Archive for technology marketing
How to get your developers to write a whitepaper
Posted by: | CommentsI found a wonderful article written by Ari McKee-Sexton for MarketingProfs. It’s hilarious and provides some great tips to get you started. For my product marketing friends you can substitute product manager for developer if that’s your particular situation (not to dis my product manager friends, but some of you guys are in the critical path and we need to get important stuff out of your noggin).
Fed up, I just started writing. I wrote whatever the hell I vaguely thought needed writing about in the manner of a professional liberal arts major with just enough knowledge to be dangerous—exactly what I am—and it was like putting fire ants in their lab coats. Within hours, they returned marked-up Word documents with added pages and comments like “Ha!” and “WTF?”
The point is to get it done when you need their expertise to make it happen. Ari provides the insight to help you get it done (and fun to read too). Had me at “Don’t Tase Me, Bro!”.
Why is product marketing so misunderstood?
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I have the privilege of working with many marketing teams at technology companies. A common theme is how many companies can describe what product marketing is, but they can’t describe the responsibilities of their product marketing managers.
Let me tell you about you, product marketing manager
Your name is John. You are 34 years old. You go by many job titles, most notably product marketing manager, marketing manager, industry marketing manager, and segment marketing manager. Sometimes your job title is product manager and you do it all. You have an undergraduate degree, usually a BS (no pun intended), and occasionally an MBA (about 30% of the time).
Your job is to develop and evangelize your products to prospects, customers, partners and analysts. You differentiate your product offerings from competitive alternatives in the market. You write a lot of stuff and build slides like they are going out of style. Your salespeople are constantly asking for one of these and one of those. You struggle to prioritize the gazillion things on your todo list because they all have one priority: high. Actually, your sales team believes you work for them and should do everything they ask you to do, no matter how ridiculous you think it is.
Last minute requests from salespeople (even though you’ve already created what they are asking for) is epic. Everything is a crisis and you know if you turn down their requests, they will complain to their boss, who complains to your boss, who asks you to do it anyway, even when you both agree it’s a complete waste of time.
You know you should be spending time doing strategic activities but there is never enough time. Of course, when you are asked to deliver said strategic deliverables and you say you didn’t have enough time, your boss stares at you in total disbelief.
You work with 2-3 product managers who are grousing that you don’t put enough effort into marketing their products. Likewise you work with a team of marketing communications people who are regularly asking for product descriptions, messaging, product highlights, web content, etc. Why aren’t you writing a blog already? What are you waiting for?
You are asked to write whitepapers that are really collateral printed on white paper. You are an expert at using jargon when you write (best-in-class, comprehensive, seamless, state-of-the-art, next-generation).
Do we really need a new definition of “marketing”
Posted by: | CommentsIn 2008 the American Marketing Association introduced a new definition for marketing. I found it in an article listed by BtoB Magazine in their 20 most popular stories of 2009. Intrigued and curious I wanted to know what I was missing. Afterall, in my role as an instructor with Pragmatic Marketing I’m teaching product marketing managers and product managers. Anything new in the marketing arena I should be keeping up with. Here is AMA’s new definition of marketing:
“Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”
It will be used as the official definition of marketing in books and taught in university lecture halls nationwide, according to the AMA.
It read to me like the enterprise-class, mission-critical, scalable, state-of-the-art, easy-to-use, jargon that is often used in technology marketing. I imagined the series of endless conference calls and wrangling that led to the final wording, but also wondered “What problem was the AMA trying to solve with a new definition of marketing?”. Perhaps it had become outdated or stuffy. Could it be that the organization that should be the premier advocate for a market-driven approach were operating in an inside-out manner?
I read further and found AMA’s previous definition of marketing:
“Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.”
It is, after all, three words shorter. I guess that’s good. At the end of the day I’m not sure that most of us would really notice much of a difference between the two definitions.
I think I’ll stick with Drucker:
“There will always, one can assume, be need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.”
—Peter Drucker
