Tag Archives: product marketing

Product Marketing: Strategic or Tactical? Yes.

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.”

Now read the rest.

My “Product Marketing” Information Page

Now that I’ve announced this on LinkedIn, I can announce it here.

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:

  1. Product marketing strategy.
  2. Product marketing environment.
  3. Product marketing content.
  4. 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.

The First Storytellers

Stories existed long before product marketers started telling them.

Long before.

Bill Moyers asked Joseph Campbell about the “why” of stories.

“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.”

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.

Google Gemini.

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.

Google Gemini.

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.

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