Bredemarket

When Names Infringe (Biometric Products Coming to America)

Then there was the time I was performing U.S. go-to-market activities for a global identity/biometric offering.

The product marketing launch went great…

…until the home office received a communication from a competitor.

A competitor with a previously existing product with a name VERY similar to that of our subsequently launched solution.

Oops.

We definitely made a mistake by not thoroughly checking the name.

Of course, with the way that some companies want to imitate the things their competitors do, I’m sure some firms perform this intentionally, rather than accidentally.

(McDowell’s 2017 West Hollywood pop-up image from Buzzfeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/morganshanahan/we-went-to-a-real-life-mcdowells-from-coming-to-america-and)

Too Many Dollar Trees?

Are there/will there be too many Dollar Trees in or near Ontario, California?

This used to be my Alpha Beta, a grocery store chain acquired by Kroger and Albertsons.

Then it became a 99 Cents Only Store. (Actually a 99.99 Cents Only Store, but close enough.) And we know what happened there.

Now this location, on Mountain Avenue near D St. in Ontario, California, is slated to become a Dollar Tree. (Actually a Dollar Twenty Five Tree, but close enough.)

Just like the former 99 Cents Only Store on Euclid near Francis, which has already reopened as a Dollar Tree.

And just like the three Dollar Trees within a two mile radius in Ontario, Upland, and Montclair.

Maybe it’s just me, but I doubt all of them will survive. The dollar store market hasn’t gotten appreciably better.

Mountain and D, Ontario, California.

More on Go-to-Market Tiers

In my post “Seven Essential Product Marketing Strategy and Process Documents, the August 30, 2024 Iteration,” I alluded to the fact that not all go-to-market efforts are the same.

You can’t just slap a few things together in three days and say your go-to-market is complete. You need a plan on how you will go to market, including the different tiers of go-to-market efforts (you won’t spend four months planning materials for your 5.0.11 software release)…

Unless you’re in very unusual circumstances, your go-to-market efforts will encompass variable efforts.

Two tier

In its simplest form, you will have two tiers. For example, Holly Watson of Amazon Web Services distinguishes between “launches” and “releases.”

Release to me relates to the update of an existing product vs. a net-new addition to a solution offering. It’s common to have multiple releases a quarter vs. large launches 1-2x per year.

Three tier

You can get fancier.

Stepped pyramids in Teotihuacan, Mexico. By Juan Carlos Fonseca Mata – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91032399.

My former product marketing team devised a three-tier system, in which the top tier encompassed a full-blown effort and the bottom tier just had some release notes, a bit of internal education, and maybe a blog post.

Defined tiers

But as I said on August 30, you need to define the tiers beforehand. Don’t just shoot from the lip and say you want a blog post, a press release, and a brochure…oh, and maybe a cool infographic! Yeah!

Establish your tiers.

Establish the content for each tier.

Execute.

And repeat.

In Case You Missed My Incessant “Biometric Product Marketing Expert” Promotion

Biometric product marketing expert.

Modalities: Finger, face, iris, voice, DNA.

Plus other factors: IDs, data.

John E. Bredehoft has worked for Incode, IDEMIA, MorphoTrak, Motorola, Printrak, and a host of Bredemarket clients.

(Some images AI-generated by Google Gemini.)

Biometric product marketing expert.

Always Remember…and Differentiate

I’ve railed against copying the competition with “me too” messaging…and this morning I ate my own wildebeest food and did something about it.

While Bredemarket usually doesn’t mark significant dates, I observed 9/11 on my social channels. While 9/11 is relevant worldwide, it is especially relevant to Bredemarket’s identity/biometrics customers because of its revolutionary impact on our industry.

But I didn’t use the tried-and-true messaging with an image of the former World Trade Center and the words “never forget.” After 23 years, we’ve seen that message thousands of times. It blends into the landscape, like a mention of the band the Dead Kennedys that no longer raises an eyebrow.

So instead I differentiated Bredemarket’s message and said “always remember” with an image of the destruction to the Pentagon. Perhaps that will wake people up to what happened that day.

Apologies to Shanksville. We will always remember you also.

WHY Ask Why?

LHC shared this bit of history from the advertising world.

If you don’t remember, “Why ask why? Try Bud Dry” was a short-lived advertising tagline from a short-lived Budweiser product from some short-lived part of the early 90s…

But “why ask why” is not just an old advertising slogan. It’s also an excellent question in its own right.

If you’ve read my writing for any length of time, you know I spend a lot of time on the questions why, how, and what.

Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. From https://blog.hubspot.com/customers/3-takeaways-from-start-with-why

Heck, I even wrote a book about those (and three other) questions. Then I rewrote the book when I came up with a seventh question.

But during the last few years I failed to realize one true power of these interrogative questions—and other interrogative questions such as who (an important question for identity folks).

The power, according to Camp Systems, is this:

In negotiating, if you start asking questions with these words, you’ll invite more thoughtful and thorough answers.

Now look at what happens when you start a question with a verb….These questions can be answered in a single word, and it’s usually yes, no, or maybe.

I won’t go into detail about why the Camp Systems devotees—the “start with no” people—despise “maybe” responses and REALLY despise “yes” responses.

For my present purpose I’ll simply say that you receive a lot more information from interrogative questions.

And if you want to maintain a customer focus, don’t you want information from the customer so you can understand them?

Whoops, let me rephrase that. What are the best types of questions to ask when you really want to understand a customer?

Practice, practice, practice…

Positioning

Remember my August 30 post about seven essential product marketing strategy and process documents?

Well, I posted a follow-up on LinkedIn (as part of my “The Wildebeest Speaks” series) about one of those seven documents.

If you’re not already following Bredemarket on LinkedIn (why not?), be sure to read “A Deeper Dive Into Positioning,” and the complexities that occur when you have to position and message for multiple products, personas, industries, use cases, and geographies.

Even for a single product such as the Bredemarket 400 Short Writing Service, the matrix can get pretty hairy.

Positioning variables can include persona, industry, (pseudo) use case, and geography.

Know Your Recruiter

KYR = Know Your Recruiter.

My two most popular LinkedIn posts over the last two weeks discussed scammy SMS texts I received from people who claimed to work for Randstad and Indeed but clearly did NOT.

THIS post clearly won’t garner tens of thousands of impressions, but it’s much more important: how do you differentiate a real recruiter from a fake one?

The easiest test—which all the fake recruiters fail—is to ask the recruiter to provide their corporate email address. But even that can backfire when the fake provides an email from an ALMOST good domain such as endeede.com and hopes the mark doesn’t notice the difference.

There are other tests, but my “biometric product marketing expert” preferred tests such as comparing a live PAD#-tested selfie against a driver’s license don’t prove anything. Sure, such methods can prove that Anna Morgan is Anna Morgan, but they don’t prove her profession per se (fractional talent acquisition leader / recruiter / career coach).

So for now the best KYR tactic is to ask for a corporate email address. Definitely don’t take the recruiting conversation to Telegram.

# PAD = presentation attack detection. A presentation attack is when you substitute a fake face (or another fake, such as a fake driver’s license) for a real one.

AI image by Microsoft Copilot because Google Gemini still won’t draw people.

Seven Essential Product Marketing Strategy and Process Documents, the August 30, 2024 Iteration

Due to the nature of my business, Bredemarket doesn’t usually get involved in strategy. The clients set the strategy, and I fill the tactical holes to execute that strategy.

I once worked for a former 3M employee. You can bet we did this. By Wikimedia Finland – Planning the strategy, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36476412.

But I recently welcomed the opportunity to envision a strategy to achieve a strategy, and in the process defined seven essential strategy documents to kick off a product marketing or general marketing program.

By I, Satyakamk, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2507740.

Depending upon how you define product marketing, one of these seven goes above and beyond the product marketing function. I included it anyway, because if you ask 20 people what “product marketing” is, you will get 21 answers.

There’s a reason I dated this. I may want to refine it in the future. For example, some of you may recall how my “six questions your content creator should ask you” eventually became seven questions.

The seven strategy and process documents

Go-to-Market Process. I’ve talked about this before, but it bears repeating. You can’t just slap a few things together in three days and say your go-to-market is complete. You need a plan on how you will go to market, including the different tiers of go-to-market efforts (you won’t spend four months planning materials for your 5.0.11 software release), the types of internal (employee) content you will release in each tier, and the types of external (prospect/customer) content you will release in each tier.
Performance Report. I listed this near the top because you need to quickly establish your metrics, define them, and how you will gather them. For example, if you want to measure “engagement,” you need to define exactly what engagement is (likes on a blog post? reshares on a LinkedIn post?), and ensure that you have a way to capture that data. Preferably automated data capture; manual tabulation is horrendous.
Product and Competitive Analysis. Plan how you will perform these duties. Even in my simplest analyses when I was still with IDEMIA, I planned exactly what data I needed, what data I wanted to capture, and how I was going to distribute it. I refined this during my time at Incode, when a team of four released battlecards in a standard format, with data that highlighted items important to Incode. My subsequent analyses for Bredemarket, which were more comparative rather than stand-alone, refined things still further.
Brand Strategy. I must confess that I have never created a formal brand book. But it’s important that you define your branding, at least informally, so that your products and services are presented consistently on all platforms. And so you spell things correctly (it’s NOT “BredeMarket”).
Customer Feedback. If you want to institute a customer focus, you need information from your prospects and customers. What information do you need? How much? (Shorter surveys get more responses.) How will you get it? What will you do with it? (“Trash it” is not an option.)
Positioning and Messaging Book. Once you’ve created the brand strategy, you need a set of consistent positioning (internal) and messaging (external) content. The positioning and messaging matrix can get pretty complex if you are supporting multiple products, personas, industries, use cases, and geographies. I will again confess that I do not have a standard messaging statement for Bredemarket 400 prospects who are Chief Marketing Officers who need blog posts in the identity/biometric industry discussing privacy concerns in the European Union. My loss.
Demand Generation and Content Marketing Parameters. Now in many organizations, demand generation and/or content marketing are separate from product marketing. But sometimes they’re not. What are your plans for demand generation? How will you achieve your goals? What content is necessary?

So what?

As I said, I recently had the opportunity to envision these strategies for a prospect, and have scheduled a meeting with the prospect to discuss these. (Note to “prospect”: these are iterative, and I fully expect that up to 90% of this may change by the time of implementation. But I think it’s a good starting point for discussion.)

The prospect may secure my services, or they may not.

And if they don’t, I can develop these same documents for others.

Do YOU need help defining strategies for your business? If so, let’s talk.

If your company needs a full-time product marketer, contact me on LinkedIn.

John E. Bredehoft on LinkedIn.

If your company needs a part-time product marketing consultant, contact me on Bredemarket. (Subject to availability.)

Contact Bredemarket.

The KlarnaBots

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski has revealed a plan to eliminate his job and replace himself with an AI bot…

…wait, I misread that. Siemiatkowski has revealed a plan to replace OTHER people’s jobs at Klarna.

Funny how these rightsizing moves, with a few notable exceptions, always seem to spare the executives. The brunt will fall on others.

“With almost half the workforce at the company, Siemiatkowski plans to shift customer service and marketing duties to AI. ‘Not only can we do more with less, but we can do much more with less,’ he said…”

Mashable: https://mashable.com/article/klarna-ceo-plan-to-reduce-workforce-fifty-percent-replace-with-ai

I bet customer service and marketing morale is REALLY high at Klarna right now. If it weren’t for the not-so-good job market at the moment, Siemiatkowski might realize his rightsizing goals via attrition before his bots are ready.

But let me ask my good buddy Google Gemini. The material below was not written by me.

= =

While AI has made significant strides in customer service and marketing, it’s unlikely that Klarna, or any company, could completely eliminate human involvement.

Here’s why:

Nuance and Empathy: Human agents are better equipped to handle complex customer inquiries, especially those involving emotional situations. AI, while improving, still struggles with understanding and responding to nuanced emotions.

Problem-Solving: Certain customer issues require creative problem-solving or judgment calls that AI may not be able to handle effectively.

Ethical Considerations: AI can perpetuate biases present in the data it’s trained on. Human oversight is essential to ensure ethical and fair treatment of customers.

Unforeseen Circumstances: AI may not be able to adapt to unexpected situations or rapidly changing circumstances. Human agents can often address these challenges more effectively.

Customer Preference: Many customers still prefer to interact with human agents, especially for complex or sensitive issues.

However, AI can be a valuable tool in these areas. It can automate routine tasks, provide 24/7 support, and offer personalized recommendations. The most effective approach is likely a hybrid model, combining AI with human agents to provide the best possible customer experience.