Tag Archives: product marketing

Achieving Total World Domination For Bredemarket Identity Clients

I’m setting an internal goal to help Bredemarket identity clients achieve total world domination. And I may even tell them I’m doing it.

Why total world domination?

I will give you a peek at what this Super Individual Contributor (IC) is doing.

This week I’m working on two analysis/content projects for two different products for two different Bredemarket clients. While the products are significantly different, there are similarities between the two projects.

Achieving total world domination for two clients. Google Gemini.
Achieving total world domination for two clients. Google Gemini.

It’s all classic product marketing elements: strategy, environment, content, and performance. These aren’t the “tried and true” familiar words, but my own. Let me define the second element, since environment isn’t an “everybody says it” product marketing term:

“Here’s where I put “Market and competitive intelligence” and “Customer feedback loop” from the list above. This also includes the internal environment in the company; if the CEO emphatically insists that a go-to-market effort should last three days, then a go-to-market effort will last three days, regardless of what anyone else says.”

Even though the CEO is wrong. But don’t get me started on that.

But WHY am I completing these projects for these clients?

  • To check a product marketing box?
  • To get clicks?
  • To raise awareness?
  • To win during consideration?
  • To increase conversion?

While those are nice, why not think bigger?

TWD. Google Lyria. Public Domain.

What about total world domination?

  • Let’s make the “Green Widget Company” the acknowledged expert (thought leader) in this particular biometric modality.
  • And the “Green Widget Gizmo” the only product that prospects will consider and buy.

This is really just a mental motivational exercise. As I analyze and write for these two clients, I can ask myself: will this advance the company and product to realize unquestioned supremacy? Keeps me focused and productive.

It’s a lot better than declaring: competitive analysis completed, and I wrote a checklist of actionable next steps. Job done. Yawn.

Will my alternative fly?

But really?

Time to check this on a real world example.

Let me eat my own wildebeest food. Do I want Bredemarket to achieve total world domination?

To be honest, no.

I work with an Indian firm, and with a Canadian firm, and I’ve worked with at least one U.S. firm with a foreign headquarters. But most of my business is with United States-owned entities.

And I’d be ecstatic if I merely achieved total U.S. domination.

Where every single identity/biometric firm that requires product marketing content-proposal-analysis services says to themselves,

“We can only achieve this by using the biometric product marketing expert. We need to contact John at Bredemarket.”

Because if over 100 companies are saying this to themselves, and I am in unrelenting demand, I can raise my rates substantially.

Champagne wishes, caviar dreams. And if you’ve been in the industry for over 30 years, you know the origin of that phrase.

So what do I tell my clients?

Now do I start my next client calls by boldly declaring, “Here’s how you achieve total world domination”?

Um, no. It all depends on the…drumroll… “internal environment in the company.”

I’ve been around dozens of identity/biometric firms. And different firms would react differently to such a statement.

  • Some would chuckle and say that would be nice.
  • Others would nod approvingly.
  • Some would get VERY charged up and put me on a plane to Uzbekistan.
  • And finally, some would throw me out the door for being cringe and unrealistic and return to their discussion about increasing ARR by 5%.

So in some cases I do this in secret. (Unless the person working on that ARR increase reads this post.)

Does your firm want total world domination?

If your identity/biometric firm isn’t salivating to be THE name in identity, don’t read any further. (Actually, those people stopped reading long ago.)

Now that I’m just talking to the rest of you, do you have a project that needs outside help with unequalled expertise?

You should talk to me now. If 100 identity/biometric firms book meetings today, my hourly rate will increase to $1,000 per hour,

Why not learn about Bredemarket and book a meeting at https://bredemarket.com/watch-book/?

Let’s dominate the world together! Revised 10/28/2026.

Iterate Your Messaging

If you iterate your messaging, it can work for you this week. (It’s Friday…next week.)

Iterate your messaging. Google Gemini.
Iterate your messaging. Google Gemini.

Don’t wait for the perfect message. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Iterate your messaging. Google Gemini.
Iterate your messaging. Google Gemini.

Don’t wait…iterate!

Iterate your positioning and messaging. Music Google Lyria. Public Domain.

Learn about Bredemarket strategic and tactical services: https://bredemarket.com/watch-book/

Biometric Product Marketing Novice?

If you’re an identity product marketing leader, don’t contract with a consultant who is a biometric product marketing novice. Why not? Because it takes time to bring a novice up to speed.

For example, a novice may believe that fingerprints with a resolution of 1000 pixels per inch (ppi) are ALWAYS better than fingerprints that are 500 ppi.

Not always. Granted, latent fingerprint examiners LOVE higher resolution tenprints and latent prints where they can see the finer detail. But for everyone else, high resolution prints can potentially cause huge problems. Longer time to display images on the screen. Longer network transmission time and higher network bandwidth. Oh, and four times as much storage space.

I will have more to say about this at another time. But for now, just consider what I’m saying.

Why You Shouldn’t Just Let AI Do It

As tech marketers are weighing their product marketing options, should they consider just turning everything over to the AI black box? Whst could go wrong?

I will look at this option and others in a video scheduled for Thursday.

And yes, I will also mention the best option of all…for your consideration.

Why Big Companies Can’t Perform Identity Verification Themselves

When someone asked on LinkedIn why IDScan.net had all that personably identifiable information in the first place, I remembered something about the ability to perform identity verification. Specifically, I remembered one significant sentence from my paradox of identity verification. Emphasis mine.

“To prevent fraud you have to risk fraud by giving selfie plus ID to a firm you don’t know—not Meta or Hertz, but a third party vendor you don’t know.”

Look at simple (?) facial recognition, which Amazon and Google and Meta could perform if they weren’t scared of their own customers. (That fear may have subsided.)

What is identity verification?

But identity verification is much more complex.

  • Yes, it includes facial recognition as well as related disciplines such as presentation attack detection and injection attack detection.
  • But it also includes analysis of a government-issued secure document such as a driver’s license or passport. This analysis checks some of the document’s security features to determine whether it is authentic.
  • Then it naturally compares the live face against the driver’s license face to see if they belong to the same person.
Google Gemini.
  • And in many cases that’s not enough, as identity verification goes beyond who you are and what you have. That includes checking state or provincial motor vehicle records to confirm that the motor vehicle agency knows about this license it supposedly entered.
  • Or it checks credit records, utility records, and the like to confirm that a person is associated with an address, a birthdate, or other personally identifiable information.
  • Or, and as long as they’re at it, the identity verification process ensures you’re not on an anti-money laundering (AML) sanctions list, a list of politically exposed persons (PEP), or a similar blocklist. Hertz may not care, but Bank of America certainly does.

So who can do all of this?

Who can’t perform identity verification

I will tell you who can’t.

Meta can’t do all this, and neither can Amazon or Google.

And Hertz can’t do all this either, and neither can Bank of America or Jerry Rainbow’s Cannabis Shoppe.

Jerry Rainbow can't perform identity verification at his cannibis shop.
Google Gemini.

Why? Because multi-billion dollar companies, and Jerry, don’t understand all the skills needed. Sure Amazon can route goods within warehouses, but it doesn’t know squat about ghost images or microprinting, much less how to check PEP lists.

Who can perform identity verification

So Meta et al outsource their identity verification work to companies that most of you don’t know.

But I do. I worked at Incode for a year and analyzed over 80 of its competitors while I was there.

(Dirty little secret: NONE of these identity verification vendors author ALL their algorithms. Sure they may own intellectual property for certain tasks, but they buy the other tasks from other suppliers.)

But who are you?

Are you a large company trying to understand the identity verification market?

Are you an identity verification company trying to understand your own market?

Do you need confidential help to analyze and plan the impossible?

Google Lyria. Public Domain.

Perhaps Bredemarket’s identity verification and product marketing expertise is what you need.

Talk to me.

Oh, as a postscript: remember when I created three similar videos last Saturday night? I also created a fourth one just for the identity folks.

“The Midnight Line.” Google Lyria. Public Domain.

Stupid Excel Tricks; Targeted Worksheets Display What Project Stakeholders Need

When I manage projects for Bredemarket clients using Microsoft Excel, my workbooks contain targeted worksheets that may or may not interest all the client stakeholders. I’m finally recognizing this and acting accordingly.

Whether you use Excel or something else, data filtering always benefits your stakeholder customers.

A sample Excel project management workbook

When a Microsoft Excel workbook has all the worksheets rather than just targeted worksheets, recipient stakeholders get frustrated.
Google Gemini.

Lately I’ve fallen into the habit of organizing Bredemarket client projects in Microsoft Excel. Why? Because my stakeholders (even in Google shops with Sheets) already have the software to read the files.

Excel and many other applications organize their data in one or more tabs (worksheets). Each tab features different data, presented in different ways at the discretion of the project manager. For example, a product marketing workbook may contain these worksheet tabs:

  • A summary view (Product Summary) of a product’s base offering, options, and prices.
  • A more detailed view (Product Detail) of the product base / option prices and costs.
  • An even more detailed view of certain supported features (Product Features) mapped to the base and options, along with detailed descriptions.
  • Candidate features for product versions (Candidate Features), and their statuses.
  • A view of prospects and the features they desire (Prospect Features), highlighting the desired features covered and not covered in the product.

You can see how all these worksheets could tie together. A prospect’s feature on the last tab that is approved and completed (double blind fingerprint verification) will ripple through all the other tabs. But an unapproved feature (geolocation in latitude-longitude at which a latent print was captured) would only appear on the last two tabs.

So what if recipients get more than the targeted worksheets?

When a Microsoft Excel workbook has all the worksheets rather than just targeted worksheets, recipient stakeholders get frustrated.
Google Gemini.

Because of some things that have happened over a recent period, it finally penetrated my thick skull that just because all this data is critically important to ME to manage the project, some of it may bear no importance to OTHERS.

For example, the stakeholder that simply wants to know how much the product base and options cost doesn’t care about the features we never implemented for the Bullhead City Police Department.

At the same time, an outside developer is only interested in the features that we want to implement for the 1.3 release. Other than as background information, the developer doesn’t care which prospect(s) want the feature. And the developer doesn’t care—and perhaps shouldn’t even know (because privacy and security)—how much we price an option containing a particular feature.

Then I acted to only distribute targeted worksheets

Before all of this penetrated my thick skull, I would distribute entire workbooks and tell selected stakeholders to check the third and fourth worksheets and ignore the rest.

That’s dumb.

Why not give these selected stakeholders ONLY the targeted worksheets that are pertinent to them? More work for me to preserve the full view (all worksheet tabs) AND the targeted views, but much less work and much less confusion for the stakeholders.

I’m already doing this with one client. When it’s time to discuss features for future product releases, I’m only distributing the equivalent of the “Candidate Features” tab. This helps focus the discussion.

(I’m also filtering the rows that appear in the tab, but filtering is a topic for another discussion. And I’m also using Date of Last Update, Show/Hide, and conditional formatting as previously spoken by the wildebeest.)

In practice, and taking my 2022-developed Y2K-unfriendly document numbering system into account, I may store the following files in my client’s Microsoft or Google repository (or Bredemarket’s own):

  • BlueWidget2609a-All (all tabs, not distributed to anyone but kept on file)
  • BlueWidget2609a-ProductSummary (just the first tab, sent to Bob and Judy only)
  • BlueWidget2609a-CandidateFeatures (just the fourth tab, sent to Judy, Chris, and Tina)

What if I’m a REAL project manager and don’t use Excel?

Now I know some project managers tuned me out when I used the E word in the title.

But the same principle applies if you use Microsoft Project, or Microsoft Teams, or Asana, or Slack, or Jira, or InsaneBambi.AI.

(Whoops, InsaneBambi.AI is still embargoed. Forget I mentioned it.)

All of these apps support views, letting you create the equivalents of targeted worksheets so certain stakeholders only see certain things about the project.

Use your favorite app’s view capability to only display information necessary for your stakeholders.

Your stakeholders are your customers. Maintain a customer focus.

But what about you?

How do you curate project views for your stakeholders? Do you send filtered spreadsheets or rely on tool-specific dashboards? Let me know in the comments.

And if you have an identity, biometric, or technology product marketing project that could benefit from Bredemarket’s expertise, let’s talk.

Reaching New Heights With An M Shaped Polymath

Can an M-shaped polymath help your firm? Ask me.

Dash, T, Pi, M, and More

Do you have broad knowledge, deep knowledge, or both?

Knowledge can be categorized into several buckets.

M shaped polymath, and other shapes.
Google Gemini.
  • Dash shaped. Like the — dash symbol, this professional has broad knowledge of multiple disciplines. However, they do not have deep expertise in any of them.
  • T shaped. Unlike the dash shaped professional, the T shaped professional does additionally offer deep expertise in one specialty.
  • Pi shaped. If you look at the Greek symbol π, you see two vertical elements below the horizontal one. This indicates that the pi shaped professional offers broad knowledge plus deep expertise in TWO specialties.
  • M shaped. This isn’t perfect, but the letter M has three points. (Ignore the fact that two are at the top and one at the bottom.) So imagine the three points indicate three specialties.
  • Comb shaped. Reserved for the Benjamin Franklins of the world who create governments, fly kites, manage fire and postal departments, write humorous text, and raise hell.

I won’t get into comb shaped professionals here, but when you can get a hold of an M shaped professional, it’s like getting three experts for the price of one.

Professional in what?

M shaped.
M shaped. Google Gemini.

But what type of M shaped professional are we talking about?

An M shaped accountant can guide your firm through the intricacies of accounting.

An M shaped engineer can roll with the frequent changes in engineering, not becoming obsolete like your expert C programmer.

An M shaped marketer can handle anything from demand generation to analyst relations to social media.

And an M shaped product marketer can deep dive into three (or more) parts of product marketing, including positioning/messaging, market/product/competitor strategic analysis, go-to-market and sales enablement, and pricing/packaging.

Why I am not just an M shaped product marketer

M shaped product marketer plus.
M shaped what? Google Gemini.

I am M shaped, but I am not an M shaped product marketer.

Perhaps you’ve seen my statement that I am a CPA, but not a CPA.

I’m a CPA, not a CPA.

In the wildebeest-populated Bredemarket world, the A in CPA stands for Analysis. The strategic stuff, including the aforementioned market, product, and competitive analysis. In other words, the stuff that can drive your firm to accomplish actionable innovation.

Impossible?

The C in CPA stands for Content. Messaging content. Go-to-market content. Sales enablement content. Whatever type of content you need.

22 types of content.

(Yeah, that’s an old style video, but it works.)

Well, that’s two, but what about the third? That thing that a product marketer should not do because it is not product marketing? The 4 Ps include product, price, place, and promotion.

The P that makes me an M shaped polymath

M shaped polymath
M shaped polymath. Google Gemini.

Before I became a product marketer, and before I became a product manager, I entered the biometric industry as a proposal writer. Taking procurement officer names and speaking Shipley.

I was a proposal writer at Printrak until I moved left on the Shipley scale and became a product manager.

When Sagem Morpho and Motorola’s Biometric Business Unit combined to form MorphoTrak, I ended up back in Proposals as a proposal manager. (Where I performed a critically important go-to-market effort, but that’s another story.)

When I started Bredemarket, some of my most lucrative work was proposal work for SMA: The Program Lifecycle Company (got the new branding in!) and other Bredemarket clients.

Then when I joined Incode as a Senior Product Marketing Manager, I was performing all sorts of tasks outside the traditional PMM bounds, including a bunch of proposal writing.

When I returned to Bredemarket full time I returned to some proposal work here and there, including some big wins that I still can’t talk about yet.

To learn more, see “Bredemarket and Proposal Services.”

Where does that leave me? And you?

Not everyone has used all my capabilities to their fullest.

  • SMA: The Program Lifecycle Company never used my content or analysis skills.
  • Many of my clients only used me for content.

But some of my clients used me for both content and proposals, while others engaged me for the full content-proposal-analysis triple play.

CPA is M shaped.
Google Gemini.

And they benefited in many ways, including millions of dollars in revenue, from my polymath expertise.

Perhaps I can benefit you. Although, unlike Benjamin Franklin, I can’t form a government. (But I can write a pretty mean process.)

To explore how we can work together, book a complimentary meeting with me.

Weekends vs. Weekdays

If your hungry people are businesspeople, why post on a weekend? Aren’t they too busy going to Costco and NOT thinking about getting help to market their products?

But sometimes “weekend mode” is the perfect time to communicate.

I originally shared the video to LinkedIn and this blog on a Saturday. I couldn’t imagine premiering it on a Monday.

Move Along Now (Biometric Product Marketing Expert). Google Lyria. Public Domain.