Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
So I’ve written a new eBook: “Three Steps to Position and Differentiate Your Technology Product.”
If you don’t have time to read it, the three steps are the following:
Show why your product benefits people.
Show why competing products suck.
Fully address prospect pain points.
And if I can help you with your company’s positioning and differentiation, contact me and book a free meeting.
How does this sound?
“State-of-the-art, frontier AI.”
Or this?
“The ultimate creative AI solution.”
There are two problems with these “AI-powered” product marketing messages, and you probably don’t even realize the first one.
Because you and your friends are so used to seeing the letters “AI” that you know to pronounce each letter separately, as in A I.
But most people don’t know this. Really, they don’t. So when they see those two capital letters next to each other, they think they’re supposed to emit a high-pitched scream.
Try it yourself. Read the sentence below, but instead of speaking the letters A and I in a normal tone of voice, yell them as a single interjection.
“State-of-the-art, frontier AI.”
Is that how you want your customers to talk about your product?
The second problem is more obvious…I hope.
Despite its undeniable impact on all of us, artificial intelligence is just a feature. Like the Pentium, or Corinthian leather.
And it’s a feature that everyone has. Not a differentiator at all.
To say your software is AI-powered is like an automotive company saying their cars have tires.
How many times do you see Ford or Toyota saying their cars have tires?
They don’t waste their time talking about something that everyone has.
And you shouldn’t waste your time talking about your AI feature.
(Also see Pavel Samsonov’s statement that “Powered By AI” is NOT a value proposition.)
Talk about your critically important benefits instead.
And if you need help with this, talk to Bredemarket.
Not because Bredemarket uses AI. My use of AI for client projects is strictly limited.
But because I work with you to speak to your prospects and customers.
Talk to me: https://bredemarket.com/mark/
What happens when you and all your competitors adopt a “humans in the loop” methodology for your marketing and your product marketing?
Quotes from Robert Rose, Content Marketing Institute.
“Generative AI promised to relieve humans of the tedious, mechanical work — freeing them to be more strategic, more creative, more human.
“The reality? We’ve wrapped our rationalizations around this new concept called “humans in the loop.”
“This often means marketers are demoted to glorified spellcheckers and fact-checkers for machine output. Not creators. Not strategists. Just custodians of content they never had a hand in shaping.
Perhaps Rose’s thoughts are wishful thinking on the part of carbon-based marketers.
But if the “humans in the loop” thought persists…isn’t everyone using the same undifferentiated loop? When everyone yells “we use AI,” no one is differentiated. And no, it makes no difference with AI flavor of the week you’re using, since they all train on data. Human data.
And if the humans at all the companies are imprisoned by their identical loops…who has the competitive advantage? No one.
Except for those that use humans…especially humans who have been around for a while and remember this. If you don’t have a full five minutes, skip right to the three-minute mark.
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 (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?
Now it’s 2025, I’m writing for the Bredemarket blog, and I own the blog and control what is in it.
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):
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?
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.
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.)
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.
(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.
Cracker Barrel’s homogenization is costing the company real money.
I previously discussed their removal of old-times decor from their restaurants.
But now they’re going all out.
For decades, Cracker Barrel has used this logo.
But I guess that isn’t “relevant,” so the company unveiled a new logo.
As someone noted on social media, the new logo removes the barrel and the…well, I shouldn’t go there.
So how did this attempt at relevancy play? According to CBS News, not well.
“Shares of Cracker Barrel fell as much as $8.74, or almost 15%, in Thursday trading, shaving as much as $194.6 million from the company’s market value. The stock regained some ground in early afternoon trading, with shares down $8.19, or 13.9%, to $50.84.”
Don’t mess with a good thing.
(Cracker Barrel, Rialto, California)
You’ve probably heard me rant about companies that fail to differentiate.
But what’s worse are the companies that have clear differentiation, but then dump it to be just like everybody else.
Take Cracker Barrel.
Despite their manufactured nature, they clearly present themselves as a place with an old-time retro feel.
Well, one of the items above is changing.
“The Tennessee-based company, known as much for its tchochkes as its Southern fixins’ like chicken fried steak and grits, has tossed the kitsch that drew generations of diners in favor of booths and crisp white walls.”
A move which gives the New York Post to describe the new look as “sterile.” A good word in healthcare, and maybe a good word in a restaurant kitchen, but not in the dining room.
So why do it? Because:
“CEO Julie Felss Masino admitted the chain is ‘just not as relevant’ as it used to be.”
Ah, RELEVANT. If you maintain a retro look that your competitors don’t have, you’re not relevant.
But what will Cracker Barrels become with white walls, no rocking chairs, and no Burma Shave signs?
Yawn.
McDonald’s learned about customer indifference the hard way. Throwing the old look into the dumpster doesn’t please people.
Years ago when I was growing up, McDonald’s was easily identifiable by its huge golden arches on the red and white striped buildings.
But then McDonald’s decided that the 1950s-1960s look was no longer relevant and shifted to square brown buildings straight from an industrial park.
But today?
McDonald’s is making its customers happy by building huge restaurants with huge golden arches again. One is being built in my local area in Upland at Foothill and Benson. You may know Foothill Boulevard as Route 66. There are two existing golden arches restaurants on Foothill near Euclid in Upland and near Archibald in Rancho Cucamonga.
So what happens in 2035 when some old man is telling his grandkids how cool Cracker Barrels USED to be?
You’ll have a new CEO ordering the high-traffic restaurants to cover the walls with farming implements again.
And maybe your technology company is in a similar state, sounding just the same as everyone else.
Ask yourself WHY your company is great and your competitors suck.
And emphasize your differentiators.
Bredemarket can help. Talk to me.
(Imagen 4)
I was reading something in which a company executive declared, “We have no competition.”
The executive was trying to say that the company’s product was so amazingly brilliant that other companies were left to eat its dust.
But think about what the “we have no competition” statement means.
It means that in any opportunity in which multiple firms are vying for a contract, the company would win all of them.
Every. Single. One.
What’s more, the company would win every sole source opportunity and never lose a prospect.
Um…no.
Because if a product is a monopoly—De Beers diamonds comes to mind—there are always alternatives. Lab-grown diamonds. Cubic zirconia stones.
And even if a product is truly unique with no substitutes, the prospect always has one alternative. Doing nothing.
Which can have an attractive price point.
So don’t claim you have no competition.
And let Bredemarket analyze your competitors and write about your benefits.
Third-party risk management (TPRM) tools take varying approaches to automated vs. manual operations.
The company SAFE addressed automation in a July 15 press release. It uses the trendy term “agentic AI” so it must shift paradigms and optimize outcomes.
After stripping out the PR fluff, here’s some of what’s left.
“[SAFE] announced the expansion of its Agentic AI strategy with the release of 12+ new autonomous agents, over the next 3 months, purpose-built for third-party risk. The next two AI agents are SnapShot and BreachWatch which help organizations proactively organize AI summaries and identify third-party breaches respectively….
“‘Legacy solutions weren’t built for risk landscape,’ said Saket Modi, CEO and co-founder of SAFE. ‘SAFE is transforming TPRM….’”
But if I could offer a marketing word of advice to TPRM firms, the “we are better than legacy TPRM firms” message has jumped the shark. EVERYONE is better than legacy TPRM firms these days; you are nothing new. No one is completely manual any more. It’s like comparing a Tesla to a bicycle. Or any basketball team to the Washington Generals.
The real question is HOW you use your automation, and how accurate your automation is. Speed alone is not enough.
(Imagen)
I’ve told portions of this story at least twice before, but not all of it. Here is my February 2021 description:
“You’ve heard the saying about eating your own dog food. That statement bored me, so I started talking about eating your own iguana food. Eventually I tired of iguanas and pivoted to wildebeests.”
Even though the wildebeest has become Bredemarket’s primary animal, the iguana still hangs around, usually playing the role of a bad hombre.
Some time after that the wombat started to appear, primarily to do things that the wildebeest found difficult because of his anatomy.
So the wildebeest, wombat, and iguana let Bredemarket brand itself a little differently than the myriad of firms that pride themselves on eating their own dog food.
And I don’t even know what wildebeests eat.
Bredemarket