Tag Archives: messaging

Does Your Marketing Pass the Duck Test?

Posted on May 3, 2024 | Leave a comment

“If a bird walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck.” — James Whitcomb Riley

Many marketers are in such a hurry to talk about topical issues that they forget the duck test: if it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then most people will conclude it’s a duck. In logic, they teach that such abductive reasoning can lead to incorrect conclusions — and it can.

But here in marketing, we draw a different conclusion from the duck test. It’s how most peoples’ minds work so we shouldn’t fight against it. There are two common ways that marketers fail the duck test and we’ll cover both of them — and what to do instead — in this post.

Deny Thy Father and Refuse Thy Name
Many marketers are eager to pretend that their product is the latest in-vogue thing (e.g., AI), and can get so busy dressing it up in the latest tech fashion, that they generate more confusion than sales opportunities.

It’s like a replay of the clichéd movie scene:
Man: Who are you?
Woman: Who do you want me to be, baby?

When someone asks your company the equivalent of “who are you?” [1], you need to answer the question and that answer needs to be clear.

Remember, the enemy for most startups isn’t the competition. It’s confusion. The easiest thing for a prospect to do is nothing. If we talk and I leave confused, then I’ll just write off the wasted half-hour and go on with my day.

Consider an answer like this [2] [3], to the question “what is MarkLogic?”

I mean great question. We ask ourselves that all the time. It’s actually hard to answer because there’s nothing else like it. Answering that is like trying to explain the difference between a Cessna and a 747 to someone who’s never seen an airplane. Our marketing people call it an XML Server, but that’s not a great description.

What is it really? Literally, it’s what you get when you lock two search engine PhDs in a garage for two years and tell them to build a database. You know, it looks like a database from the outside, but when you pop open the hood — surprise — you find that it’s built from search engine parts. Search engine style indexing. And it’s schema-free like a search engine so it can handle unstructured, semi-structured, and, of course, structured data as well. Let’s get into those exciting distinctions in a minute.

This thing — whatever you want to call it — it’s the Vegomatic of a data: it slices and dices and chops in every conceivable way. In the end, I think what makes it hard to understand is that it’s basically a hybrid: half search engine, half content application platform, and all database.

Is that clear?

As mud. What’s wrong with that answer?

  • It’s confusing
  • It’s long
  • It’s navel-gazing (let’s talk about me)
  • It’s bleeding on the customer (sharing internal troubles)

It’s a horrible, horrible answer.

Now before you stop reading, perhaps thinking that this is one specific, dated case study, let me say that I could easily write such a parody for about a quarter of the twenty-something startups I work with today. This is not some ancient example from another world. This is a current problem for many startups, but I’m not going to parody any of them here [4]. Might you suffer from this problem? Go listen to some Gong or Chorus recordings, particularly high funnel (e.g., SDR) and/or discovery calls, and see if anything resonates.

Now, let’s contrast the previous answer with this one:

It’s an XML database system, meaning it’s a database that uses XML documents as its native data modeling element. Now, what did you want to do with it again?

What’s nice about this answer?

  • It’s short
  • It’s clear
  • It’s correct
  • It leaves an opportunity for follow-up questions [5]

But the really nice part of this answer is that it puts focus back on the customer. The direct cost of all the previous blather is confusion. The opportunity cost of all that blather is you waste precious time you could have spent listening to the customer, learning more about their problem, and trying to decide if you can solve it.

So why didn’t some of our sellers want to give the second answer? They didn’t want to say the X word. XML was cool for a while, but that quickly passed and XML databases were always distinctly uncool. So, some sellers would rather spend five minutes tap dancing around the question rather than directly answering it.

What followed was almost always a difficult conversation [6]. But the flaw in tap-dancing was simple: the customer is going to figure it out anyway [7]. Customers are smart. If it:

  • Stores data like a database
  • Builds indexes like a database
  • And has a query language like a database

Then — quack, quack — it’s a database.

That’s the first way marketers fail the duck test. They’re afraid to say what the product is for fear of scaring people off. But there’s another way to fail the duck test.

Confusing Products and Solutions
The second way to fail the duck test is to rotate so hard to solutions that you basically refuse to say what the product is. You end up dodging the question entirely.

Customer: So, what is it?
Vendor: You can use it to build things, like a deck.
Customer: That’s great, but what is it?
Vendor: You can use it to assemble things, too, like a bed.
Customer: Sure, but what is it?
Vendor: And you can use it for disassembling things too.
Customer: Wait, it’s a drill isn’t it?

Here we have the prospect playing twenty questions to figure out what the product is. Yes, we all know that customers buy solutions to problems [8] and Theodore Levitt’s classic example of customers buying 1/4″ holes, not 1/4″ bits.

But don’t take that in a fundamentalist way. If the customer asks, “what is it?” the answer is not, “a thing that makes holes” but, “a power drill with a 1/4-inch bit.” If they ask why ours is better, we say that our bits are titanium and don’t break. “Feature” need not be a four-letter word to remember that the purpose of the drill is to make a hole and, transitively, that the purpose of the hole is to build a new deck with the ultimate benefit of quality family time.

The point is: knowing what solutions (or use-cases) we want to target does not eliminate the requirement to have strong product messaging. Particularly in unexciting categories, we will need to lead with use-cases, not product superiority, category formation, or market leadership. But, inevitably, even when you lead with use-cases, you will get the question: what is it?

And a short, clear answer – as we discussed above – not only gets the customer what they want, but it lets us have more time for listening and discovery. I see many companies where they rotate so hard to use-case marketing that their product messaging is so weak it actually interferes with discussions of the use-case.

For example, say the product is a data streaming platform (DSP) and the use-case is industrial monitoring for manufacturing facilities. Let’s assume that data streaming platforms are not a hot category, so there aren’t a lot of people out shopping for them. That means we’re not going to target DSP shoppers with a product-oriented superiority message, instead, we are going to target people who have a problem with industrial monitoring.

But when one of those people asks what it is, we’re not going to say, “a thingy that helps you do industrial monitoring.” Instead, we’re going to say, “it’s a data streaming platform, many of our customers use it for industrial monitoring, and here’s why it’s such a great fit for that use-case.”

That is, we map to the use-case. We don’t redefine the product around the use-case. We don’t try to use the use-case to avoid talking about the product. Doing so only confuses people because eventually they figure out it’s not an industrial monitoring application, but a data streaming platform that can be used for industrial monitoring. Unless we are clear that it’s a platform being used for a use-case, then we fail the duck test.

In the end, you will get the right answer if you always remember three things:

  • Customers are smart
  • Time spent in hazy product explanations confuses customers and robs time from discovery
  • If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck — then, for marketing purposes at least — it’s a duck.

# # #

Notes

[1] That is, “what is it?”

[2] I swear this is only partially dramatized, and only because I’ve assembled all the fragments into one single response.

[3] This is circa 2008. Presumably much has changed in the intervening 15 years.

[4] I obviously don’t use more recent examples as a matter of both confidentiality and discretion.

[5] An obvious one might be, “so if it’s a database, does it speak SQL?” (To which the answer was “no, it speaks XQuery,” which could lead to another loop of hopefully tight question/answer follow-ups.)

[6] Because, simply put, nobody wanted to buy an XML database. Gartner had declared the category stillborn around 2002 with a note entitled XML DBMS, The Market That Never Was. The way we sold nearly $200M worth of them (cumulatively) during my tenure was not to sell the product (that nobody wanted) but to sell the problems it could solve.

[7] And when they do, they’re not going to be happy that you seemingly tried to deceive them.

[8] Or hire them to do jobs for them, if you prefer the Jobs To Be Done framework.

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Analyzing Core Messaging in the 2024 Election

Posted on January 20, 2024 | 9 comments

Once in a rare while, I address political issues in my blog. Why? Well, because when it comes to messaging and positioning, it’s the big leagues. Politics is Major League Baseball, consumer packaged goods (CPG) is AAA, and here in Silicon Valley we’re only AA. It’s hard not to look at the big leagues to try and learn from what they do. Plus, they drown us in their communications, which makes it easy to find familiar examples to discuss.

Through looking at politics, I’ve become a fan of Frank Luntz‘s methods, specifically his research-driven approach to messaging. While one side hires Luntz more than the other, that shouldn’t matter. As Patton reminds us, you should learn from the best and brightest of both [1].

“Rommel, you magnificent bastard. I read your book.”

In this post I’m going to pick a white-hot topic — core messaging in the US 2024 presidential election — and try to analyze it. Here’s the hard part: I want to do so without dragging myself or my readers into a debate about politics. I believe the key to doing this successfully is not objectivity (an impossible goal), but dispassion [2]. 

Ground rules help, too — I’ll immediately delete any comments or messages that move off messaging/positioning and into policy. If you want an example of the difference, see note [3].

If this exercise is going to bother you, stop reading here. Otherwise, let’s go!

In this post, I’m going to:

  • Reduce the messages to two words, each.
  • Analyze that reduced messaging using three tests: (1) is it compelling, (2) does it have cross-over appeal, and (3) how good is it as a capstone?
  • Share who I think has the stronger message, and why
  • Make suggestions on how I’d improve the weaker message

The Reduced Messaging

While I don’t think the messaging has completely converged yet, I think we’re headed here.

Please choose one.

That’s the choice. Save Democracy or Save America.

How Compelling Are The Messages?

Putting aside the execution of the two signs [4], both sides argue that they’re fighting to save something. The Democrats want to save democracy. The Republicans want to save America. Who’s got the better message?

Both sides pre-suppose something needs saving. The Republicans argue that America needs saving from a list of real, embellished, or imagined crises, including immigration, inflation, wars, the IRS, Democrats, and the swamp. The Democrats argue that our system of government, democracy, needs saving from a real, embellished, or imagined dictator in Donald Trump, who is under indictment for numerous crimes, perpetuates the falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen, and who tried to prevent the proper transfer of power at the end of his presidency.

In short,

  • Republicans want to save the country from a list of crises.
  • Democrats want to save the system of government from a man.

This x-ray view makes it easier to analyze the messages.

  • Republicans want to save the country, Democrats want to save an idea. Saving the country is infinitely more visceral and motivating.
  • Republicans want to fight crises, Democrats want to fight a man. This positions the Republicans as trying to help the average American [5] and the Democrats as fighting a personal battle [6].

Logically, the Republican message almost auto-justifies extraordinary means in order to achieve its critical end. Who cares about saving democracy when America itself is at risk? We need to save our country and our way of life — and if that means taking a few liberties and/or tyranny of the minority, then so be it. We’re talking about saving America, here. We can fix that other stuff, later.

The Democratic message is quite cerebral. We need to save the American ideal, the soul of the nation, and Western liberal democracy. We need to be a beacon of hope for would-be democracies around the world. But tangibly, what does that actually mean? It’s actually kind of a meta-message [7]. It says nothing about what they want to do after saving democracy. There’s no future promise. 

To have some fun, and I’ll exaggerate here, let’s contrast two chants that seem to go with these messages:

What do we want? A Western, liberal, democratic system of government in order to save the soul of the nation and to ensure we remain a beacon of hope to would-be democracies. When do we want it? As soon as reasonably can be expected.

Versus:

What do we want? To save America. When do we want it? Now.

Less is more. Less is more. Less is more. Burn it into your marketing brain. Less is so much more when it comes to messaging. Most software companies miss this, too.

But there’s an even bigger problem with the Save Democracy message that I learned years ago when writing, of all things, a business intelligence white paper on information democracy [8]. I wanted a pithy quote on the benefits of democracy, so I did what I thought would be a quick search. And kept searching. And kept searching. In the end, I had to use this.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried.” 

— Winston Churchill

It turns out that people don’t like democracy all that much. It’s hard to find people with a kind word to say. Churchill captured the spirit perfectly. In this light, then, let’s re-evaluate the Democratic message.

  • Republicans are fighting to save the country.
  • Democrats are fighting to save an idea that most people don’t even like all that much.

I think this makes Save Democracy a significantly less compelling message than Save America.

Do The Messages Have Cross-Over Appeal?

I’m not a political strategist, but I’d guess in a world where only 54% identify as either Republican or Democrat and 43% identify as Independent, that you’d want a message that does two things: (1) rallies the base and gets them out to vote and (2) appeals to those outside the base, particularly the Independents. Now let’s analyze how our two reduced messages fare on this test.

Save America is a strong message for the base. And I think it’s a reasonable cross-over message that has some appeal to both Democrats and Independents. Sure, I don’t want to be a member of your party, but I’m down for saving America. What you want to do and how you want to do it may well turn me away, but for a two-word message, with Save America you still have my attention.

Save Democracy is a good message for the base. It’s too cerebral for my taste, but many members of the base are cerebral themselves, so that shouldn’t bother them too much. The problem is with cross-over appeal. For Independents, I think it’s a reasonable message. Yes democracy is important, but again, fairly cerebral and a bit too meta — and then what? 

For Republicans, however, it’s a total non-starter. Wait, you want me to save democracy by putting the people I disagree with in charge? That’s your sales pitch? Take one for the team in order to save democracy? Please tell me that your marketer hasn’t pinned your hopes to this message.

For these reasons, I think the Save America message has better cross-over appeal than Save Democracy.

What is the Capstone Utility of the Messages?

Capstone is a fancy MBA word, typically referring to a capstone course and/or project that integrates everything you’ve learned in the program. I think it’s a useful concept here. Your reduced messaging really should serve as a capstone. It’s thus both the ultimate summary of what you’re saying as well as the starting point for your stump speech. For example:

“Thank you for coming out today. We’re here to Save Schmumble. If we don’t, here are some of the bad things that will happen. If we do, here are all of the good things that will happen. Do you folks want to Save Schmumble? So do I. Let me ask you, is there anything more important than Saving Schmumble? No, I didn’t think so. Now, let’s talk about how we’re going to roll up our sleeves and do it.” [9]

I believe that the reduced messaging naturally points you in a given direction. Let me demonstrate that with an example of where Save America would point me.

“We’re here to Save America. Our country is under threat. Threats from immigration and our open border policy, inflation and the erosion of the US dollar, endless wars that siphon our resources and put our brave troops in harm’s way, taxation that stifles both American business and the American spirit, slowing job creation and the economy … Are we going to do something about these threats? Can we stop them? You bet we can, and we will.”

Save America points you in the direction of talking about the threats to America. That is, from the audience’s perspective, the day-to-day problems they face. As I’ve said many times [10], convincing someone you understand and care about the problem — in software or in politics — counts for about 80% of the sale. 

Unlike software sales where customers require proof that you can solve a problem, to win the rhetorical war you don’t actually need concrete solutions to close the deal. All you actually need is to convince people that you care about the problem and that you can solve it [11]. We can talk about how, later.

Let’s see where Save Democracy points me:

“Our system of government is under threat from a man who has shown us that he believes he’s a king. From granting key government jobs to unqualified family members, to the use of government to pursue personal vendettas, to abusive pardons of convicted criminals, to the events of January 6th and all that surrounds it. Democracy itself is at stake here … And it’s up to us to protect democracy and its sacred light. And we’re going to do just that in November.”

Save Democracy points you in the direction of Trump. He is the threat to democracy. So you start to talk about the things he’s done and the risks of what he might do. That leads to talking about the people who’ve joined him, the inner circle at first, but if you keep going, you get to the entire Republican party. Ending here is disastrous because, as Hillary clearly demonstrated, insulting people isn’t a great strategy to win their support.

The narrative ends up sounding personal, angry, and negative. And it can lead to a deplorables style write-off of your opponent’s supporters and, more dangerously, the Independents who sympathize with them. 

Believe it or not, I didn’t try to throw the exercise. I just started with the two different themes and followed where I felt they were pointing me. Save America pointed me to a place where I could rant about problems and gloss over solutions. Save Democracy pointed me to attack Trump, his people, and those who support him. For these reasons, I think Save America has higher capstone utility.

Thoughts on Improving the Weaker Message

In the spirit of bringing solutions, not just problems, I’d recommend the following ways to improve the Democratic messaging:

  • Not adopt a save-something counter message. This blows things up on the launch pad and lets the opponent define the agenda.
  • Sell today’s success. Several surveys show that many Americans think they (and interestingly, other Americans) are doing worse than they actually are. The cardinal sin of marketing is under-marketing reality [12].
  • Sell a vision for a brighter future. I’m not sure what or how, but that’s what people want to buy. Sell it to them. It’s a far better strategy than attacking the other guy in the name of saving a relatively unpopular idea.
  • Don’t turn the race into a good vs. evil battle. This is precisely what the opposition wants. Don’t give it to them.
  • Put an emphasis on actual solutions. Where’s the beef? What are the details of the “better” health plan? This one’s dangerous, but so is giving your competitor a pass on their ability to solve problems.

I can’t start out talking about Frank Luntz and not say that I’d research the heck out of all this. Don’t get confused. I am a big believer — as this post shows — of thinking deeply about what we are actually saying. More software companies should do that. But I’m also a big believer in understanding what they are actually hearing. More software companies should do that, too.

Thanks for reading. I’m not here to change anyone’s mind about the election, but I am hoping to help us all learn something about marketing by examining it.

# # #

Notes

[1] The movie took some cinematic license. The scene appears made up. Nevertheless, I think the point stands because it’s made by many others, who have expressed an equivalent idea, if not so dramatically.

[2] Hard as we try, none of us can ever be objective. We can do our best, try to see both sides, etc., but our opinions are definitionally subjective. Research is probably the only way to do objective anything — and there are plenty of ways to bias research as well. Ergo, rather than strive for an unattainable goal (and potentially get sucked into debates about the degree of my objectivity), I’ll admit now that I’m not objective. I have opinions. But my purpose here is neither to share them, nor persuade you to believe them. To make this kind of post work, objectivity is the wrong goal. I think dispassion is a more realistic goal and I will thus in this piece attempt to dispassionately analyze the messaging.

[3] For example, in this context debating policy would be debating the pros/cons of a Mexican border wall, including its effectiveness, efficiency, cost, morality, environmental impact, and such. Analyzing messaging would instead look like: should we pick immigration as a core issue, and if we do, can we successfully use “the wall” as our solution? In a problem/impact/solution format, immigration is the problem, impacts are the various troubles it causes the audience, and the wall is the solution. In this context, it’s fair to ask if you can sell the audience on a wall as the solution to the problem. But you get a penalty flag if you enter into a debate about your opinions on the wall.

[4] I can’t resist. Let’s quickly analyze the execution of the two signs. What do I see?

  • The left sign is generally inferior to the right.
  • The left sign has two messages, the right sign has one. For a quick-read sign, pick one. (The only person who reads all 30 words on this lawn sign risks running over the neighbor’s kids.)
  • The left sign inverts the relative importance of its messages, heavily weighting Vote Blue over Save Democracy. I hope it was intended to sit outside a polling place, otherwise I don’t get it.
  • The right sign is clearly a lawn sign. I tried to find the left sign in a similar aspect ratio, but couldn’t. Either way, this demonstrates an important lesson about aspect ratios when making logos or images. The left sign loses relative space here due to an arbitrary choice I made (i.e., equal height) in designing the composite.

[5] A particularly unfortunate built-in concession, given the opponent’s lack of a policy platform in 2020.

[6] Enabling the “Trump Derangement Syndrome” genre of messages.

[7] By meta, I mean, “we’re not sure what we want to do, but we know how we want to do it — democratically!”

[8] Which I was going to turn into a quadrant (access vs. control) with boxes named things like information dictatorship, information anarchy, and such.

[9] If needed, you could add a dash of: ”Can you believe that my opponent doesn’t even want to Save Schmumble? Why just last week, he said Schmumble didn’t matter. I can’t believe it. How are you going to Save Schmumble if you don’t even care about it? Well, we can’t let that happen.”

[10] My definition of “solution selling” is convincing the buyer of three things: they understand my problem, they can solve my problem, and I want to work with them. You score most of your points on the first and the third item; demonstrating proficiency on the first often gets you credit on the second. That’s why I like completing the customer’s sentences occasionally when they’re describing the problem.

[11] In this light, real policy is actually kind of dangerous. It’s hard work to create and details matter (which is why you need “policy wonks” to help). Worst yet, once you create a policy, you pin yourself down. It can and will be attacked. It’s far easier and less risky to devote your messaging to high-level vision and detailed discussion of the problems, but with only a cursory discussion of the solutions. If your audience and your opponent let you.

[12] I’m not saying this would be easy. Convincing someone they’re doing better than they think they are is no easy task. I know it’s dangerous ground, but so is letting people think they’re worse off when they’re not. As with many situations, the best way to get out of this one is to not get into it. But that’s where they are.

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Three Marketing Lessons from The Realm of Politics

Posted on August 20, 2023 | 6 comments

Silicon Valley marketing communications are, simply put, not the major league.  By comparison to Washington, DC and political communications, we are AAA baseball [1].  In fact, to be less kind, if DC communications are the major league, you could argue that consumer marketing is AAA, and we in Silicon Valley are only AA.  We play for the love of the game [2].

Without overstretching the metaphor, let’s try and agree to two things:

  • We aren’t the top league.
  • Therefore, we can learn from studying the leagues above us.

I study the higher leagues from time to time in this blog, e.g., by looking at consumer marketing cases such as the goosebump-inspiring Olay example in Playing to Win. But I generally refrain from studying political examples [3] for many reasons, mostly for fear that I’ll end up in political arguments when my actual point is to study marketing and communications techniques, and not whether I agree or disagree with what someone stands for and/or is saying.

For example, while I don’t necessarily agree with Frank Luntz’s politics, I have great respect for his work.  Words That Work [4] is a great book.  He’s amazing at linguistic reframing (e.g., climate change vs. global warming).  He relies on a heavily research- and data-driven approach to communications, including numerous focus groups that he often personally runs.  Like him or not, agree with his views or not, the man is not afraid to roll up his sleeves and he is good at what he does.

In that spirit, in today’s post, I’m going to discuss lessons marketers can learn from today’s political right.  I pick the right because I think they execute against three principles particularly well [5]:

  • Demonstrate an understanding of the problem.
  • Framing is everything.
  • The power of consistency.

Demonstrate an Understanding of the Problem

Politicians know that the problem is safer ground than the solution.  Think: “I’m in favor of food for the hungry.”  It’s hard to disagree with that.  The devil, of course, is in the detail of how you want to do it. To illustrate this, let’s break down a marketing message into three parts:

  • Problem — describing the problem and its consequences, empathizing.
  • Solution — presenting the solution to the problem, naming and explaining.
  • Proof — providing evidence that the solution will work, typically via technical explanations and/or customer stories and references.

For example, let’s use this recent Trump CPAC excerpt (and we’re going to ignore the diction), break it down, and determine the percent of the lines used in each of those three areas:

Before Biden came into office, we had illegal immigration at a record low, refugees were at the lowest level in history. Human trafficking, women and children was at the lowest in 30 years. And drug dealers were finding the US border a very inhospitable place to be. It was very inhospitable. In my last year, less drugs came through the southern border than had been seen in many, many decades. We weren’t playing games. Now we have complete chaos. Fentanyl is pouring in. Families are being wiped out, destroyed, and there’s death everywhere, all caused by incompetence. Millions of illegal aliens are stampeding across our border. Interior enforcement has been shut down. Everyone is overstaying their visas. Nobody even thinks about reporting it anymore. My wonderful travel ban is gone. I had a travel ban, it was so wonderful.  Refugee numbers are through the roof. And spies and terrorists are infiltrating our country totally unchecked like never before.

When I’m back in the White House, the very first reconciliation bill I will sign will be for a massive increase in Border Patrol and a colossal increase in the number of ice deportation officers […] Under my leadership, we will use all necessary state, local, federal, and military resources to carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Other countries are emptying out their prisons, insane asylums and mental institutions and sending all of their problems right into their dumping ground, the USA. Think of it, they’re emptying out their prisons, and you’ve heard me say that, but they’re also emptying out their mental institutions and to use a strong couple of words, insane asylum.

Now, let’s analyze it:

  • Problem:  illegal immigrants, drugs, spies, refugees, other countries emptying prisons, insane asylums, and mental institutions into the US.  (58%)
  • Solution:  increase border patrol budget, largest deportation effort in history.  (21%)
  • Proof:  claims that problems were at record lows during prior tenure. (21%) [6]

The underlying logic:  if you don’t take the time to demonstrate an understanding of the problem and its impacts, then why would I care about your solution and how it might work?  Convince me you understand the problem, care about the problem, make me feel seen and heard, and then I might give you a chance to try and solve it.

Consider the rise of the viral country hit, Rich Men North of Richmond.  While we can demand solutions and proof from politicians, it’s not a reasonable ask for singers, so I won’t decompose the lyrics here.  I will, however, share two reactions from the target audience on understanding the problem:

“And just like that you became the voice of 40 or 50 million working men,” read one comment that received 11,000 likes.

“You’ve captured the anger, the angst, and the disbelief of every hard-working, law-abiding, patriotic American who can’t believe what our country has become.”

People outside the target audience have plenty to say, too but I won’t jump into that fray.  I will say that Oliver Anthony demonstrated an understanding of the problem to his audience.  That, plus a pretty husky singing voice, is how you rise to #1 on Apple, Spotify, and iTunes in just a few days.

Now, let’s zoom back to Silicon Valley and think about how a sales team might allocate their energy across problem/solution/proof.  Example (dramatized):

Problem:  yes, we’re aware of the problem with totaling some types of measures at the end of a period.  That’s called semi-additive measures, it’s common in OLAP systems, and for what it’s worth Excel doesn’t handle it well, either.

Solution:  the schmumbleator engine understands semi-additive measures and let me tell you how that works …

Proof:  we invented the schmumbleator after our founder graduated MIT and he decided to make an OLAP engine that used metadata to overload functions like TOTAL.  So, when the schmumbleator TOTALs an additive measure, the value for the year will be the sum of the four quarters, whereas when it TOTALs a semi-additive measure, like headcount, the value will not be the sum of the four quarters, but instead the period value for the fourth quarter.  By the way, this is kind of recursive because just like headcount is semi-additive across quarters of the year, it’s also semi-additive across months of the quarter, right?  Q1 headcount isn’t the sum of January through March, it’s just March.  The schmumbleator can do a lot of other interesting things as well.  I love telling people about the schmumbleator, …

What are we doing wrong here? Lots.

  • Not talking enough about the problem.  Is the customer convinced we understand the problem and that we understand its impacts?  Do we understand how the problem affects them personally?  Would the customer say, “they get me” at the end of this interaction?
  • Not talking about enough about the solution, either. 
  • Spending all our time talking about the proof.  Presumably, that’s what interests us — “wait, this is really cool” — if not the customer.
  • Offering only technical explanations as proof, not offering any stories about companies like theirs who also faced the problem, solved it with our product, and received benefits X, Y, and Z.
  • Speaking in technical language and jargon.  Something else a smart politician would never do, but all too common in Silicon Valley.

Thus, our first lesson:  spend more time demonstrating an understanding of the problem, its impacts, and empathizing with the customer.  Spend less time on proof — and offer the right kind of proof for the situation.  Sometimes proof means a deep technical explanation (so write a white paper), sometimes it’s a reference story, and sometimes it’s just a smiling, “that’s what we do here.”

Framing is Everything

Allow me to introduce Kellogg’s Two Rules of Communications:

  1. Framing is everything
  2. See rule 1

I somewhat arbitrarily break framing into three levels:

  • Issue:  what are we actually talking about?
  • Narrative:  what’s the bigger story in play?
  • Linguistic:  what words do we use to describe it?

Issue-level framing answers the question, what are we actually talking about?

  • Air-traffic controller working conditions or an oath?  (Reagan in the 1981 PATCO strike.)
  • A candidate’s age or experience?  (Reagan in the 1984 debate.  Yes, he was great at framing.)
  • Protecting life or the right to make one’s own medical decisions?  (You’re familiar with this one.)
  • The freedom to practice one’s religion or the right to discriminate against others?  (Ditto.)

In general, if you win the framing, you win the argument.  Issue-level framing works because — if you can get away with it — you split the issue into A vs. B where there is a fairly obvious choice between the two.  Examples:

  • Should people stick to their oaths?  Well, yes.  I think they should.
  • Should people be able to practice their chosen religion?  Well, yes.  I think the country was founded on that.

Narrative-level framing kicks it up a level.  It answers the question:  what’s the bigger story here?  Examples: 

  • All these indictments and investigations, they’re just part of an ongoing witch hunt designed to interfere with the 2024 election and prevent Trump from being president. 
  • This is really the story of a con man, someone who’s stiffed contractors, evaded taxes, and bankrupted casinos — someone who’d lie to you about the time of day just for the practice. [7]

Narrative-level framing works by ingesting every new story into a bigger narrative.  It moves the attention from the  individual story (e.g., Trump was indicted on 13 counts including racketeering) to the bigger, more favorably framed narrative.  And it can work:

He suggested Trump’s opponents are using the charges to impede his electability.  “They’re trying their very best they can to keep him from running,” Nannet said. “Because they know they can’t beat him.”

The idea is to string together a series of events into a bigger narrative so that each new story just feeds the narrative.  That allows you to respond consistently (see next rule) to the series of events, instead of making a specific response each time.

Linguistic-level framing answers the question, what words do we use to describe this? 

  • Gaming vs. gambling
  • Energy exploration vs. drilling
  • Death tax vs. estate tax
  • Obamacare vs. the ACA
  • Entitlements vs. social security [8]

To contrast, issue-level framing is about concepts:  is refusing to bake a cake an act of religious freedom or an act of discrimination?  Linguistic-level framing is simply about words.  People react differently to the same concept expressed with different words.  You can guess that a death tax is less popular than an estate tax, even if it’s the same thing.  You can guess that the reaction to Obamacare vs. the Affordable Care Act will be a function of Obama’s popularity ratings.  If you’re trying to rehab your industry’s reputation, gaming sounds a heck of a lot better than gambling.

How can we apply these framing lessons to Silicon Valley sales and marketing?  Let’s provide several examples:

  • “This is not about picking the best product today, it’s about picking the best vendor with whom to partner over the long-term.”  Reframes vendor as partner and reframes technological advantage as fleeting.  Used frequently by market leaders to dismiss startups.
  • “This is not about which vendor has feature X, it’s about which system delivers the best overall performance.”  Moves attention from a feature that you lack that is supposed to improve overall performance, and back onto overall performance.  The inverse also works when you have a differentiating feature.
  • “This is not just about compliance, it’s about security.”  Reframing that properly separates compliance from security.  You can comply with lots of standards and still have weak security.  People want both.
  • “While I know you were initially shopping for a financial planning system, don’t you want to integrate your sales plan with your financial plan, and thus shouldn’t you be looking for a system that does both?”  Reframing that moves the goal post.  If your competitor only offers financial planning and you win this argument, you win the deal.
  • “If you want data governance to be effective, you should not tell the user to go the data governance system, you should bring data governance to the point of user access.”  Reframes separate data governance systems as undesirable and frames integrated access and discovery as more desirable and more effective.
  • “The question isn’t the price of the yearly subscription, but the total cost of ownership (TCO) and the total return on investment (ROI)?”  Reframes from looking at subscription price to TCO and adds a focus on ROI.
  • “It’s not about features XYZ.  If you’re looking to solve problem A, then you need to be looking at features PDQ and let me tell you why.”  Reframes the product selection criteria around a specific problem and the feature requirements for solving it.

These examples are all issue-level framing.  Narrative-level reframing is usually used when it comes to corporate messaging around innovation (e.g., “GoodCo is once again setting the bar as part of our ongoing technology leadership”), ongoing disputes (e.g., “another example of BadCo making poor imitations of our products”), or rivalries (e.g., “this market continues to be a two-horse race”).

Linguistic framing examples are harder to find in Silicon Valley marketing.  I’ll mull on this more and share some if I find them [9].

The Power of Consistency

Let’s wrap up by discussing consistency [10].  Consistency matters across three dimensions:

  • Language.  We need to consistently use the same words to describe things (e.g., consistently say “witch hunt” and not use synonyms like “fishing expedition”).
  • Spokesperson.  Each spokesperson needs to communicate the same messages (e.g., if we send five spokespeople to cover the Sunday morning talk shows, they all need to communicate the same talking points).
  • Time.  You must stick with the same message over long periods of time.  You can’t get bored with your message before the entire audience has heard it — and heard it several times.  David Ogilvy reminds us: “you aren’t advertising to a standing army, you are advertising to a moving parade.” I think politicians are quicker to understand this than marketers [11], hence the notion of stump speech. 

In Silicon Valley, we are not very good at consistency:

  • Companies tend to change their messaging every 18 months.  This is a by-product of changing CMOs at the same rate.  There are two ways to fix this:  reduce turnover in the CMO position or challenge the need to change messaging with the arrival of each new CMO.  To me, it’s a huge red flag when a new CMO wants to rebrand simply to put their mark on the company.
  • Companies get bored with their messages before the customers do.  Example:  Tableau has been talking about building data culture for over a decade.  Chief data officers (CDO) list building data culture as a top-three priority.  Instead of seeing this as a long-unfulfilled need, some marketers will see data culture as “tired” and want to talk about something else.  That’s a mistake.  You should not get bored with your message before your customers do.  Ivory soap has been “99 and 44/100ths percent pure” since 1882.  [12]
  • Companies confuse strategic and tactical messaging.  The company’s message shouldn’t be the latest product launch or marketing campaign.  Those can and often should dominate the hero on your homepage.  But your company’s message should be on the about-us page, start with your origin story, and change little over time.  The easiest way to ensure consistency is to stratify your message with some parts changing fairly frequently and others not changing at all.
  • Companies are terrible with synonyms and naming.  Most startups have about 3-5 names for roughly the same thing. These pseudo-synonyms are often loosely defined and used interchangeably when they shouldn’t be.  For example, ask your EPM seller the difference between planning, budgeting, and modeling.  Or ask your DI vendor about the names and types of metadata.  Product marketers need to get control over this by draining the language swamp, defining terms, and training the company to repeat the standard terms in the standard way.  If this seems like too small a battle, go inspire yourself by listening to some recordings of sales calls. You’ll be starting a glossary by lunch.

In this post, I’ve discussed three important communications principles that I think politicians execute well, shown how you can see them at work every day if you’re looking, and demonstrated how to apply them to the world of Silicon Valley marketing and communications.

Those principles are:

  • Demonstrate an understanding of the problem.   Don’t skip over this critical step in your rush to offer technical proof.
  • Framing is everything.  You can win deals by changing the customer’s view on what they should be buying.
  • The power of consistency.  Repetition works.  Pick a standard set of messages and words, train your team on them, and enforce standard usage.  Use this maxim to help: it’s better to be consistent than better.

Peace out.

# # #

Dedication

While researching this post, I was saddened to learn of the passing of Alan Kelly, the only PR titan I know who, after crushing it in Silicon Valley (e.g., by putting Oracle on the map in the 1990s), decided to challenge himself, move to DC, and bring both his firm and his communications system to the major leagues. Ave atque vale.

Notes

[1] For my European friends, this is the soccer equivalent of premier league vs. championship in England or Ligue 1 vs. Ligue 2 in France. 

[2] Which I mistakenly took as the AA baseball motto, but in fact it’s the motto of the American Association of Professional Baseball, an independent professional baseball league.

[3] Exceptions:  Communications Lessons from Mayor Pete which I wrote after watching him do a town hall or The Introvert’s Guide to Glad-Handing, inspired by watching Jackie Speier work a room.

[4] Right down to its subtitle:  It’s Not What You Say, It’s What People Hear.

[5] Which brings to mind the old Will Rogers quip: “I am not a member of any organized political party.  I am a democrat.”

[6] I’m also not going to drill into the extent to which these claims are supported.

[7] The fact that I knew exactly what to write in the first narrative and had to struggle coming up with second is a testament to my beliefs about execution, consistency, and the quip in note [5].  See this Tweet for a reference on the quote.

[8] I know entitlements is broader definitionally so they’re not really equivalent. However, note that social security and medicare/caid constitute the vast majority of entitlement spending.

[9] Every example I’ve thought of ends up actually being issue-level reframing.  I think it’s relatively rare when our arguments depend solely on the words chosen for expressing the exact same concept.  This can happen with feature naming and branding, but that’s not really the same thing.

[10] I call consistency one of the “three Cs” of communications:  clear, credible, and consistent.

[11] Put differently, do you ever wonder if Trump gets tired of saying “hoax” or “witch hunt”?  Using synonyms would be more refreshing for him.  But to drive the message home, it’s better to consistently repeat the same words. 

[12] Even inspiring the country song Pure Love with the chorus, “ninety-nine and forty-four one-hundredths percent pure love”.

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Appearance on Data Radicals: Frameworks and the Art of Simplification

Posted on August 16, 2023 | 2 comments

This is a quick post to highlight my recent appearance on the Data Radicals podcast (Apple, Spotify), hosted by Alation founder and CEO, Satyen Sangani. I’ve worked with Alation for a long time in varied capacities — e.g., as an angel investor, advisor, director, interim executive, skit writer, and probably a few other ways I can’t remember. This is a company I know well. They’re in a space I’m passionate about — and one that I might argue is a logical second generation of the semantic-layer-based BI market where I spent nearly ten years as CMO of Business Objects.

Satyen is a founder for whom I have a ton of respect, not only because of what he’s created, but because of the emphasis on culture and values reflected in how did it. Satyen also appreciates a good intellectual sparring match when making big decisions — something many founders pretend to enjoy, few actually do, and fewer still seek out.

This is an episode like no other I’ve done because of that history and because of the selection of topics that Satyen chose to cover as a result. This is not your standard Kellblog “do CAC on a cash basis,” “use pipeline expected value as a triangulation forecast,” or “align marketing with sales” podcast episode. Make no mistake, I love those too — but this is just noteably different content from most of my other appearances.

Here, we talk about:

  • The history and evolution of the database and tools market
  • The modern data stack
  • Intelligent operational applications vs. analytic applications
  • Why I feel that data can often end up an abstraction contest (and what to do about that)
  • Why I think in confusing makets that the best mapmaker wins
  • Who benefits from confusion in markets — and who doesn’t
  • Frameworks, simplification, and reductionism
  • Strategy and distilling the essence of a problem
  • Layering marketing messaging using ternary trees
  • The people who most influenced my thinking and career
  • The evolution of the data intelligence category and its roots in data governance and data catalogs
  • How tech markets are like boxing matches — you win a round and your prize is to earn the chance to fight in the next one
  • Data culture as an ultimate benefit and data intelligence as a software category

I hope you can listen to the episode, also available on Apple podcasts and Spotify. Thanks to Satyen for having me and I wish Alation continuing fair winds and following seas.

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Bottle the Love: Selling Customer Satisfaction vs. Vision

Posted on May 18, 2023 | Leave a comment

A funny thing can happen with startups. Sometimes, the reasons customers love the product end up not being the same reasons that the founder wants them to love the product. This may sound bad or scary, but it’s not. It’s actually an opportunity, provided you recognize it, understand it, and take advantage of it.

I’ve blogged previously on the difference between selling solutions and selling product and on the difference between selling product and selling vision. In today’s post, the distinction [1] we’ll draw is between selling the reasons customers actually love the product and selling the reasons founders want them to.

Can such a gap develop? Absolutely. The founder is usually thinking about the future, implementing exciting new features that align with a vision of not only what the product should be but, more importantly (to them), how it should properly be used. Meanwhile, back in the trenches of reality, overworked directors and VPs are buying the product to solve practical problems that make their bosses happy and let them live to fight another day.

So when a new head of product marketing — chartered with a revised messaging exercise — shows up and asks, “why do people buy our product, anyway?” they’re likely to hear some pretty inconsistent answers.

Let me demonstrate this with two examples:

  • A data intelligence founder might answer, “because we help them build a culture of data-driven decision making.” A dataops director might say, “because it helps our pricey data scientists find data faster, so they can spend their time analyzing data instead of looking for it.” A data scientist might say, “because it helps me find clean data quickly, so I can train my models correctly the first time.” [2]
  • A conversation intelligence founder might answer, “because we help them do data-driven coaching to unleash each seller’s potential.” A salesops director might say, “because it’s cheaper than the big guys and offers all the functionality I care about.” A sales VP might say, “because it’s really well designed and my sellers actually love to use it.” A seller might say, “because it keeps me honest about how I’m doing on sales calls and ultimately will make me more money.” [3]

That revised messaging exercise now looks a lot harder than it did a minute ago, not because different buyer personas are giving different answers, but because none of them echo the founder.

What’s happening here? What should we do about it?

Two things are happening:

  • You’re hearing the point of view of different buyer personas on product benefits. This is great. Once we talk to enough of each to be reasonably sure we have the representative persona viewpoint, we can burn that into our messaging architecture, put it on the solutions-by-role section of the website, and give it to sales for customizing presentations.
  • No one is echoing the founder because the founder is messaging on another plane. A chief data officer might exactly echo the data culture claim. A chief revenue officer might see their job as unleashing the potential of their salesforce. But those are very high-level reasons, so high level, that we need to classify them as vision.

The founder is serving dessert before sales can serve the entree. They’re delivering an important message. That message will likely resonate with high-level, executive buyers. But it’s not a substitute for the actual reasons why customers buy and love the product.

In this situation, product marketing’s job is to do two things:

  • Identify the problem, and frame it properly. We should not be arguing over which is the “right” message for sales. These are two different types of messaging. Sales should talk about why customers actually buy the product. Founders should talk about their vision for the product and the market. [4]
  • Bottle the love. Bottle up — capture, distill, and structure — the key reasons that customers love the product [5], and build those into the messaging architecture, teach them in sales training, and drive them through campaigns. Those reasons — the ones that effectively came from the customer’s own peer group — will tend to resonate best. [6]

We can’t sell software on vision alone. We need to market the sizzle and sell the steak. To do that requires knowing the difference between the two, and then capturing, distilling, and structuring the actual reasons customers buy and love your product.

That’s what I mean by bottle the love.

# # #

Notes

[1] As NYU’s Jay Rosen has said, when in doubt, draw a distinction. He demoed this most recently in an MSNBC interview that shows both the power of framing and excellence in practicing-what-you-preach when he ignores an odds-framed question in favor of a stakes-framed one.

[2] I pick spaces I understand because it makes my examples better. That said, readers should be aware that I’m in angel investor, former director, and informal advisor to Alation, a leading data intelligence provider. That said, this is just my take on their messaging, and probably a somewhat dated one.

[3] I love conversation intelligence (CI) as a category and have put in and/or recommended CI at many companies.

[4] While this will be controversial, I’m actually not a big fan of sales talking about the vision. It devalues the message, scoops the user conference keynote, and generally doesn’t come off well. It also has the potential opportunity cost of forgetting to sell the actual reasons customers buy and love the product. For these reasons, I recommend that companies who product formal vision decks restrict who can deliver them. Keep it special.

[5] Speaking broadly here. They may love the product because of the company that builds it, so I’m not presupposing that these are all strictly product feature/benefit messages.

[6] They can also help the founder bottle the vision messaging as well, for example, by helping structure the founder’s keynote presentation at the annual user conference. But don’t confuse that messaging with the standard one for new sales opportunities.

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