I’ve repeatedly said that your product marketing, or anything you do, benefits when you take the time to explain WHY you’re doing it in the first place.
But sometimes an explanation is unnecessary.
Tag Archives: marketing
Mary the Marketing Leader
Back in 2022 I worked on various prospect personas, described in Word documents. Although I feel that personas are overrated, they do serve a purpose.
In those days, to use the persona you would have to read the Word document and evaluate your content against what you just read.
It’s different today with generative AI.
I spent Tuesday evening writing a persona specification for “Mary the Marketing Leader,” the persona for Bredemarket’s chief prospect. This is something I would enter into Google Gemini as a prompt. “Mary” would then ask me questions, and I would ask her questions in turn.
As of December 23 (yeah, this is a scheduled post), the persona specification has 30 bullets arranged into four sections: role, context, tone and constraints.
And no, I’m not going to share it with you.
One reason is that I don’t want to share my insights with my product marketing expert competitors. This is pretty much a Bredemarket trade secret.
The other reason is that some of my bullets are brutally honest about Mary, and even though she’s fake, she still might take offense about the things I say about her. One example:
“When working with product marketing and other consultants, Mary sometimes takes a week to provide feedback on content drafts because higher priority tasks and emergencies must be handled first.”
Such comments are all through the specification, so you’re not gonna see it.
But maybe you’ll see the benefits of this specification and use the persona, tweak it, and use it again.
For example, I’ve already learned that my 30 years of identity experience can resonate with MY prospects, as can my statement “I ask, then I act.”
Now I just have to recast Bredebot as a persona specification. That will help me immensely.
Mary Goes to Space
Someone has to.
Mary Goes to the Circus
Assuming a marketing department ISN’T a circus.
More Monday.
There’s Something About Mary
You’ll meet “Mary the Marketing Leader” on Monday.
Even though she’s not real.
But she is a friend.
Omnigarde Peter Lo Biography: I Need to Steal This Idea
As we approach 2026, advanced biometric firm Omnigarde has released new marketing materials. One of these is a video biography of Omnigarde’s principal, Dr. Peter Lo.
Of all the videos I’ve created, I’ve never created a “Who I Am” video. Not that I have the industry recognition that Dr. Lo has…
There Are Emotions, and There Are EMOTIONS
Luna Marketing Services made an (LinkedIn word warning) insightful point in a recent Instagram post.
“According to a study by Jonah Berger and Katherine L. Milkman, certain pieces of online content that evoke high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions are more viral.”
That part wasn’t a surprise to me. I’ve talked about it before. And here’s part of what Berger and Milkman said in 2012:
“This article takes a psychological approach to understanding diffusion. Using a unique data set of all the New York Times articles published over a three-month period, the authors examine how emotion shapes virality.”
But this was the insightful part. From Luna:
“The study also found that content evoking emotions such as happiness and sadness is less likely to be shared or go viral.”
From the original authors:
“Experimental results further demonstrate the causal impact of specific emotion on transmission and illustrate that it is driven by the level of activation induced.”
As I mentioned in a comment to Celia, I hadn’t thought of the distinction between high arousal and low arousal.
No, not that.
I’m thinking about emotions akin to complete bliss.
We need to let our readers experience them.
Why You Need a Go-to-Market Process
Technology product marketers know that you don’t just throw together a go-to-market plan in three days. You need to plan all the external content—and all the internal content—that you use for your go-to-market effort.
Usually you create a checklist of what you need. Or better still, a go-to-market processs that defines the internal and external collateral you need for different tiers of releases. For example, a Tier 1 go-to-market effort may warrant a press release, but a Tier 3 effort may not.
In the best case scenario, the product marketer is able to coordinate the necesary content so that all external stakeholders (prospects, customers, others) and internal stakeholders (sales, customer success, others) have all the information they need, at the right time.
In the worst case scenario, some content is shared before other necessary parts of the content are ready.
For example, it’s conceivable that a company may host a public webinar about its product…even though the company website has absolutely no information about the product for prospects who want to know more. Yes, this can happen.
If you need help with go-to-market strategy, Bredemarket has done this before and can discuss your needs with you.
Reducing Biometric Marketing Internal Bias By Using Bredemarket
Identity/biometric marketing leaders continuously talk about how their companies have reduced bias in their products. But have they reduced bias in their own marketing to ensure it resonates with prospects?
I recently talked about the problem of internal bias:
“Marketers are driven to accentuate the positive about their companies. Perhaps the company has a charismatic founder who repeatedly emphasizes how ‘insanely great’ his company is and who talked about ‘bozos.’ (Yeah, there was a guy who did both of those.)
“And since marketers are often mandated to create both external and internal sales enablement content, their view of their own company and their own product is colored.”
Let’s look at two examples of biometric marketing internal bias…and how to overcome it.
Internal bias at Company A
- Company A does not participate in the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Face Recognition Technology Evaluation (FRTE) for technical reasons.
- As a result, the company’s marketing machine constantly discredits NIST FRTE, and the company culture is permeated with a “NIST is stupid” mentality.
- All well and good…until it runs into that one prospect who asks, “Why are you scared to measure yourself against the competition? Does your algorithm suck that bad?”
Internal bias at Company B
- Company B, on the other hand, participates in FRTE, FATE, FRIF (previously FpVTE), and every other NIST test imaginable.
- This company’s marketing machine declares its superiority as a top tier biometric vendor, supported by outside independent evidence.
- All well and good…until it runs into that one prospect who declares, “That’s just federal government test data. How will you perform in our benchmark using our real data and real computers?”
Internal bias at Bredemarket
Well, I have my admittedly biased solution to prevent companies from tumbling into groupthink, drinking of Kool-Aid, and market irrelevance.
Contract with an outside biometric product marketing expert. (I just happen to know one…me.)
I haven’t spent 30 years immersed in your insular culture. I’ve heard all the marketing-speak from different companies, and I’ve written the marketing-speak for nearly two dozen of them. I can ensure that your content resonates with your external customers and prospects, not only with your employees.
All well and good…until…
Reducing internal bias at Bredemarket
“But John, what about your own biases? IDEMIA, Motorola, Incode, and other employers paid you for 25 years! You probably have an established process that you use to prepare andouillette at home, based upon a recipe from 2019!”
I don’t…but point taken. So how do I minimize my own biases?
My breadth of experience lessens the biases from my past. Look at my market-speak from 1994 to 2023, in order:
- We are Printrak, a nimble private company that will dominate AFIS with our client-server solution.
- We are Printrak (stock symbol AFIS) a well-funded public company that will dominate AFIS, mugshot, computer aided dispatch, and microfiche.
- We are Motorolans, and our multi-tier Digital Justice Solution has a superior architecture to that of Sagem Morpho and others.
- We are MorphoTrak, bringing together the best technologies from MetaMorpho and Printrak BIS, plus superior French technology for secure credentials and road safety…unencumbered by the baggage that weighs down MorphoTrust.
- We are IDEMIA North America, bringing together the best technologies from MorphoTrust and MorphoTrak for ABIS, driver’s licenses, and enrollment, coupled with the resources from the rest of IDEMIA, a combined unbreakable force.
- We are Incode, not weighed down with the baggage of the old dinosaurs, and certainly not a participant in the surveillance market.
Add all the different messaging of Bredemarket’s clients, plus my continuous improvement (hello MOTO) of my capabilities, and I will ensure that my content, proposals, and analysis does not trap you in a dead end.
Reducing internal bias at your company
Are you ready to elevate your company with the outside perspective of a biometric product marketing expert?
Let’s talk (a free meeting). You explain, I ask questions, we agree on a plan, and then I act.
Schedule a meeting at https://bredemarket.com/mark/
An Alternative to “I Ask, Then I Act”: “Review. Plan. Execute.”
Back in July, I shared a post and a video based upon the simple phrase “I Ask, Then I Act.”
To be honest, this is not a revolutionary insight. A lot of people have described the things that do or do not happen before you take action.
- There’s Nike’s famous “Just Do It.” This wasn’t necessarily intended to imply that you proceed in a thoughtless manner. Nike was instead addressing the tendency to hesitate, and urging people to move forward.
- Now there are phrases that DO imply (at least in my humble opinion) that you proceed in a thoughtless manner, the two most famous of which are “ready, fire, aim” and “move fast and break things.” Both of these, especially the latter, suggest that the act of doing is itself empowering and that the negative consequences of doing something bad can be mitigated by doing the right thing later.
But on Wednesday I ran into another phrase that urges that you do something BEFORE you act, but it uses a different formulation than my two-step process.
I attended the Small Business Expo in Pasadena on Wednesday, at which the first keynote was delivered by Dave Charest of Constant Contact. He let us know at the beginning of his keynote that he was going to repeat the following throughout:
“Review. Plan. Execute.”
Unlike me, Charest got a little more granular about what happens when you execute / act. In a LinkedIn post from a couple of weeks ago, Charest talked about each of the three parts of RPE. Yeah, he has an acronym. Because AARC.[1]
✅ Review: Where are you right now?
You don’t need to be an expert. Just be honest about what’s working and what’s not.
✅ Plan: What’s the one thing you can do to support your goal?
Not ten things. One. Focus is how you win.
✅ Execute: Block time on your calendar to actually do the work.
If you don’t protect that time, distractions will take it from you.
Charest’s “review” step maps to my “ask” step, but I didn’t explicitly call out the “plan” step like Charest did. But I have talked about “focus” a lot, which is the emphasis of Charest’s “plan” step. Don’t go all over the place. Just do one thing. He parallels Wally Schirra’s thoughts on this issue.
“With my eyes fixed on the control panel, studiously ignoring the view, I began a slow, four degrees per second, cartwheel.”
When Schirra went into space as part of the Project Mercury program, he was focused on the goal of completing his engineering tasks. While the view from space was spectacular, he ignored it and focused on the control panel. And the engineering tasks were themselves focused, explicitly avoiding “Larry Lightbulb” experiments. This was a reaction to the prior Scott Carpenter mission.
But whether you review and plan, or if you just act, I believe you need to prepare before you do the thing.
[1] AARC: Acronyms are really cool.
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