Product marketing strategy (not tactics), including why, how, what, and process.
Product marketing environment, including the market and competitive intelligence, the customer feedback loop, and the company culture.
Product marketing content, both internal and external, including positioning, personas, go-to-market, sales enablement, launches, pricing, packaging, and proposals.
Product marketing performance, including metrics, objectives, and key results.
Does your firm have all four puzzle pieces? Or are one or more of the pieces lacking?
Proven expertise from Printrak BIS, MorphoWay, and a recent launch for a Bredemarket client?
Recent Go-to-market.
If you are ready to move your firm’s product marketing forward with Bredemarket’s content-proposal-analysis services for technology firms, let’s discuss your needs and how Bredemarket can help you solve them. Book a free meeting at https://bredemarket.com/mark/.
I’ve said that strategy is one of four essential elements of product marketing. But you have to know what strategy is…and what it is not.
To illustrate the difference between strategy and tactics, it helps to differentiate between abstract, long term goals and concrete, short term goals.
If your goal is to better the world, that’s a strategy.
If your goal is to excel in a particular industry, that’s a strategy.
Although strategies can change. Those who know of Nokia as a telecommunications company, and those who remember Nokia as a phone supplier, are not old enough to remember Nokia’s beginnings as a pulp mill in 1865.
If your goal is to secure business from a specific prospect, that’s a tactic. Or it should be.
It’s just that one tactical blunder upended that strategy.
Whether Bredemarket pivots from biometric content to resume writing (not likely), I am presently equipped to address both your strategic and tactical product marketing needs. If I can help you, talk to me at https://bredemarket.com/mark/.
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.
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.
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!
I was checking on Bredemarket’s appearance in various searches (have I told you that I am a biometric proposal writing expert?), and I ran across something having to do with proposals and identity that was outside of my usual definition of “identity.”
This article talked about writing a proposal to help a company establish its corporate identity.
(Yes, I know a corporation is a person, but this is something different. I can’t capture IBM’s face, and Wendy’s face is not necessarily a unique biometric identifier.)
Establishing an outward-facing corporate identity
In the article, Ruben described how to help a company establish its corporate identity. After suggesting that you ensure that you understand the company, Ruben focused on the company’s needs.
Identify the Needs – having described the company, the next step is to explain why your idea for a logo or marketing campaign is suitable for their goals. There may be many “needs” you need to address. For example, it might be a good idea to describe why rebranding can make a company look more modern and approachable.
From there, you would naturally describe how you would meet the company’s needs, and why you are qualified to meet the company’s needs.
If all goes well, the company will contract with you, then you will come up with a plan to optimize the company’s corporate identity. The company will implement the plan, the company’s revenue will increase, and you will be a hero.
But corporate identity goes beyond the logo, the website, and the marketing materials.
Establishing a strategic corporate identity
There’s an important step that a company needs to take before making decisions on outward-facing marketing.
The company has to decide who it is.
There are a multitude of ways to do this, ranging from a detailed business plan to a brief mission statement or statement of purpose. Regardless of the avenue you take, you need to know what you want to do.
Take an example from the 1980s. Perhaps some of you may remember Mita, famous for the advertising slogan “all we make are great copiers.”
If you are sixth in unit sales in the office copier industry and you are one of the few manufacturers that does not have a diversified product line, then the thing to do in your advertising is disparage diversification.
In fact, it was too successful. Because if you already make great copiers, what else do you need to do? Not much, I guess.
But early in the 1990s, it started making mistakes: relocating factories in expensive Hong Kong, letting management become bloated and backsliding on technology. At the same time, Fuji-Xerox, Ricoh and Konica stepped up their presence. Among other things, Mita failed to embrace digital technologies.
Mita eventually went bankrupt and was acquired by Kyocera, who immediately decided to work on Mita’s corporate identity. The company was rebranded as Kyocera Mita Corporation in 2000, and was re-rebranded as Kyocera Document Solutions in 2012. Mita schmeeta.
In today’s business world, digitalization is proceeding at an unprecedented pace and the volume of documents is growing exponentially. In this business environment, we believe that our mission is to support our customers to effectively manage their information, and turn that information into knowledge, in order to address their challenges with a sense of speed.
You can see how the corporate identity has evolved over the decades, and how a company that once concentrated on taking pieces of paper and making identical pieces of paper now aspires to transform document information into knowledge to address challenges.
What does this mean for your corporate identity?
As I’ve noted, establishment of a marketing corporate identity is only part of an overall strategic plan to guide the future direction of a company.
Taking Bredemarket as an example, the corporate identity established by my logo is only a part of the plan guiding Bredemarket.
The pencil symbolizes writing, and long experience in writing, but it does not say WHAT Bredemarket writes. That has been established, revised, and expanded, partially through the annual goals that I set.
As long as I don’t blow it and get too restrictive (Bredemarket: all we write are fingerprint RFP responses), I should be fine.
(This past illustration describes something that I performed in my career, either for a Bredemarket client, for an employer, or as a volunteer. The entity for which I performed the work, or proposed to perform the work, is not listed for confidentiality reasons.)
A large, worldwide event affected multiple markets in multiple countries. While this event had negative ramifications in some of the markets in which a particular company competed, it had positive ramifications for markets that the company could conceivably enter.
SOLUTION
As part of a team, I analyzed potential new markets that the company could enter. The analyses included addressable market size (with assumptions documented), existing and potential competitors, risks, and other factors. While the analysis must of necessity remain confidential, I can state that a number of new markets were analyzed: some within the company’s core capabilities, some within the company’s identified growth areas, and some in entirely new areas.
RESULTS
The analyses were forwarded to others within the company. The results must of necessity remain confidential.
Bredemarket 
