product marketing – Bredemarket

Go Out Of Your Way To Eat Your Own Wildebeest Food

You’ve heard me use the phrase “eat your own wildebeest food.” (Like eating your own dog food, but I differentiate myself from the rest of the world.) When can you eat your own wildebeest food? Let’s take a product marketing example.

Be reasonable?

I recently encountered a company that does NOT use the product it sells for its own in-house purposes.

The company has a good reason for this. The product is meant for a particular market category, and the company itself doesn’t fall into that category.

Without revealing anything confidential, it’s akin to a bus agency executive using a limo to get to a board of directors meeting. Yes, the executive could take the 61 to the 83 to the 66, but that takes time.

It would be a stretch for the firm to use its product internally. So it uses a semi-competing product for internal use.

Sounds reasonable, right?

I don’t care about reasonable.

FOMO

The company is sharing a subliminal message, or perhaps a super liminal one: yeah, our product is great, but this semi-competitor is good enough for us so we don’t bother to try to use our own.

By not jerry-rigging its product for its internal needs, the company’s missing an opportunity.

External prospects and customers will see that the company uses its product. As of now, it is VERY obvious that the company uses a different product.
Internal people will have to use the company’s product every day, and will know its strengths and weaknesses very well.

So try to use your own product, even when you shouldn’t. You, your prospects, and your customers will learn a, um, bunch.

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.

Go To Market

From Instagram.

Go To Market. Grok.

Stefan Gladbach’s “A PMM Christmas”

And the Oscar goes to…

Well, probably not. But I enjoyed contributing to Stefan Gladbach’s Christmas video “A PMM Christmas” as the only biometric product marketing expert in the cast.

And if you heard me mutter in the last few weeks that attribution is a myth, now you know why.

As you can see, Gladbach assembled an all-star cast. Credits at the end of the video, and also in the text of Stefan’s LinkedIn post.

Well, one additional credit: Susan Bredehoft was the camerawoman for my contributions. For lighting and background removal purposes, my scenes were taped outside in our back yard. Since my glasses lenses automatically adjust to sunlight, I can, um, attribute my Roy Orbison look to that.

And I did not follow instructions to wear an ugly Christmas sweater for the end credits…because I haven’t got one. (Ugly sweater, yes. Ugly Christmas sweater, no.) I should have stolen one from Talya.

And for those keeping score (only me, to be honest), I appear at 2:15, 4:40, 5:40, and 8:05.

And now I’m wondering if Roy Orbison ever covered a Smiths song. But again, that’s just me.

Merry Christmas.

What B2B Product Marketing CANNOT Do

For many B2B salespeople, this isn’t the holiday season. It’s the last month of Q4, and some are sweating.

Product marketing can’t help here. Maybe 17 months ago, but even the best conversion content can’t help in the next three weeks or less.

So start now to plan for success in 2026 and 2027. Talk to me about your content.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

Feel Distinct Emotions

You want your prospects to feel distinct emotions when they consider your product—the stronger the better.

When your prospects consider the, um, prospect of life WITHOUT your product, they should experience fear or anger because your product is not available to them.
But when your prospects consider the alternative of having your product at their disposal, they should not only feel a quiet satisfaction but should feel power and joy. Your product equips them to perform the tasks that are important to them.

Bredemarket Essentials November 2025

If I had to choose three videos that represented today’s Bredemarket, I would choose the three listed below:

Landscape.

The Seven Questions I Ask.

Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing.

I placed all three in this YouTube playlist.

I’ve shared all three as an Instagram story (which will probably have expired when you see this).

And I’m sharing them again below.

Landscape.

The Seven Questions I Ask.

Bredemarket: Services, Process, and Pricing.

Those are good essentials.

If you want to know more, visit https://bredemarket.com/mark/ and book a free meeting with me.

Stop losing prospects! Use Bredemarket content for tech marketers

Tag Archives: product marketing