Author Archives: bredemarket

Marketing and writing services.

There Are NOT 10 Essential Elements of Product Marketing (Even If I Told Bredebot There Are)

The beautiful thing (and the terrible thing) about generative AI is that it (mostly) does what it tells you to do.

Imagen 4.

That was mean. Bredebot, I’ll make it up to you.

Imagen 4.

Back to generative AI following the instructions in a prompt.

So I, in my “managing editor” role, asked Bredebot to write a LinkedIn post listing “the 10 essential elements of product marketing.”

“I was asked to list the 10 essential elements of product marketing. Honestly, there probably isn’t a magic number…”

Never mind if there aren’t 10 essential elements. I told Bredebot to list 10, so it listed 10. Even though (as you will see) I think there are only four.

  1. Product messaging and positioning
  2. Buyer personas
  3. Go-to-market strategy
  4. Sales enablement
  5. Product launches
  6. Market and competitive intelligence
  7. Customer feedback loop
  8. Pricing and packaging
  9. Content strategy
  10. Performance metrics and analysis

Bredemarket’s four essential elements of product marketing

So what are the REAL essential elements?

I could ask 20 product marketers to boil this AI-generated 10-item list down to a select few, and I would get 21 different answers.

But I’ll take my shot anyway, warning you that my list may not contain the really cool product marketing buzzwords like “positioning” and “target audience.”

I’ve identified four essential elements:

  1. Product marketing strategy.
  2. Product marketing environment.
  3. Product marketing content.
  4. Product marketing performance.

Strategy

Strategy comes first, which not only refers to the two “strategy” elements in the list, but also to things I’ve talked about in the past, including why, how, what, and process.

Environment

Here’s where I put “Market and competitive intelligence” and “Customer feedback loop” from the list above. This also includes the internal environment in the company; if the CEO emphatically insists that a go-to-market effort should last three days, then a go-to-market effort will last three days, regardless of what anyone else says.

Content

I’ve previously discussed the non-difference between content marketers and product marketers, noting that product marketers have to product a lot of content about the product, both external and internal. Most of Bredebot’s 10 items fall into this category in one way or another: positioning, personas, go-to-market, sales enablement, launches, pricing, and packaging. You can also throw proposals into this list, and I just did.

Performance

The metrics stuff, including Objectives and Key Results (OKRs). Because if you don’t know how you did, you don’t know how you did. Sleep-inducing but essential.

“By the end of Q4 2025 I will establish and obtain approval for a multi-tiered go-to-market process identifying the go-to-market tiers, the customer-facing and internal deliverables for each tier, as well as the responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed organizations for each deliverable.”

Yes, I talk like that. Sometimes.

What is your list?

So I’ve concluded that the four essential elements of product marketing are strategy, environment, content, and performance.

Prove me wrong.

Is there validity is the traditional lists, such as HubSpot’s list? With the recognizable buzzwords such as “target audience”?

  1. Researching and monitoring your target audience.
  2. Ensuring your product meets the needs of your target audience.
  3. Determining your product’s positioning in the market.
  4. Creating, managing, and carrying out your product marketing strategy.
  5. Enabling sales to attract the right customers for your new product.
  6. Influencing marketing strategy and product development.
  7. Keeping your product relevant over time.

You tell me what the proper list should be.

Imagen 4.

And regardless of your list, if you need a technology product marketing expert to assist with any aspect of your product marketing, contact me.

Consulting: Bredemarket at https://bredemarket.com/mark/

Employment: LinkedIn at https://linkedin.com/in/jbredehoft/

Could Any Company Create Your Content?

Take a look at your most recent content. If you extracted this content from your channels, changed the names, and injected it into the channels of one of your competitors, would anyone know the difference?

This post looks at content created by human SEO experts, and my generative AI colleague Bredebot. And how to differentiate your content from that of your competitors. (Inserting a wildebeest isn’t enough.)

Several years ago

Several years ago (I won’t get more specific) I was a writer for a company’s blog, but I didn’t own the blog. Frankly, I don’t think anyone did. There were multiple writers, and we just wrote stuff.

One writer had the (apparent) goal of creating informational content. The writer would publish multiple articles, sometimes with the same publication date.

The posts were well-researched, well-written, and covered topics of interest to the company’s prospects.

They were clearly written with a focus on SEO—several years ago, AEO didn’t exist—and were optimized for keywords that interested the prospects.

The goal was simple: draw the prospects to the company website with resonating content.

What could be wrong with that?

This week

Now it’s 2025, I’m writing for the Bredemarket blog, and I own the blog and control what is in it.

In a huddle space in an office, a smiling robot named Bredebot places his robotic arms on a wildebeest and a wombat, encouraging them to collaborate on a product marketing initiative.
Bredebot. (In the middle.)

But I’m not the only writer. I brought a new writer on staff—Bredebot. And like a managing editor, I’ve been giving Bredebot assignments to write about.

As of Sunday August 31 (when I’m drafting this post), the next three Bredebot posts to be published are as follows (subject to change):

  • Move Over, Authentic AI: Why You Shouldn’t Overlook AI’s Role in Modern Marketing
  • Power Up Your Sales: A CMO’s Guide to Sales Enablement (with a Wink and a Nudge)
  • What Is Liveness Detection? Let’s Re-Examine a Sentence

Bredebot just finished writing the sales enablement and liveness detection posts Sunday afternoon, and they blew me away.

The posts were well-researched, well-written, and covered topics of interest to Bredemarket’s prospects.

And while I’m not as much of an SEO/AEO expert as my colleague from several years ago, the posts do feature critical keywords. For example, the references to Chief Marketing Officers are intentional.

The goal is simple: draw prospects to the Bredemarket website with resonating content.

What could be wrong with that?

Next week

I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that:

Any other company could publish identical content.

My colleague from several years ago could produce identical content for any firm in that particular industry. Or some other writer could produce identical content.

Moving to the present day, my esteemed competitor Laurel Jew of Tandem Technical Writing could (if she wanted to; she probably wouldn’t) log in to her favorite generative AI engine and churn out bot-written posts on sales enablement and liveness detection that read just like mine—I mean Bredebot’s. Especially if she reverse engineers my prompts and includes things like “Include no more than one reference to wildebeests as marketing consultants and wombats as customers of these marketing consultants.” Once Bredebot has been easily cloned, game over.

TTW Bot?

As I noted Sunday, a correlation in which two bots use the same source data ends up with the same results.

Perhaps I could mitigate the risk by using a private LLM with its own super secret data (see Writer) to generate Bredebot’s content, but as of now that ain’t happening.

Another way to mitigate the risk is by careful prompt tailoring. I experimented with this in the pre-Bredebot days, back when Google Gemini was still Google Bard, and I told it to assert that “Kokomo” is the best Beach Boys song ever.

But in the end, no matter what data you use and what prompt you use, a generative AI bot is not going to produce anything original.

Another reason that humans should always write the first draft.

(Although philosophers may question whether even humans can produce anything original; they say there is nothing new under the sun.)

Imagen 4.

But at least attempting to control the strategy behind your content helps to ensure that you are differentiated from everybody else.

So what of my pal Bredebot who is incapable of original thought or differentiation? For now I will continue the experiment.

The Longer List of My Products

In my Saturday post “Technology Product Marketing Expert,” I listed several of my strategy, go-to-market, and sales enablement projects.

That was the SHORT list.

Here are the products I mentioned in Saturday’s post, along with news articles about a couple of them.

A long list…but it could have been longer. Here are the products I removed from the list.

  • Series 2000.
  • Omnitrak.
  • MorphoWAVE.
  • The SIGMA Series.
  • Driver’s license and mobile driver’s license services.
  • Enrollment services.
  • Adobe consulting services.

Why did I remove them? As I said on Saturday:

“But my past isn’t as important as your present challenges.”

Speaking of your present challenges, if Bredemarket can help you as a consultant, book a free meeting to discuss your needs at https://bredemarket.com/mark/

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

The Favor of a Share

I’ve written up a description of my technology product marketing expertise and repurposed it to four platforms: my consulting blog, LinkedIn, Substack, and Instagram. Actually more platforms than those four, but these are the biggies.

If you are on one of these platforms, and are so inclined, feel free to share this with any technology marketing leaders in your circles. I am open to both employment and consulting opportunities.

Technology Product Marketing Expert

(and elsewhere)

On Original Thought, When the Intelligence is Artificial

From Naomi Kaduwela in 2024, but still valid.

“So, can generative AI replace original thought? The answer is nuanced. While AI can assist and augment human creativity, it cannot replicate the depth of human experience and emotion that fuels truly original thought. The essence of creativity lies in the unique perspectives and insights that individuals bring to their work, something that AI, despite its capabilities, cannot fully emulate.”

I will return to this topic on Wednesday.

Move Over, Bredebot: My Personal Thoughts on the Content Marketing Institute Article

No, I’m not laboring on the U.S. Labor Day. And neither did Bredebot. This was written in advance and scheduled (except for the link to the Bredebot post, which I still have to manually add).

My request to Bredebot for a 6am article

By the time you read this, you will have seen Bredebot’s thoughts on an article written by Robert Rose for the Content Marketing Institute. The article? “Move Over “Authentic AI,” Real Beats Perfect in Content and Marketing.”

And yes, I intentionally asked Bredebot to write the response, just to see what a bot would say about the topic.

Here’s part of the prompt that I gave to Bredebot when writing the article:

The post must include the following three parts: (1) an introduction explaining how Bredemarket asked Bredebot to analyze the post “Move Over “Authentic AI,” Real Beats Perfect in Content and Marketing” at https://contentmarketinginstitute.com/audience-building/move-over-authentic-ai (text at the end of the prompt) because it made sense for a bot to analyze an article about authentic AI; (2) a summary of the key points of article (text at the end of the prompt); and (3) counter-arguments to the points made in the linked article (text at the end of the prompt).

Bredebot’s criticism of the Content Marketing Institute article

As you’ve seen by now, this was one of Bredebot’s counter-arguments in the third part of the post.

The author says, “Let the people perform. Let the machines cue the spotlight.” I love that line. And I agree completely. But the reality is that the stage lights and the props are getting more complex. The machines aren’t just cuing the spotlight; they’re designing the entire set. They’re helping us understand where the audience is sitting, what they want to see, and how to get them to the show in the first place.

Instead of fighting the technology, we should be leaning into it. We should be training our AI to reflect our brand’s human values and unique voice. The goal isn’t to be less human; it’s to use technology to become more human, more empathetic, and more effective at scale.

How a bot raises an important issue

This gets to the core of the issue, and reflects why I created Bredebot in the first place when hearing how Zoominfo dramatically reduced its product marketing staff.

Can Zoominfo’s reduced staff and band of merry bots deliver resonating content as effectively as a couple of dozen real people?

Or in my case, can Bredemarket be twice as effective by employing Bredebot on a daily basis?

But let me insert one caveat here.

Bredmarket’s client work is (so far) very human and unchanged

Regarding client work, John E. Bredehoft still ALWAYS writes the first draft. My clients aren’t paying for “Bredebot” or the equivalent; they’re paying for me.

And when I do employ generative AI, I disclose it.

For example, last week, I wrote a single sentence for a client, and then said this:

I then asked Google Gemini for 20 alternatives, obfuscating the customer name and the product name from Google’s prying eyes. Do you prefer any of these formulations to the one I drafted? 

Pay particular attention to the obfuscation. Just like 2023, I don’t feed confidential information to my bots.

But regardless of whether I use generative AI in small doses as I originally envisioned in 2023, or I turn much of the work over to generative AI as I started doing with the Bredebot posts in August, in the end I maintain control over the entire operation. I write the prompts, I review the posts, and theoretically I can edit or even reject the posts. (I haven’t yet, just to see what uncontrolled Google Gemini can produce.)

A very human call to action

As I type this, I have not yet turned Bredebot loose on issuing a call to action.

I’m reserving that for myself.

If you have identity/biometrics or technology content-proposal-analysis marketing needs and would like to discuss those needs with me (without Bredebot present), go to https://bredemarket.com/mark/ and schedule a free discussion.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

Differentiation, Causation…and Correlation

(Picture from https://www.yourgreenpal.com/blog/is-there-an-uber-for-lawn-care)

Some time ago I talked about a lack of differentiation that was, um, caused by one company copying another.

And one of those records was so unmemorable that it was memorable. 

The album, recorded in the early to mid 1960s, trumpeted the fact that the group that recorded the album was extremely versatile. You see, the record not only included surf songs, but also included car songs!

The only problem? The album was NOT by the Beach Boys.

And I can’t even remember the name of the band.

But this sameness is not only a result of causation.

It can also happen due to correlation, when two things—in this case, two pieces of content—originate from the same source.

I will examine this on Wednesday.