Author Archives: bredemarket

Marketing and writing services.

Go Out Of Your Way To Eat Your Own Wildebeest Food

You’ve heard me use the phrase “eat your own wildebeest food.” (Like eating your own dog food, but I differentiate myself from the rest of the world.) When can you eat your own wildebeest food? Let’s take a product marketing example.

Be reasonable?

I recently encountered a company that does NOT use the product it sells for its own in-house purposes.

The company has a good reason for this. The product is meant for a particular market category, and the company itself doesn’t fall into that category. 

Without revealing anything confidential, it’s akin to a bus agency executive using a limo to get to a board of directors meeting. Yes, the executive could take the 61 to the 83 to the 66, but that takes time.

Google Gemini.

It would be a stretch for the firm to use its product internally. So it uses a semi-competing product for internal use.

Sounds reasonable, right?

I don’t care about reasonable. 

FOMO

The company is sharing a subliminal message, or perhaps a super liminal one: yeah, our product is great, but this semi-competitor is good enough for us so we don’t bother to try to use our own.

By not jerry-rigging its product for its internal needs, the company’s missing an opportunity.

  • External prospects and customers will see that the company uses its product. As of now, it is VERY obvious that the company uses a different product.
  • Internal people will have to use the company’s product every day, and will know its strengths and weaknesses very well.

So try to use your own product, even when you shouldn’t. You, your prospects, and your customers will learn a, um, bunch.

Google Gemini.

Mary the Marketing Leader

Back in 2022 I worked on various prospect personas, described in Word documents. Although I feel that personas are overrated, they do serve a purpose.

In those days, to use the persona you would have to read the Word document and evaluate your content against what you just read.

It’s different today with generative AI.

I spent Tuesday evening writing a persona specification for “Mary the Marketing Leader,” the persona for Bredemarket’s chief prospect. This is something I would enter into Google Gemini as a prompt. “Mary” would then ask me questions, and I would ask her questions in turn.

As of December 23 (yeah, this is a scheduled post), the persona specification has 30 bullets arranged into four sections: role, context, tone and constraints.

And no, I’m not going to share it with you.

One reason is that I don’t want to share my insights with my product marketing expert competitors. This is pretty much a Bredemarket trade secret.

The other reason is that some of my bullets are brutally honest about Mary, and even though she’s fake, she still might take offense about the things I say about her. One example:

“When working with product marketing and other consultants, Mary sometimes takes a week to provide feedback on content drafts because higher priority tasks and emergencies must be handled first.”

Such comments are all through the specification, so you’re not gonna see it.

But maybe you’ll see the benefits of this specification and use the persona, tweak it, and use it again.

For example, I’ve already learned that my 30 years of identity experience can resonate with MY prospects, as can my statement “I ask, then I act.”

Now I just have to recast Bredebot as a persona specification. That will help me immensely.