Coming Up with the Perfect Name

Posted on November 16, 2009 by

Names matter.  They immediately convey a message, before you even make it to a positioning statement.  Companies will pay consultants and spend lots of money trying to come up with the perfect name for their product… or their company, for that matter.  Even engineers aren’t immune, as they are often responsible for naming features or elements of a product… names in code that may stick in documentation or turn up in the UI somewhere… and before you know it, they’re terms being used by customers.  It’s the difference between people referring to that functionality as “F8 advanced startup configuration” or “safe mode.”

So how does one come up with a name?  Without succumbing to some level of marketing cutesy-ness that makes engineers gag?  Let me help you get your “MBA” in naming:

1) Message.  Figure out what you want to convey.
2) Brainstorm.  Write down all the related words you can think of.
3) Assemble.  Pick through and select different favorite words and combinations until you have a short list of 3-5 you like.

First, the Message. Take a step back and figure out what you’re trying to convey with the name.  Since a name is essentially a mini-positioning statement, you should avoid the temptation to simply come up with merely a descriptive name.  Boring!  You may also try to avoid conveying something.  For instance, if you want something to sound easy to use, you may not want a very complicated-sounding name.   If possible, write down in prose what your intended reaction is when someone hears this eventual name.

Got that?  Great.  Now the second step: Brainstorm. Start writing down as many words as you can that are related to what you’re trying to convey.  Pop up a thesaurus and go nuts.  One word may inspire another; give yourself permission to go off on tangents.

Once you’ve got a good list of words, you can Assemble. Start picking through them, combining them in whole or in part, discarding ones that give the wrong connotation, and otherwise manipulating them until you have a short list of favorites.  Try to come up with at least 3-5 choices.

Chances are good that you have other people who have a say in what this name is.  Take your short list of names and ask them to rank your list, or at least find out if they have any favorites or vetoes.  For bonus points, include at least one name you don’t like so the others look good by comparison.

Ready for some practice?  I received the following email asking me for help renaming a new product feature that’s part of a hosted telephony service.

We have a feature in the new release[... which] is the programmatic action to take if a call fails.  [...It] is currently called “Default Call Action”.   What this feature does is allow users to login and specify some ways that the customer wants the system to act if the application is unavailable.   The user can specify an optional wav file to play and then a phone number that the system will transfer the call to.

Below is a thread with a bit of brainstorming on how to rename this.   “Call Failure Action” was considered since this more accurately reflects what we are providing, but of course “Failure” is kind of a taboo word.   “Call Recover Action” was also suggested, although it was argued that we aren’t really “recovering” in this scenario just taking a different action.    None of these capture the fact that the customer has the flexibility to specify what will happen in this case.

So with the above brief description, give it a shot, and use your MBA.  Message: Figure out what you’re trying to say. Brainstorm: Generate your list of words.  Assemble: Come up with 3-5 potential names for the feature.  In my next post I’ll show you the message I chose, the words I brainstormed, my assembled short list of suggestions, and what the developers eventually went with.

This exercise is part of a larger theme when it comes to mixing an engineering mentality with a marketer’s task list — call it structured creativity.  It’s too easy for people to assume that marketing work is black magic, a vacuous practice beyond the reach of the left-brain logical thinkers.   Wrong.  It is possible to be creative on demand by following the right process — one that sets boundaries to guide your analysis but still opens the door for innovation and right-brain thinking.  Best of all, you don’t need an MBA in marketing — or naming — to accomplish this.

Posted in Dark Path, Dark Side, Force Training, Light Side | 2 Comments

Keeping Your Evil Scorecard Straight: Even More Flavors of Marketing (Part 2)

Posted on November 6, 2009 by

In Part 1 on this topic, I talked about how many people, especially engineers, assume that the marketing department is one giant mass of marketers, all sitting around trying to come up with new tchotchkes that increase top-of-mind awareness and otherwise wasting time and money.  When in reality, all of us marketers are in charge of a variety of  ways to waste time and money.

So continuing with our lineup, here are a few more marketing roles you should know about should you ever deign to approach your marketing department with an idea, a question, or a complaint:

Field Marketing. If product managers sometimes think they’re in engineering, then field marketing sometimes thinks they’re in sales.  This term means many different things to different organizations, but what everyone generally agrees on is that it involves marketers whose primary role is to support sales by participating “in the field,” i.e., in front of customers.  For some organizations these are roaming demo dudes/dollies, the equivalent of people giving out free cheese samples in the grocery store.  They may be showing off software in a Best Buy or visiting top sales accounts to do a dog and pony show.  For other organizations, field marketing personnel are more senior and support the sales team directly with logistics help: organizing customer events, attending trade shows, and joining them on sales calls.  When sales says jump they ask how high.  One variant of this role is Vertical Marketing, which is just Field Marketing assigned to a sales team that concentrates on a specific set of your customers in one industry.

So what: If you do end up on a sales call or at an event, seek out the relevant field marketing person for some practical tips on what to do and what not to do in front of this customer/sales rep/crowd of prospects.  If you want to know more about how actual customers are using your product, or how sales is actually pitching your product, these are good people to befriend.

Marketing Communications (also called “Marcom”) This is where what most technically minded people focus their derision, because it may be the hardest for them to understand.  If product marketing managers were the architects, marcom consists of the true coders.  They actually produce the marketing collateral – as in, they decide what colors and graphic images to use, they write the copy, they gather screenshots and schedule the photo shoots… the list is endless and varies from product to product.  Marcom folks will have an hour meeting to argue about whether a new website design looks too weird… or how far to deviate from the standard template for that new whitepaper… or if the poster at the tradeshow should have the company name or just the logo so there’s room to write some copy, at which point they may go back and forth about whether to use the word “customers” or “clients.”  Just as a programmer must decide when and how to do the database dip to support scaling to thousands of concurrent users, so must marcom decide whether going to a 6-panel folding brochure is worth the extra price and design hassle given that almost everything is electronic these days.  It’s these details that can make the difference between a piece that looks professional and a piece that looks slapped together, which, like it or not, infers something about the quality of the product it’s representing.

So what: If you think your product’s datasheet is lame, or the package artwork is misleading, or the messaging is not right… well you should probably talk to the product marketing manager as these people are executing on his vision.  But it’s still helpful to know who’s doing the actual work.

Advertising and promotion. In the B2B world, often marcom will include a division strictly responsible for lead generation, which may be the most important (and most measurable!) function of marketing from the sales perspective.  They create “campaigns” which, if all goes well, educate interested customers and convert them into buyers (or at least get them into the selling process).  Those sales bounty hunters types can do their job better if you’re constantly handing them targets, rather than forcing them to figure out who to go after on their own.  Warning: ad people speak a crazy alien creative language that you may never truly understand.

So what: As an engineer, you may not have too many interactions with the advertising/lead-generation team, short of stumbling across their ads or promotions.  If you disagree with what they’re creating, again, you won’t get far with this group — talk to the product marketing manager about the messaging, and not these people who are executing the plan.

Project marketing. Also referred to as traffic at some companies.  This is the equivalent of the  project manager on the engineering side.  They don’t care if it looks great or looks awful — they only care that the marcom team or agency meets the milestones and deadlines on their plan.

So what: If you’re dealing with project marketing, it’s because they’re expecting you to give them something — a two-sentence feature description, a jpg of your product in action, a demo script.  If you blow them off, they will hound you relentlessly until they get what you promised them.

Corporate marketing. For a large enough company, some marketers won’t be in charge of a specific product; rather, they will be in charge of the entire company’s look and feel.  They publish a style guide, which is effectively an API for using the corporate logo and colors.

So what: The main thing you care about from this group of people is that you get their guidelines and their blessing on any company logos, colors, or other stuff you put in your product to make it look official.

Event managers. While their duties are often absorbed by field marketing, marcom, or corporate marketing… in the end, someone must be the main contact for everything associated with holding your event.  That someone lines up union contractors to get electricity and carpeting in place, or hotel workers to make sure there’s a podium with a working microphone and enough chairs in the ballroom.  That someone books a block of hotel rooms and makes sure all support staff know when to fly in, where to go, what times to appear.

So what: If you’re participating in events regularly, make the event manager your best friend.  He can get you better hotel rooms, better flights in and out of town, better booth duty times, and invitations to the nicer restaurants with the rest of the crew so you’re not grabbing dinner at McDonald’s.

Agencies.  Few companies can afford to keep a full-time staff of marketing communications experts and production crew to churn out all their deliverables, simply because there are so many of them.  If you had on-staff experts to handle all of your company’s events, webcasts, print advertisements, product demo videos, banner ads, advertising budgets, guerrilla marketing, trade show posters, and yes, the litter of corporate-branded pens, golf balls, frisbees, and other giveaways…  since those needs come in fits and starts, a typical company could never keep a full time staff busy.  Enter agencies.  These agencies will also have a share of ‘creative aliens’ whose language you can’t even begin to speak.  But just like those coders you outsourced from the Ukraine/Sri Lanka/Israel, quality varies dramatically… and if you don’t tell them explicitly what you want, they’ll do the minimum work and take your company’s money, and charge you more to fix it.

So what: As an engineer, all you need care about is that sometimes the people to blame don’t even work for you.

There you have it.  (Fellow Dark Siders, did I miss anyone?)  Hopefully this will help you navigate your marketing department when you want to go beyond recreational complaining about how much “marketing sucks.”

Posted in Aliens, Light Side | 1 Comment

Keeping Your Evil Scorecard Straight: Different Flavors of Marketing (Part 1)

Posted on November 2, 2009 by

“I had a question for Jim, but he’s out today… but you’re in Marketing too, so I thought I would ask you.”  This is the equivalent of asking someone in QA to back out a recent check-in from source control and fix a problem because the engineer who coded it is off today.  And yet you’d be surprised how often those outside of marketing assume that marketing acts as some collective hive mind.  As if we were that competent!

Marketing is NOT a monolithic organization.  Yeah, we’re all “marketers.”  We know you think we’re evil.  But at least associate us with the right flavor of evil.  You wouldn’t credit Darth Maul for cutting off Luke Skywalker’s hand.  You wouldn’t think the Emperor was responsible for C-3PO getting blown to pieces in Cloud City.   Yeah, I know, you’ve seen one Dark Jedi, you’ve seen them all… Darth Vader, Darth Sidious, Darth Maul, Count Dooku, they’re all basically the same, right?

So it is with people not in marketing.  To them, marketing is marketing, and the finer distinctions between the various roles are lost.  When most say, “I hate marketing,” they’re usually talking about the promotional aspect of marketing: an ad campaign, a slogan, copy that lapses into marketing-speak… basically, anything that involves someone trying to sell you something you don’t want by using some sort of funky psychological Jedi mind trick that your mind is immune to.

When most engineers say, “I hate marketing,” they’re usually referring to a department within their organization that engineering feels is misrepresenting their products to customers.  Remember, most engineers would be hard pressed to come up with an answer to “what DOES marketing do all day, anyways?”  The conventional engineering wisdom is that everyone in marketing sits around all day dreaming up ridiculous new portmanteaus to become product names or industry terminology.

Why should this matter?  If you wanted to change the implementation of a particular API call, you’d want to know which engineer could fix that for you.  To avoid being a victim of marketing, it’s helpful to know who you can work with to make sure your work is being properly represented.  So here’s a brief overview of several different flavors of evil.  To make things even more confusing, depending on the size of your organization, roles may be combined or split depending on the team’s needs.

Product Manager. This guy is nominally responsible for defining a release’s requirements.  He sits in on development meetings, works with the engineering lead to track schedule, and is the one the engineers expect to make tough decisions so they have someone to blame when upper management can’t believe we shipped with that critical bug.  Even though he often reports into the marketing department, he sometimes thinks he’s an engineer… which is too bad, because the development team will always consider him in league with The Enemy.

So what? Knowing the Product Manager is key if you want to influence product direction, such as arguing for your favorite feature.  It’s also a good way to get a broader context for why your corner of the project is important.

Product Marketing Manager, sometimes just referred to as the Marketing Manager or even the Brand Manager in some companies. This guy manages external communications about the product, rather than keeping internal product affairs in order.  Messaging and positioning, press releases, marketing collateral like datasheets and whitepapers, analyst interviews, market research (who’s gonna buy this?), demos, product packaging if relevant… all fall under the role of the product marketing manager.  They will often be involved in pricing and, yes, promotion.  Sometimes they even get to help strategize what products are actually made.  Engineers typically have more reason to hate the product marketing manager as the product marketing manager is the one who took your 2 years of coding and trivialized it with 3 bullet points… paid someone hundreds of thousands of dollars for a crappy ad campaign… and then came back and asked for two impossible features for the next version.

In smaller companies or lines of business, these two roles are often combined into one person’s responsibility. It’s convenient, but almost always results in sacrifices because very rarely do you find someone who excels in both roles.  Someone needs to be working with the engineers so they don’t spend cycles building a cool product that no one wants to buy.  Someone else needs to spend time figuring out let the people who might buy the product know that it exists.

So what? Knowing your Product Marketing Manager will give you a better understanding of what’s actually being communicated to customers.  In other words, you can prevent “those bums in marketing” from making up stuff or promising things to customers today that become your emergency “they said WHAT?!” fire drill tomorrow.

Solution Manager. Don’t be fooled!  Typically this is just another name for a product manager or product marketing manager in the B2B world, except their responsibilities have expanded to include not only the product but also related services, consulting, and other things needed to actually make the product work.

Channel Marketing Manager.  (Also called Partner Marketing.)  A product marketing manager whose focus is entirely on helping other companies succeed by selling your products and giving you a cut of the sales.  Or, if the shoe’s on the other foot, helping other companies teach yours how to sell their products.  It involves a lot of kowtowing, negotiations, compromises, and intentional trickling out of information so that your partners know enough (but not too much) of your strategy… since, after all, they may also choose to sell your competitor’s products, and whatever you tell partners will likely make its way back to competitors.  This is a delicate, painful balancing act, made only slightly better by the fact that if you like travel, you end up doing a lot more trade shows.

So what? More often than not, your channel marketing manager needs you more than you need them, since they may depend on you making partner-friendly standards-based products that they can get others to sell.  But like the product marketing manager

Part two of this discussion is here.

Posted in Light Side | 1 Comment

Trade shows — why engineers think marketers drink too much

Posted on October 27, 2009 by

One day I inserted myself in a product development meeting because I wanted to have some input into the team’s presentation of marketing plans to the senior staff.  (They, uhhh… they seemed to think they didn’t need marketing for this step.  Shrug.)  The development team was planning their briefing to be during the same week as our industry’s biggest trade show.  I explained that this wasn’t an option; all of the marketing team would be out of town for the event, and most of the senior staff as well.  They then suggested we have the meeting the day after the event.

Now, if you’ve ever participated in an industry’s big trade show (you know, the ones that are in Vegas because there’s no other city in the U.S. that can book enough hotel rooms for the crowd coming in), or an annual rah-rah sales kickoff, or been involved in running a user conference, you know that while there are some chances to socialize and kick back a bit, they typically involve a lot of mind-numbing presentations, long-winded keynotes, and occasionally rows and rows of vendors with demos trying to get you to spend 5 minutes with them to validate their presence at the show.  It resembles a party about as much as a lecture hall resembles a kegger.  And if, bless your soul, you’ve ever actually been responsible for some portion of the event, then you already know the stress that goes into them from a planning and logistics side.  It’s like releasing a product, except with the individual effort concentrated on a smaller set of people but with a level of coordination that far exceeds a product release.  There are booth schedules, and people to corral to show up for their scheduled times.  Union workers and site coordinators to manage.  Marketing materials (yes, including those tchotchkes that non-marketers slobber over, for some reason) to ship and retrieve and unpack… and then to repack and ship back again.  Computers to preloaded with demos.  Demos to test and test again.  Speeches and presentations to write.  Arrival, hotel, and departure details to track for every person attending.  If you’re sponsoring the event, there are partners and exhibitors to keep happy, food arrangements to make, speakers who haven’t finished their presentations yet, evening events to plan and execute… the whole thing is one giant chaotic ball of work careening forward, following you wherever you run, looking to crush you under its weight.

If you haven’t been, though, then I can see the confusion.  All you see are pictures of a beautiful resort in pleasant weather.  You read about the golf and boating and other mixer activities.  You hear the stories about late-night drinking and partying.  You grumble as you sit in your cubicle with everyone else gone and obviously enjoying themselves while you continue shuffling papers or coding or doing whatever it is you do that suddenly feels boring and insignificant compared to the blast that everyone else at the conference is having.

So… back to that meeting. I explained to these engineers that they wouldn’t get anyone to support them or listen to them as they presented their plans if they were aiming for the day after the event.   Their natural reaction wasn’t even to ask why.  It was to say: “Why don’t you just drink less?”  followed by self-congratulatory laughter from the rest of the engineers.   I tried to hide my frustration and displeasure at this blatant display of disregard for the hard-working, stressed out marketers still trying to write abstracts, get the conference guide published, assuage the cocktail night sponsor who’s pissed that their name was misspelled on all the napkins, get the slides preloaded on all the presentation laptops, figure out why the A/V team wasn’t bringing extra microphones to the panel discussion session…

We marketing types aren’t asking for your pity.  We don’t even ask you not to be a little jealous, because hey — it’s the Dark Side.  The Dark Side is inherently more fun!  Why do you think I crossed over?  What we are asking is to be cognizant of the fact that there is a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that go into running one of these things, and even attending a conference can mentally wipe you out from the fire hose of information and physically tax you from the travel.   The bottom line is, these events are a reality in our calendar, and scheduling meetings or planning work in the weeks leading up to a big event is akin to us asking you to spend a half day brainstorming with us when you’re in crunch-time 3 days before a major release milestone.

Posted in Light Side | 1 Comment

Proof That Most Marketers Naturally Excel At Golf

Posted on October 13, 2009 by

I know, I know, you don’t wanna deal with Marketing because they’re always at some promotional event, drinking it up with sales and clients and prospective customers, or out on the golf course.

Well, here’s one more reason to beware the Marketing team.  The Dark Side — now helping your golf game!

(Thanks, Spike TV, for the promotional video that fits into this blog’s wheelhouse.)

Posted in Humor | 1 Comment

Practical Examples of a Positioning Statement in Action

Posted on October 7, 2009 by

“Look, good against remotes is one thing. Good against the living? That’s something else.”

I just finished a series of blog posts explaining how to write a strong positioning statement.  Yes, yes, good practice, that’s all very well and good…. SO WHAT?  Once you have one, what good does it do?  It’s just a buncha marketing hooey anyways, right?

Let’s take a look at two practical examples of a positioning statement in action.

The quintessential example I’ve often heard cited to illustrate how a positioning statement can be effective is Volvo’s.

For upscale American families, Volvo is the family automobile that offers maximum safety.

Note that this does not talk about the quality of their air bags, the optional collision warning with autobrake or the adaptive cruise control with distance alert.  Nor does the statement mention the results of the tests that prove they offer maximum safety.  Those are all nice features, but the benefit of all of them is maximum safety.

Note also that the positioning does not talk about great gas mileage, affordability, the sound system… all stuff that a customer (an upscale American one, with a family) will probably look at when he gets closer to making a buying decision.

And now…  look how they execute.  The first categories of their long list of features are “Preventive Safety, “Protective Safety,” “Child Safety,” and then “Security.”  Only then do they start talking about other categories people might care about, like Comfort, Tech & Sound, Styling, and Performance.  Now look at any brochure in their catalog.  You’ll see safety mentioned as the constant refrain, along with other features to distinguish each of their models from each other.  They probably have their own positioning statements too.

What’s that?  You don’t work in the automotive industry?  Perhaps a more hi-tech example will help.  Here’s a positioning statement that I worked on about 2-1/2 years ago, for my current company.

For existing Nuance customers, Nuance Recognizer v9 is the best-of-breed speech recognition software that drives higher business performance by dramatically increasing the efficiency of your self-service solutions.  By combining the natural conversational capabilities of OpenSpeech Recognizer with the administration and maintenance resources of the Nuance 8.5 engine, Nuance Recognizer v9 provides unparalleled levels of accuracy, reliability, and ease of use.

This v9 release occurred about a year after Nuance and ScanSoft merged.  It represented the integration of both companies’ flagship product lines.  But you can’t market a product as “now, on one unified code base to make our internal support and programming easier!” What’s in it for the customer?  Lots of stuff, but with R&D focused on the integration work, it was up to product management and product marketing to pull a message out from the list of committed features.  We focused on the three benefits of accuracy, reliability, and ease of use.  And then we used it.  Everywhere.  The website blurb.  Trade show signage.  The datasheet.   The whitepaper itself is called “Bringing New Levels of Accuracy, Reliability, and Ease of Use to Speech-Based Self-Service Applications.”  The customer-facing presentation hits you over the head with it too.  Accuracy.  Reliability.  Ease of Use.  And those aren’t just marketing mantras – we had the lab tests and beta user evidence to prove the accuracy; new load balancing features and a resource manager that simply weren’t in both versions before; and an entire OA&M mechanism added with the Management Station.  But by focusing on those higher level benefits, we could introduce all these features (consolidated logging, reporting and analytics, improved natural language support, yada yada yada) as evidence supporting those benefits, and provide a structure to the argument.

Get it?  No?  Then consider the alternative. What does all this marketing material look like when the engineering team doesn’t have a high level message in mind while they’re designing and building the product?  It’s whatever the marketing people make up.  If you’re lucky, it’s based on whatever features they can yank out of requirements documents.  And then we’re writing about “one-of-a-kind unique capabilities that leverage our core strengths and enable us to utilize our vast experience to help you expand your investment and achieve an ROI.”  Huh?

Posted in Dark Path, Light Side | 4 Comments

Refining a Positioning Statement — The Key Benefit and Differentiation

Posted on October 2, 2009 by

Okay, you’ve stood on your head and stacked a few rocks by defining the target and the brief description of your positioning statement… now can you move your entire X-wing out of the swamp?  Choosing the key benefit and the differentiation are by far is the hardest part of this task.  This step will drive most engineering minds to insanity.

It’s very easy to be lazy and put in something that may sound pretty marketingy, but is really just a feature (“Innovative, easy-to-use interface”).  Or to put in something for differentiation that is not at all differentiating (“it’s the best in the industry.”)  It’s also tempting to cram too many things into the positioning statement because you couldn’t decide on one message.  Oh, and don’t get sidetracked coming up with a cutesy tagline instead of an actual value prop!

It’s not good enough to say what your product does.  You have to say why people should care, and why they should pick you over someone else.  And you have to say it in simple terms your target audience understands, not in terms that your product team understands.

Once again, the best tool for this iterative process is to keep using SO WHAT? until you’re satisfied that you have a benefit which is appealing to your target audience.

while (answer != TYPE_BENEFIT)
    answer = SoWhat(answer);

See?  This marketing stuff isn’t inscrutable Black Magic that people spent years studying how to do.  You just have to stretch your thinking methodology a bit.  You’re not trying to repair the X-wing.  You’re gonna free your creative mind up and lift the X-wing up from the swamp… but you’re still following a process.  Yes, even an engineer can do this.

Let’s see this in action by going back to this week’s example again.  I started with things like “The Dark Side is a blog that teaches engineers about marketing.”  But so what?  Now I’ve got a bunch of engineer readers who know some marketing.  What does that mean?  Well, it means they are smarter about marketing.  So what?  Being smarter about marketing means they can understand why the marketing department does things.  So what?  It means they can work better with their peers in marketing.

Aha.  That’s a benefit.  We could continue – working better with their peers in marketing means having a better work environment, or broadening your experience and furthering your career, or preparing yourself for your own leap into marketing, or making sure your products are marketed properly, or being a better watchdog to make sure your marketing department isn’t mailing it in… all those feel like valid benefits, but I’m not convinced that they’re meaningful to my stated target audience, “engineers who want to learn more about marketing.”  Some are too specific to subsets of that audience, such as engineers on the Dark Path.  Others are smaller parts of the bigger picture of understanding why you’re your marketing team does what they do.  And the “broadening your experience” one?  It feels a bit too mom-and-apple-pie.  It is tempting – I could see a positioning statement where I promise to further your career by increasing your knowledge of marketing and preparing you for a broader role in your organization.  But that doesn’t ring true to what I’m trying to accomplish.

Now what differentiates this product, this blog?  What does it do differently?  You can find lots of places within this grand series of tubes that talk about creating positioning statements – and they’re very good discussions.  In some sense they’re my competition.  Fortunately, I’ve known what I do different from the start – it’s part of the reason I sat down to start writing this.  I’m writing about marketing in terms an engineer can relate to.  And I’m writing about marketing with as much of a hands-on, how-to approach as possible, rather than hand-wavy generalities about branding and self-examination questions.  For learning marketing, that’s about as practical as giving someone a book about the history of LISP and expecting them to code the next day in Scheme.

So there you have it.

For engineers who want to learn more about marketing, The Dark Side is a practical, educational blog that discusses abstract marketing concepts in concrete, engineering-friendly terms so you can learn how to work with your own marketing department.

And note that, to make it easier to read, I swapped the position of the benefit and value proposition.  Purely a style thing, it could have easily read “…blog that teaches you how to work with your own marketing department by discussing abstract marketing concepts…”  Yup.  Marketing is squishy.

Next week, I’ll answer SO WHAT about positioning statements, and give you some examples of how marketers can execute on a positioning statement… and what inevitably happens if your engineering team doesn’t supply them with enough ammo.

Posted in Dark Path, Force Training | Leave a comment