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Why your messaging needs a number written for the buyer, not for you.
Musical theater offers a surprisingly useful lesson for B2B marketers: the “I want”song. Nearly every musical features an “I want” song third or fourth in the score, after we’ve been introduced to the characters but before we understand their motivations. That’s when the protagonist steps forward and articulates what they want, often in the language of longing. It is a structural requirement: the audience cannot understand the stakes of the story unless they first understand the desire that animates its hero.
Hercules wants to find where he belongs. Hamilton wants his shot. Ariel wants to be part of another world. Mulan (like Rumi) wants to be accepted as her true self. Elder Price wants to do something incredible. The details vary, but the mechanism does not: the story cannot begin until the protagonist tells us what they want.
This turns out to be a useful metaphor for B2B marketing. Every buyer has an “I want” song: usually unspoken, often half-formed, but always present. Yet most messaging fails to reveal it. Instead, we default to talking about our own technology, our architecture, our features, our AI, our category. We sing our song. When we should be singing theirs.
I like devices that force a frame switch, and thinking about “I want” songs does exactly that. They push us out of vendor-centric thinking and into a more empathic posture: what does the buyer wish were true, not only organizationally but personally? To make the idea concrete, I went so far as to draft a sample FP&A “I want” song to the tune of Go the Distance, which worked quite well as a template. The exercise also forced me into short, simple phrasing — an unexpected but useful reminder to use plain language.
That detour was fun, but let’s return to the main argument.
The reason the “I want” structure works as a messaging framework is that its underlying components — the ache, the aspiration, and the bridge — map surprisingly well onto the way buyers perceive their own situation.
First comes the ache: the protagonist’s sense that something is missing. Ariel feels trapped; Moana feels pulled toward something beyond the reef; Hercules feels out of place. In a business context, the ache is rarely “we need AI-driven orchestration.” It is more grounded and more personal:
I want to stop feeling constantly behind.
I want the board to stop grilling me every month.
I want managers to believe in the plan rather than treat it as something imposed on them.
I want my team to get home at a reasonable hour.
I want to actually do analysis instead of wrestling with systems.
These are the underlying motivations that drive buyers. As I’ve said before, marketers tend to remember the business benefits but forget the personal ones –i.e., the “kiss” in the benefits stack. Writing an “I want” song forces us to reinsert the personal dimension.
Next is the aspiration — the imagined better world. Hercules imagines belonging; Mulan imagines authenticity without alienation; Elder Price imagines extraordinary accomplishment. In FP&A terms, aspirations could include:
A plan that people believe in and are committed to
A model that can be updated without triggering a cascade of breakage.
A planning cycle that doesn’t consume nights and weekends.
A finance team that is viewed as a strategic partner rather than a reporting function.
These aspirations, importantly, should be described in terms the buyer actually uses, not in vendor jargon.
Finally comes the bridge — the mechanism that makes the aspiration feel reachable. In a musical, this is the moment when the hero decides to act. In marketing, this is where the product finally enters, not as the hero but as the tool that enables the hero’s journey. If the ache is “I’m stuck in Excel hell” and the aspiration is “I want a planning process that people trust and that lets me get home for dinner,” then the bridge might be: This system will take me from the chaos I live with today to a world in which the plan is credible, the board is confident, and I’m not working every weekend.
In this framing, the buyer is the protagonist and you are the mentor, guide, or map. The best narratives work this way. The worst invert the roles.
Unfortunately, much of modern B2B messaging still sings the wrong song. “We’re an AI-enabled platform delivering real-time insights at scale” is an “I am” song. The buyer does not care who you are until they understand why it matters. A better start would acknowledge the ache, gesture toward the aspiration, and only then offer the bridge: “FP&A teams spend 30% of their week pulling data instead of analyzing the business. Our platform gives them that time back.” That’s the beginning of an “I want” song: I want to put the A back in FP&A.
Companies that successfully reframe markets often do this instinctively. Snowflake didn’t lead with “cloud data warehousing”; they led with, “I want my data to be usable.” Figma didn’t lead with “multiplayer design”; they led with, “I want design to move at product speed.” Datadog didn’t lead with “observability”; they led with, “I want to see everything before it breaks.” These are buyer “I want” statements, whether or not the companies described them that way.
Narrative, messaging, and positioning are distinct disciplines, but they share a foundational principle: the buyer is the protagonist. Your first task is to understand the buyer’s “I want,” and your second is to articulate it more clearly than they can themselves.
Try this simple test: read your homepage aloud and ask whether the buyer can hear themselves as the one singing it. If the answer is no, you are singing your song, not theirs.
You know you’re on the right track when buyers start reacting not just to your product, but to your understanding of their situation. They nod before you ever show a screenshot. They finish your sentences. They repeat your messaging back to you in their own words, often with a slight sense of relief that someone has articulated the problem. They circulate your deck internally not because it describes your offering, but because it describes their goals. They say things like, “This is exactly what we’ve been trying to do,” or — my personal favorite thing to hear — “It sounds like you’ve been in our meetings for the last three years.”
Let’s net this out: if this were a musical and your buyer was the protagonist, what “I want” song would they sing?
Figure that out and you’ll build some powerful messaging. But don’t be like me and actually try to pair those lyrics to a song — though I have to admit it is fun.
While I don’t do politics on Kellblog, I do analyze messaging, including political messaging. My point is not to change your mind on a given issue, but to study what works in the major leagues [1]. Towards that end, I wrote a post back in January entitled Analyzing Core Messaging in the 2024 Election. I argued that the campaign messages distilled down to:
Republicans want to save the country from a list of crises
Democrats want to save democracy from a man
And that the Democratic message suffered from four key flaws:
It was too cerebral — e.g., saving the American ideal and the soul of the nation.
Fighting a man sounds vindictive while fighting for the country sounds noble. (Irony noted.)
Democracy isn’t all that popular an idea. It’s often referred to as the least bad form of government.
The message to cross-over voters was effectively: take one for the team. Vote for someone you don’t like in order to save the democratic system of government. (Hint: that’s not very compelling.)
I understand there are a hundred other factors that influenced the outcome and people will be studying that for years. But in this post, I want to take a quick look at some of the messaging tactics that I think worked to the Republicans’ advantage. I’m not going to touch on truth or falsehood both because that’s quicksand and because lots of other people do [2].
Here are the tactics that I think worked to the Republicans’ advantage:
A simple, clear message. Put “Save America” against uh, well, I can’t even tell you what Harris’ message was. “Joy,” or “The Other Guys Are Weird,” or perhaps, “A New Way Forward”? [3] This is a big problem. You should always have a simple clear message for your candidate or, in technology, for your company and product [4].
Talking about the problem. The Republican message recites a litany of problems with America. But it is very light on solutions (e.g., “I have the concepts of plan“) [5]. I have long believed that 80% of winning is about demonstrating understanding of the problem. In tech, we are so eager to talk about the solution (i.e., the product) that we fail to use the powerful technique of demonstrating absolute fluency in the problem. Complete your customers’ sentences when they’re describing the problem. They’ll love you for it. And then trust that you can solve it [6].
Differentiation. While the Democrats did differentiate from the Republicans, they failed to differentiate from themselves. Given the unpopularity of the Biden administration, this was essential. But Harris offered no differentiation message. This enabled Republicans to position her as a continuation of the unpopular status quo. In tech, we must remember not only to provide differentiation from our direct competitors, but also our indirect ones, and sometimes from ourselves (e.g., our prior version). Most marketers build one generic differentiation message. They should build N specific ones.
Tit-for-tat messaging. For example, “I’m not the threat to democracy, you’re the threat to democracy.” This goes all the way back to 2016 and “I’m not the puppet, you’re the puppet.” This tactic works because it muddies the issue. You don’t even need a strong counter-argument to neutralize the message because all you’re trying to do is gray it up [7]. The desired conclusion: “Well, they’re each a threat to democracy in their own way.” This works in technology. “We’re not the ones with scaling issues, they’re the ones with scaling issues.” Just build an argument to support the assertion. Even if it’s somewhat contrived, it can still work when you remember the job is not to win the point, but only to muddy it up.
Attacking the opponent’s leaders, not their supporters. I think “the enemy within” can be seen as referring to key Democratic leaders. Whereas Hillary’s deplorables, Biden’s garbage, and Obama’s scolding were attacks not on the opponent’s leadership, but on their supporters. You don’t win votes by insulting people [8]. In technology, never attack the users of a product, but instead how the product has evolved. “Picking X was a good decision at the time, but now people are finding problem Y.” Or, “it was a great company back when you selected them, but new owners have come in, changed the leadership team, and killed innovation. We can help.”
Speaking in plain language. Republicans generally express themselves in simple language. Democrats, not so much. Can voters correctly define facism? Regressive tax policy (in reference to tariffs [9]). Supermarket price gouging. Neoliberalism. Reproductive rights. Demagoguery. If someone needs a dictionary to understand your message, it’s a big problem. In tech, we should use regular language, as opposed to industry jargon, whenever possible. Confused people don’t buy from you. Especially when you’re a small startup.
Consistent use of standard vocabulary. Open borders. Coastal elites. Immigration crisis. Invasion. Endless wars. Mass deportations. Election integrity [10]. Love these terms or hate them, Republicans picked them and used them over and over on the stump. Marketing is a game of repetition. Not only do the Democrats generally prefer more abstract words, they lack the discipline to repeatedly use them. Many technology companies do the same thing. They never settle on a common vocabulary, use multiple words for the same concept, and confuse people as a result. And the easiest thing for a confused buyer to do is nothing. That is, not buy your product.
No matter your views on the outcome of this election, I hope you can appreciate some of the messaging lessons that can be learned from it.
Peace out.
# # #
[1] While I’m not trying to evangelize my views, nor do I try to deeply bury them. So they have a habit of leaking out. If that bugs you, stop reading here. In regards to my own views on the election, I’ll just say that it looks like I picked the wrong week to quit stoicism.
[2] It’s difficult to compete against an opponent who lies constantly. (In software as in politics.) But it’s not impossible if you inoculate against their lies in your messsaging (e.g., our competitor is going to tell you XYZ, here’s why they do that, and here’s why it’s not true) and call them out when they do (e.g., using tactics like tit-for-tat below). In this election, the lying issue was muddied up using tit-for-tat (described in the bullets above) with the desired conclusion being: “all politicians lie,” which grays out the large differences in frequency and degree.
[3] “A New Way Forward” wasn’t a bad message, but it was neither fully developed nor hammered home. (I had to go to her campaign website to learn it was the message.) Moreover, The New Way Forward was absolutely gutted by Harris’ flub on The View, which basically said that the new way forward is the same as the old way forward. Talk about driving a stake through the heart of your own message.
[4] For a startup, your company message is your origin story. Why you exist.
[5] Or the slogan “Trump Will Fix It” which captures the spirit perfectly.
[6] The other advantage of not proposing detailed solutions is that you have no concrete plans to attack. While Project 2025 was a very specific plan, Trump immediately backpeddled when faced with its unpopularity. It won’t take long to find out the extent to which that backpeddling was disingenous.
[7] A lot of messaging is the basic battle between black/white and gray. You want black/white differentiators for your offering and you want to gray out the differentiators of your competition. Think: in fact we both have that feature, but we do implement it differently.
[8] Also, when attacking an opponent with a cult-like following, you should never attack the cult because it only makes it stronger. That’s why people were dressing up as garbage cans after Biden’s gaffe.
[9] Many people don’t understand tariffs let alone how they represent regressive tax policy. Or, for that matter, what regressive tax policy is. The correct counter-message would have been to position tariffs as a sales tax or as an inflation driver.
[10] Which surprisingly became a non-issue on 11/6/24.
I was thrilled to get together with Janessa Lantz (former CMO at dbt Labs) to join her and Amrita Gurney’s podcast, Standout Startup Brands, to discuss a topic that most people don’t even want to talk to me about — branding!
Yes, I’m known as something of a brandcurmudgeon, but I’m also very much a marketer and I do care a lot about branding — but approach it with pragmatism, caution, and healthy skepticism.
To me, branding is about trust. My definition is quite meta, but it’s trusing that you will be you. Trusting that you look like you. That you sound like you. That you act like you. That your execution is consistent with your vision. Basically, have you defined a clear character and are you staying within it? You be you.
It starts with hygiene factors: is your corporate image even professional? Is your copy error-free and mechanically consistent (e.g., via style guide). They’re called hygiene factors because you get punished if you land beneath the bar, but get no extra credit for being above. For example, you might not hire someone who arrives in very dirty clothes, but I doubt you’ll pick the top candidate based because they wore the cleanest. So any money invested in coming in above the bar is effectively wasted. Clear the bar, but by an inch.
Consistent messaging across deliverables is arguably a hygiene factor. I wouldn’t think your terribly professional if I heard a different story across SDRs, sales, the website, a live webinar, and in reviews from industry analysts. Consistency is key to communications effectiveness, but it’s also a hygiene factor. Some people notice. The smart ones, I think.
You can stay consistent by making a marketing blueprint deck, a deck that captures the answers basic questions (what is it, what are the benefits of using it, why is it different, etc.) in a master deck that you continually update and reference as you build marketing deliverables.
Consistency is hard with genius founders who often have too many great ideas. To manage this, you need to get their buy-in about their best delivery and then standardize on it. And then hold accountable for not changing it every day.
If there’s a technical story behind your product, you should make a seminal white paper that tells it in about 8-12 pages. You’ll be surprised how hard this is — particularly with platform software — and it will help you both tighten your story and tell it consistently. It’s literally the first thing you should at a zero-to-one startup on the marketing front. (Writing it will also help you get started on the style guide.)
Why do I say “wait until you’re $100M until you focus on brand?” or “if you want to build a brand, go sell some software?” Because capital-B branding — hiring an agency that has no intent on tightening product message or increasing pipeline, but instead helps you determine brand values, brand promise, brand platform, etc. — usually can wait. Some marketers want to do it too early. Heck, it’s fun. But don’t do it too early. Simply put, if you’re $15M and not growing, nobody actually cares what you stand for. So don’t spend $300K trying to figure it out. Get big enough to be relevant, then tighten up who you think you are.
Most $100M companies still don’t have tight product and corporate messaging. Get your priorities right. Fill the pipeline. Helps sales win deals with product, competitive, and corporate messaging. And when all that is working (and if you’re hearing about troubles due to a lack of branding) then go hire an agency to work on capital-B branding. And I am not universally opposed to this! For example, I recently had a great experience with Twenty-First Century Brand on a branding project. My argument isn’t never. It’s be sure you’re doing it at the right time and place in your evolution.
Building a strong leadership message will help you win more deals than capital-B branding, so do it first. If you can convince people that you are the technology leader, the market leader, and the vision leader, you are going to win a ton of deals in a growing category. Why wouldn’t you want to buy from someone who you thought was all three?
I view content marketing and thought leadership as demand generation, not branding. So that may be a source of confusion as well. Kellblog itself is demand generation and awareness generation for my serivces as a advisor or board member. It monetizes indirectly and is more demand generation than demand capture, but it works and I practice what I preach in this department.
Lot’s wife‘s law (don’t look back) — why you should never communicate externally about smaller competitors.
Why, in competitive, the rule should be, “if they go low, we go lower” and not, “we go high.” Enterprise software sales is a full-contact sport. You need to train and arm your sellers to go play it. In a perfect world, they’re so well trained that they’re eagerly waiting what used to be the toughest attack points.
The other rule is, “when they go low, we get on the phone.” Never try to resolve competitor attacks via email. Use the attack as an opportunity to get on the phone and spend more time with the customer.
Why you should allocate enough budget to measure your external demand funnel: awareness, opinion, consideration, trial, purchase.
How to combat the age-old, “if we just had more at-bats we’d win more deals” or “nobody’s ever heard of us” claims from sales.
Thanks again to Amrita and Janessa for having me. The episode is here.
“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. Philosophers teach that such abductive (or should we say, abducktive) 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 few score of 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.
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 beexpected.
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.
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.
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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.
I’m Dave Kellogg, advisor, director, blogger, and podcaster. I am an EIR at Balderton Capital and principal of my own eponymous consulting business.
I bring an uncommon perspective to enterprise software, having more than ten years’ experience in each of the CEO, CMO, and independent director roles in companies from zero to over $1B in revenues.
From 2012 to 2018, I was CEO of Host Analytics, where we quintupled ARR while halving customer acquisition costs, ultimately selling the company in a private equity transaction.
Previously, I was SVP/GM of the $500M Service Cloud business at Salesforce; CEO of MarkLogic, which we grew from zero to $80M over six years; and CMO at Business Objects for nearly a decade as we grew from $30M to over $1B in revenues.
I love disruptive startups and and have had the pleasure of working in varied capacities with companies including Bluecore, FloQast, Gainsight, Hex, Logikcull, MongoDB, Pigment, Recorded Future, Tableau, and Unaric.
I currently serve on the boards of Cyber Guru, Light, Scoro, TechWolf, and Vic.ai. I have previously served on boards including Alation, Aster Data, Granular, Nuxeo, Profisee, and SMA Technologies.
