we need to spend a ton on branding.” While brand spend might be a good thing for your company, it might not be. But God help you if you think differentiating your company is going to be easier than differentiating your product [6].
- Hire a strong product marketer. In most cases they should report directly to you — and not a CMO more interested in pipegen or a product leader more interested in roadmap. While board members might question this as unusual, you’ll find a better product marketer if they work directly for you and remove a potentially uninterested middleman.
- Work closely with them. Great product marketers need to interact with (even, interview) the CEO, founders, and product leaders repeatedly, searching for nuggets, and structuring what they hear. The process is highly iterative and somewhat subjective. Hopefully with each cycle you improve both quality and consensus.
- Support them. While the product marketer should be able to hold their own in debates with sales, product, and the e-team, there is no substitute for founder/CEO support when trying to standardize a company on a message. Think: “I know this may not be perfect, but it’s very, very good, and we’ve iterated ten times with Sandy. This is what we’ve decided to go with.”
As a founder/CEO you’re likely to already be hearing about the sea of sameness from your sales and marketing teams. The question is: what are you going to do about it?
Blame the product, and set off on a endless quest for potentially irrelevant differentiation – all while investing more and more of your marketing dollars in branding? Or hire some product marketers who can distill the essence of what you’ve got today and build on it?
There is no sea of sameness. Only marketers who don’t know how to differentiate.
Notes
[1] Some product marketers think demonstrating value is the job. And in some situations (e.g., an early-stage startup selling an entirely new thing) you do certainly need to sell value. But in more developed markets, the game quickly changes from why buy one to why buy mine? The reward for successfully selling the concept is typically N competitors all selling something similar.
[2] Companies often cling to lost differentiators, well past their neutralization date. This is likely due to positive reinforcement from past success and, surprisingly, the fact that it usually still works for a while even though the feature is no longer differentiated. (A mind is a difficult thing to change.) But eventually customers learn that the differentiation is no more, and you lose both product differentiation and credibility with the customer.
[3] And is harder to demonstrate. So hard, perhaps, that it’s not worth trying. This is why I often refer to “graying-out” competitive differentiators. You don’t need to match them functionally; you just need enough to take their formerly black-and-white difference and turn it gray, changing their claim from “only” to “better.”
[4] And you should be able to explain why.
[5] And yes, you should explain in detail the exact problems that God will need to help you with. The rhetoric is fine, but only if you can back it up.
[6] If you think tech products all look the same to customers, try tech companies. They’ve all got hip founders who went to Stanford to MIT, tons of venture capital (and no, they can’t tell Redpoint from Sequoia), modern offices, ping pong tables, youthful energy, a “we’re going to change the world” vision, customer focus and integrity as core values (regardless of whether they actually practice either), and a strong conviction that their people is really what differentiates them. Think hard about really differentiating your company from a dozen others, in your space or not, and then you might find yourself in a real hurry to go back and differentiate your product.
