Need help identifying your competitors? You can’t perform a competitive analysis until you know who they are.
But you’re not determining them yourself. The market is. Granted the views of the market are shaped by…um…marketing. But in the end it’s the individual prospect who decides who is on the consideration list…and whether you’re on it.
So let’s look at how a PROSPECT creates that short list of products and companies to consider.
Ask your own people
I’m a sole proprietor, but if I weren’t, I’d ask my people who they think can solve our problem.
And I do this myself. When I launch competitive analyses for clients, I ask a client SME to review my list before I proceed. Sometimes I take the client’s advice, and sometimes I don’t. (After all, I’m an SME too.)
Your prospect does the same thing when entering the consideration phase of a purchase decision. “Who should we talk to?”
Listen to word-of-mouth
Prospects don’t need to restrict this exploration to their own employees. They can hit up their partners, industry colleagues, and others with knowledge of the market.
But soon the prospect stops listening to others and starts to explore on their own.
Measure online presence
The prospect types something in the box. A search engine. A prompt. Simple or complex, the goal is to get a list of products or vendors.
Whether the results are organic or sponsored, they will hopefully surface case studies, white papers, and similar content that speaks to the prospect’s needs and desires.
And if not, there are other sources.
Read formal recommendations
This doesn’t apply to small fry such as Bredemarket, but there are companies that rate and compare the big products, and collect customer reviews. If you’re reviewing products at that level, perhaps one or more of them are in a stellar Gartner quadrant or some similar highly-rated category.
All of these methods can help the prospect narrow down their options to a final shortlist of the desired length. 2 vendors? 3-5 vendors? 12 vendors? Over 80 vendors? It’s up to the prospect.
Identifying YOUR competitors
And you can use similar methods when identifying your competitors.
Now you just have to ensure your company has the positive reputation and visibility to get on that shortlist. At the top, above your competitors.
Considering the right consultant for your biometric firm often comes down to a single, make-or-break dynamic: biometric domain fluency.
But that’s just a fancy phrase for knowing what you’re talking about.
“The Longest Hour.” Google Lyria. Public Domain.
Consider what happens when a product marketing consultant at a biometric firm does NOT possess biometric domain fluency.
Off-target content
Imagine that you’re writing your first blog post for a biometric company. So you figure you’ll get educational by telling your prospects how “Gender Shades” identified huge accuracy problems, but your firm’s facial recognition algorithm has overcome them.
Google Gemini.
Congratulations, novice. You just mixed two distinctly different things up.
I’ve addressed this before, but I’ll address it again. Do you know why that old study was called “Gender Shades”? Because it tested algorithmic ability to recognize gender and race. That is facial ANALYSIS (or categorization), not facial RECOGNITION (or individualization). The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) draws a clear distinction between the two. And if you use a high-quality facial recognition application, the gallery of possible matching candidates may have a white woman next to a black man…because the facial recognition algorithm DOESNOTCARE about gender or race.
And that’s just one example of how someone who doesn’t know biometrics can make a grievous mistake that repels a firm’s prospects.
Losing proposals
Before I launch into this, let me explain that there are a number of reasons why a firm may lose a proposal.
Not submitting your proposal in Times New Roman 12 font with one-inch margins.
Submitting a 16-page proposal when the page limit is 15 pages.
Submitting your proposal Friday at 5:03 pm when it was due at 5 pm.
Here I want to talk about something different: getting the answers wrong.
Let’s say you’re tasked to answer a question about submitting your fingerprints at 500 pixels per inch (ppi). But you want to get some extra evaluation points, so you write this:
“The Super Duper Ridger fingerprint reader EXCEEDS THE REQUIREMENT by capturing fingerprints at 1000 ppi.”
Granted, latent fingerprint examiners LOVE higher resolution tenprints and latent prints where they can see the finer detail. But for everyone else, high resolution prints can potentially cause huge problems. Longer time to display images on the screen. Longer network transmission time and higher network bandwidth. Oh, and four times as much storage space. If the agency specifies 500 ppi, they mean what they say.
You have to know your biometrics to answer the questions properly.
Flawed analysis
Sometimes, product marketing consultants need to strategically analyze the market. Or the products in the market. Or the competitors who sell the products in the market. Analysis is a minefield in which an inexperienced person can get blown up.
Let’s say you’re asked to identify the leading facial recognition algorithm providers for U.S. intelligence community agencies. Now you, being a smart person who knows the difference between face recognition and face analysis, hone in on NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test (FRTE) collection. You go to FRTE 1:N, identify the specific test that best meets the needs of the intelligence community, and sort the list with the most accurate algorithms at the top. You then report results for all the leading vendors…including CloudWalk, Megvii, and SenseTime.
Google Gemini or Imagen; I can’t remember which.
Congratulations, novice. The firm that contracted with you will NEVER get intelligence business.
All three of the firms I mentioned are Chinese firms. Just because NIST or the FBI tests an algorithm doesn’t mean that U.S. agencies will buy it. For legal and practical reasons, the CIA is not going to install a Chinese algorithm on one of its systems.
No point in performing a competitive analysis on firms that will never compete in your markets.
Avoid these problems by contracting biometric domain fluency
You can avoid these problems by contracting with a product marketing consultant who offers biometric domain fluency.
Such as Bredemarket.
My wife passed by me while I was drafting this post, and when I told her I was writing about biometric domain fluency, she was not impressed.
Then again, she is not an identity marketing leader.
But if YOU are an identity marketing leader, consider Bredemarket for your consulting needs.
Watch and book.
Learn about what I can do for your firm and schedule a free meeting.
If you’re an identity product marketing leader, don’t contract with a consultant who is a biometric product marketing novice. Why not? Because it takes time to bring a novice up to speed.
For example, a novice may believe that fingerprints with a resolution of 1000 pixels per inch (ppi) are ALWAYS better than fingerprints that are 500 ppi.
Not always. Granted, latent fingerprint examiners LOVE higher resolution tenprints and latent prints where they can see the finer detail. But for everyone else, high resolution prints can potentially cause huge problems. Longer time to display images on the screen. Longer network transmission time and higher network bandwidth. Oh, and four times as much storage space.
I will have more to say about this at another time. But for now, just consider what I’m saying.
I finally made a Bredemarket consideration video, with the highly imaginative title “Considering Bredemarket.”
Consideration content, unlike the awareness content that I’ve shared previously, assumes the prospect already knows who you are and now has to consider how you compare to various alternatives.
“People in the learning phase aren’t ready to buy yet, but they are ready to engage. They’re reading, researching, and evaluating.”
The video helps my technology marketing leader prospects evaluate me. What happens if I use Bredemarket? But what if I use something else?
Now the Bredemarket consideration video’s short messages obviously aren’t very detailed. My presentation of the four alternatives to Bredemarket (“Your alternatives”) lasts 40 seconds max.
So what did I claim were the alternatives to using me and Bredemarket?
Don’t do it (doing nothing is ALWAYS an alternative)
Overwork your existing staff
Hire cheap inexperienced consultants
Let AI do it
Google Gemini.
Perhaps an unfair contest, but I won.
And then I bragged about myself.
But to see that you have to watch the video.
“Midnight in the Metropole.” Google Lyria. Public Domain.
I am John E. Bredehoft, a 30-year technology veteran.
Since 2020, my consultancy Bredemarket has worked as a ghostwriter with nearly two dozen providers of tech products.
My clients work in content management, digital asset management, third-party risk management, identity verification and authentication, fingerprint encoding and matching, facial recognition, rapid DNA, and many more.
As tech marketers are weighing their product marketing options, should they consider just turning everything over to the AI black box? Whst could go wrong?
I will look at this option and others in a video scheduled for Thursday.
And yes, I will also mention the best option of all…for your consideration.
So I took an earlier song (“The Midnight Line,” used here and here) and had Google Lyria lengthen it.
“Midnight in the Metropole.” Google Lyria. Public Domain.
And no, I haven’t used this song in a video yet. Give a break; I already created three videos this evening. (Actually I created four, as you’ll discover soon enough.)
Perhaps the length of this song will let me finally move from awareness to consideration. Not just that Bredemarket exists, but why you should use Bredemarket over the alternatives (do nothing, overwork your employees, use some other consultant).
New content creation carries a level of uncertainty.
Will this future blog post raise awareness about your company’s product?
Will the case study assist those in the consideration phase?
Finally, will your formal proposal result in conversion?
This uncertainty itself creates a giddiness as you await the results of your product marketing. Will this be the one?
So how do you maintain that inner excitement?
Easy.
Never give final approval on the content.
And you can continue to imagine the “what if” rewards.
Bredemarket’s failure
Now this highlights a terrible failure on Bredemarket’s part.
Because my goal isn’t to get you into a “what if” euphoria.
My goal is to complete the work and get it out.
Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing.
If you’ve seen my descriptions of Bredemarket’s services, the final goal is always clearly in sight. I produce a draft, you review the draft, I revise, you review again, I provide the final copy, and you publish it.
Well, that’s the intent.
Business lost…or was it?
I turned a simple blog post draft over to a client, and two months later the client hadn’t reviewed it. I ended the project right there.
So did I lose business? Not really. For short projects I am paid at project completion, and this project was never going to complete.
So if your goal in life is to work on product marketing without ever completing anything, your company is not a fit for Bredemarket.
Archie’s friend Rocky is not getting stuff done. Google Gemini.
For one thing, they’re easy to remember: why, how, what, goal, benefits, hungry people (target audience), emotions.
So I use these questions in actual client work.
The seven questions.
Using these questions with a Bredemarket client
Again, this isn’t just ivory tower stuff. I actually USE these questions. Here’s an anonymized example of how I recently used five of these seven questions to launch a new client project.
The questions I asked
Why is this document needed?
How will this document be used? As a download? As introductory text within proposals? As a demo script, video script, or webinar script?
What funnel stage(s) should this document address? Awareness? Consideration? Conversion?
As a related question, what is the primary goal of this document?
Who should be the target(s) for this document? Decision-makers? Technologists?
Approximate document length?
Just between you and me, “approximate document length” is one of the questions I ask AFTER I’ve asked my initial seven questions. I normally don’t talk about my other questions (if I tell you about them I will have to kill you), but they’re there.
The questions I didn’t ask
And no, I felt no driving need to ask about the benefits of the document. The chief benefit is more sales of the product that the document will describe.
And in this case I didn’t ask about emotions. Perhaps I’ll address that once I have a better feel for the document and start writing it.
It’s too early to say how these questions will shape the final content, because I just asked them. But I believe the answers will give me a rapid head start on creating the client’s deliverable.
So what?
But you don’t care about my client (unless you ARE my client and are reading this). You care about YOUR content.
How can my question process help you create stellar content and more sales of YOUR product?
If you want me to annoy YOU with a lot of questions (in the same way that I annoy my existing clients), set up a free meeting.
