It’s easy to toss around phrases like “customer-focused benefits” without comprehending what they mean.
So I’ll provide an example.
Years ago I wanted to learn about a particular company—and no, I’m not going to name the company—so I read what it said about itself. And what did the company’s product marketing say?
“We’re a unicorn!”
Google Gemini.
For the benefit of normal people, when businesses talk about being a unicorn, they are saying that the firm, based upon funding from private investors, has a theoretical valuation of over $1 billion. For example, if Ventures R Us pays $100 million for 10% of the company.
Well, this company was really proud about its unicorn status, to the exclusion of everything else.
With reason, when you think about it.
Taking an example from my own industry, if you are the police chief of a medium sized city that needs an automated biometric identification system, would you risk buying one from a provider with an actual or theoretical valuation of less than $500 million?
Because isn’t company valuation the most important thing to a prospect?
What? It isn’t? Prospects care about results?
(For the record, you can buy a perfectly fine ABIS from firms with actual, not theoretical, values of less than $100 million.)
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if the first sentence of your company description includes the word “Series” followed by a letter from the beginning of the alphabet, your focus is the investment community rather than your prospects.
Google Gemini.
But if the first sentence of your company description talks about what you deliver to your customers, then you’ll impress both your prospects and the discerning investors. Nothing magical about that.
I recently mentioned again how ALL the identity verification companies use the following two elements in their product marketing:
“We use AI.”
“Trust!”
If you read three marketing messages from three IDV vendors, I defy you to tell them apart. Admittedly my last comparison took place years ago, so I took a fresh look at the 2026 versions. Here are two:
“Industry-leading AI-driven Technology”
“We make it easy to safeguard your customers with AI-driven identity verification.”
Thankfully the companies are finally mentioning differentiators other than trust, but the magic letters AI still persist.
AI is everywhere and nowhere
But you can’t really blame the IDV vendors when everyone is injecting the two letter word in their messaging.
20 years ago, anyone who talked about an AI-powered vacuum cleaner would have been relegated to the back of the hall and told to put on his Vulcan ears.
“Handwrite only the critical points. Let Flowtica AI summarize and visualize the rest-audio, photo and even your sketches – into insights. Stay focused in the flow”
[O]ur research suggests that in 2025, the actual number of touchpoints before a sale varies between 1 and 50, depending on the prospect’s buying stage:
Inactive customers only need 1–3 touches on average
A warm inbound lead will need 5–12 touches
A cold prospect can require 20–50 touches
So I came up with a bright idea: just repeat my message: “Identity, biometric, and technology marketing leaders should use Bredemarket’s marketing and writing services for their content, proposal, and analysis needs.”
And repeat it 50 times. (Preferably in a shorter form.)
But before applying my mad copy/paste skillz, I checked…and Email Tool Tester also notes that product marketing doesn’t work that way either. Specifically, you need multiple touchpoints, and multiple TYPES of touchpoints, to ensure your message resonates with your hungry people.
Which means that Bredemarket needs to use multiple methods to communicate with my prospects.
I recently completed a long piece of content for a client, and flagged six sections that the client can share as shorter pieces of content. That’s seven pieces for the price of one. (And two touchpoints. 48 to go.)
The mood at the time was that the world was changing and generative AI bots and non-person entities could replace people.
Yes, I am familiar with the party line that AI wouldn’t replace anyone, but would empower everyone to do their jobs more effectively.
The layoff trackers told a different story.
As did the AI gurus who proclaimed that many jobs would soon be obsolete.
Strangely enough, “AI guru” was not one of the jobs that was going away. Which is odd. It seems to me that giving inspirational talks would be the perfect job for a non-person entity.
But many people agreed that entry-level jobs were ripe for rightsizing, meaning that those at the beginnings of their careers would have a much harder time finding work.
“Hardware giant IBM plans to triple entry-level hiring in the U.S. in 2026, according to reporting from Bloomberg. Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM’s chief human resource officer, announced the initiative….’And yes, it’s for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do,’ LaMoreaux said.”
Because IBM has separated what AI can do from what it can’t do. IBM’s new positions are “less focused on areas AI can actually automate — like coding — and more focused on people-forward areas like engaging with customers.”
Guess what? Bots are not engaging. Well, maybe they’re more engaging than AI gurus…
Can you use people?
But I will go one step further and claim that human product marketers and content writers are more engaging than bot product marketers and content writers.
Believe me, I’ve tested this. Bredebot can fake 30 years of experience, but it’s not genuine.
If you want to engage with your prospects, don’t assign the job to a bot. That’s human work.
I just realized that I have never told the FULL story of FpVTE 2003 in the Bredemarket blog. I’ve only told the problem part, but not the solution part. Bad on me.
The problem part
I told parts of this in a 2023 post entitled “The Big 3, or 4, or 5? Through the Years.” One of the pivotal parts of the story was when the “big 4” became the “big 3.”
It happened like this:
These days the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is well known for its continuous biometric testing, but one of its first tests was conducted in 2003. At the time, there were four well-recognized fingerprint vendors:
Cogent Systems.
Motorola, which had acquired Printrak.
NEC.
Sagem Morpho, which had acquired Morpho.
There were a bunch of other fingerprint vendors, but they were much smaller, including the independent companies Bioscrypt and Identix.
I was a product manager at Motorola at the time, managing the server portion of the company’s automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), Omnitrak. This featured a modernization of the architecture that was a vast improvement over the client-server architecture in Series 2000. The older product was still in use at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), but Motorola was in the process of installing Omnitrak in Slovenia and upgrading existing systems in Oklahoma and Switzerland.
“FpVTE 2003 consists of multiple tests performed with combinations of fingers (e.g., single fingers, two index fingers, four to ten fingers) and different types and qualities of operational fingerprints (e.g., flat livescan images from visa applicants, multi-finger slap livescan images from present-day booking or background check systems, or rolled and flat inked fingerprints from legacy criminal databases).”
So the companies listed above, among others, submitted their algorithms to FpVTE 2003. After the testing, NIST issued a summary report that included this sentence.
“Of the systems tested, NEC, SAGEM, and Cogent produced the most accurate results.”
You can see how this affected Motorola…and me. We were suddenly second-tier, via independent confirmation.
I’m a loser, baby. Google Gemini.
We first had to go to the RCMP and admit that we weren’t as accurate as other systems. This came at a particularly bad time, since the RCMP was engaged in a massive system upgrade of its own. While Motorola’s FpVTE performance was not the ultimate deciding factor, we lost the massive RCMP system to Cogent.
But Motorola did something else at the same time.
The solution part
The accuracy of an automated fingerprint identification system falls in the laps of the algorithm developers, whether the vendor develops its own algorithms or buys a third-party algorithm from another AFIS vendor.
Motorola developed its own algorithm…and one of the R&D leaders was Guy Cardwell.
Motorola held a User’s Conference after the FpVTE results announcement, and Cardwell spoke to our customers.
It wasn’t a flashy presentation with smoke and mirrors.
It wasn’t an accusatory presentation calling NIST a bunch of crooks.
It was basically Guy, on stage, saying that we didn’t do well.
And that we would do better.
Now of course that in itself means nothing unless we actually DID better. The R&D team went to work and improved the algorithm, and continued with other advances such as supporting complete 1000 pixel per inch systems as Sweden demanded.
But from a product marketing perspective, Motorola’s initial messaging to its customers was critically important.
Because if Motorola didn’t publicly address its FpVTE 2003 performance, then the only people talking about it would be Cogent, NEC, and Sagem Morpho.
I tend to load my Bredemarket blog posts with a ton of outbound links, and if you didn’t look at my 7am post carefully, you may have missed one.
Tamara Grominsky recently wrote “The Operator,” or Why the strategic vs tactical PMM debate is a false choice.
One brief excerpt:
“If you’re only doing strategy, sitting in your ivory tower designing the future without grounding it in reality, you’re going to be out of touch….But it’s equally true that if you’re stuck in pure execution mode, you could be executing brilliantly on the wrong things.”
Before this week, if I wanted to refer people to what I have written about product marketing, I would have to provide the link to the product marketing tag. Which is a massive brain dump of everything.
This week, I created a curated view of Bredemarket’s product marketing content with a Product Marketing information page, similar to my other information pages.
Since these information pages also allow a preface, I also took a crack at defining what product marketing is.
“[Y]ou’re telling stories to bridge the gap between your product and your hungry prospect.”
That’s it. Although in retrospect I probably should have said “telling narratives.”
Well, I provided another definition. Here are my four essential elements of product marketing:
Product marketing strategy.
Product marketing environment.
Product marketing content.
Product marketing performance.
Why make things complex?
And of course if you’re interested in BIOMETRIC product marketing, you can continue to visit my biometric product marketing expert page.
“Well, the ancient myths were designed to put the mind, the mental system, into accord with this body system, with this inheritance….To harmonize. The mind can ramble off in strange ways and want things that the body does not want. And the myths and rites were a means to put the mind in accord with the body, and the way of life in accord with the way that nature dictates.”
Bredemarket 