Tag Archives: product marketing

Spilling One of My Secrets on Differentiation

(Wildebeest picture Imagen 3/Google Gemini)

I recently interviewed for a full-time position with an identity/biometrics company.

The hiring manager and I agreed that differentiation is sorely lacking in the industry.

However, the company did NOT agree that I was the person to lead their firm’s product differentiation efforts.

But this, combined with the upcoming completion of a Bredemarket project later this week, provides an opportunity.

Their loss is your gain

Bredemarket can now help others in the identity/biometric industry, including the hiring firm’s direct competitors, with THEIR differentiation—in the same way Bredemarket has differentiated other companies.

So I am going to help SOME company differentiate itself from the me-too “trust us” crowd. 

But how?

I won’t tell everything, but I will give away ONE of my secrets. 

Which isn’t a secret.

My baby’s got a not-so-secret secret

As you probably know, I like to ask questions before starting a content, proposal, or analysis project. And the first of my questions is critical for differentiation.

Why?

No…that’s the question. Why?

The life experiences of founders are very different. After all, the reason Bill Gates got into the computer business is different than the reason Steve Jobs entered the business. 

  • What if Jobs had never studied calligraphy at Reed? 
  • What if Gates had studied calligraphy at Harvard? 

The world would be very different.

Book ‘em, Danno 

I’ve written about the why question. Here’s an excerpt:

“Before I can write a case study about how your Magnificent Gizmo cures bad breath, I need to understand WHY you’re in the good breath business in the first place. Did you have an unpleasant childhood experience? Were you abandoned at the altar? WHY did you care enough to create the Magnificent Gizmo in the first place?

“Once I (and you) agree on the why, everything else will flow from that, and your own end users will benefit in the process.”

Give me that origin story and I can differentiate you and your product. Whether it’s your breath gizmo or your identity verification solution, we now have a story that your foolish inferior competitors do not have. 

THEY are just mere moneymakers. 

YOU are the enlightened giving individual solving a problem that has bugged you for years, making the world a better place.

So tell your story…and differentiate yourself!

What Coauthor “Wrapped” About My LinkedIn Activity

So I checked out Coauthor’s me-too LinkedIn-themed copycat of Spotify Wrapped, like many of you did. Here’s the (unedited) post it wrote for me—not too bad:

= = =

Here’s my 2024 LinkedIn Rewind, by Coauthor.studio:

After 30 years in identity and biometrics, 2024 showed me that verification only goes so far. The real challenge isn’t just confirming who someone is – it’s understanding what they might do.

From employment fraudsters with verified credentials to healthcare imposters with stolen birthdates, this year proved that identity verification alone can’t prevent deception. But it also showed how combining technical expertise with human insight can help protect organizations and individuals.

Key observations from 2024:

  • Identity verification without intent analysis is incomplete
  • Employment fraud evolves faster than verification methods
  • Healthcare identity remains dangerously vulnerable
  • The best fraud prevention combines technology and psychology
  • Product marketing must address both verification and trust

Three posts that captured these themes:

“Employment Fraud and Identity Verification”

On why verifying someone’s identity only goes so far

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7268454996734545921/

“Rich Powaza’s Disappearance” 

Real consequences of fraudulent behavior

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7253092940393193472/

“Get Off My Lawn”

Changing workplace norms and responsibilities

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7262320817898758145/

Through Bredemarket, I delivered over 100 content and analysis projects helping organizations navigate these challenges. I also conducted research on employment fraud tactics and moderated communities helping others avoid scams.

Looking ahead: 2025 will require even more sophisticated approaches to identity verification and fraud prevention. The fraudsters aren’t going away – but neither am I. I’ll continue helping organizations implement effective identity strategies while advocating for ethical AI use and employment practices.

To the wildebeests following along: remember that verification is just the start. The real value comes from understanding intent and building trust.

#fraud #identity #security #productmarketing

—

Get your 2024 LinkedIn Rewind! Go to coauthor.studio 

If the World is Flat

(Part of the biometric product marketing expert series)

(August 1, 2025: image img_2522-1.jpg and video flat2412a-1_mp4_hd_1080p.original.jpg?h=1378 removed by request)

(also deleted related content on Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok personal, and YouTube)

If the world is flat…

…there’s no need to look beyond the horizon.

…only the current quarter counts.

If you want to survive…

…think beyond the current quarter.

…invest in the long term.

…invest in product marketing.

…invest in a product marketer.

John E. Bredehoft on LinkedIn: LINK

I’m seeking a Senior Product Marketing Manager role in software (biometrics, government IDs, geolocation, identity and access management, cybersecurity, health) as an individual contributor on a collaborative team.

Key Accomplishments

  • Product launches (Confidential software product, Know Your Business offering, Morpho Video Investigator, MorphoBIS Cloud, Printrak BIS, Omnitrak).
  • Multiple enablement, competitive analysis, and strategy efforts.
  • Exploration of growth markets.

Multiple technologies.

Multiple industries.

Over 22 types of content.

Currently available for full-time employment or consulting work (Bredemarket).

More details on the latter at Bredemarket’s “CPA” page.

Cobwebs

“Let’s not market that product until the new year. Let’s not even build anticipation for the product until the new year. What could go wrong?”

Plenty.

Bring someone on board NOW to market your anti-fraud technology product NOW.

  • Multiple go-to-market efforts
  • Strategic and tactical
  • Positioning and messaging expertise
  • 22 types of external and internal content
  • Ethical and unbiased competitive analysis skills

Bredemarket Content-Proposal-Analysis:

CPA

(AI image from Google Gemini)

In the Long Run, Can Your Company Be Saved?

Effective product marketing usually won’t help you make your numbers this quarter. But it can provide long-term benefits…if properly executed and maintained.

A Cautionary Tale

In a down employment market such as the one the tech industry is experiencing right now, the common wisdom is that if a company isn’t hiring new employees, it can definitely use independent consultants.

Sometimes the common wisdom is faulty.

One of Bredemarket’s former clients (whom I will not name) illustrates the gaps in the common wisdom. I had worked on projects for this company several times…until I didn’t.

  • Because of a company reorg, my contact at the company changed, and the new contact sent a project my way.
  • Halfway through the project I was asked to stop work with no explanation.
  • When a direct report to my new contact reached out to get to know me, the report assured me that the stop work order had nothing to do with me. 
  • My contract was about to expire, but the direct report said it would probably be renewed. (Admittedly the direct report had no decision-making authority).
  • A month later, I found myself unable to log in to the company’s contractor website.
  • I reached out to a third party (not employed by the company) who managed its contractors. The third party confirmed that my contract had not been renewed.
  • I executed my offboarding process for removing confidential company information and informed my company contact. I received no response. (Not surprising. Many people, rather than delivering or confirming bad news, will say nothing at all—ghosting.)
  • I subsequently learned that the company was performing multiple rounds of layoffs, in a “the layoffs will continue until morale improves”style.

If Properly Executed

If I had provided said company with top-notch content-proposal-analysis work, would those laid-off people have kept their jobs?

Probably not. Content, proposal, and analysis work is not a quick fix.

  • Content, for example, often takes as many as 17 months to bear fruit.
  • The proposal process is only part of a long-term effort, which may start years before a Request for Proposal (RFP) is released, and may not end for years after a proposal is submitted in response to the RFP.
  • And analysis itself is just the first step in a long process. After you analyze something, you have to decide what to do with the results.

While not a quick fix, doing the work now will benefit the company in the long run. Even in the short term, setting the strategy communicates to everyone, including both internal and external stakeholders, the direction in which your company is heading.

If Properly Maintained

But you can’t just treat this as a one-time oroject and be done with it. Looking at the content portion alone, you have to regularly revisit your content and update it as needed.

This is a trick I learned back in my proposal days. Some of my former employers used proposal management software packages, many of which used a “timeout” feature on standard proposal text that required someone to review the text by a certain date. 

Does your proposal text state that your software supports Windows 10? Perhaps it’s a good idea to mention Windows 11 also. 

Or you may need to revise your standard proposal text to mention that new feature…or new benefit. Any proposal text for a health application that was written in December 2019 definitely required an update in December 2020.

What this means for your company

If you haven’t laid the groundwork for your company’s product marketing, Bredemarket can help in a variety of ways. After asking questions (starting with “Why?”) about your needs, we can jointly decide on the most critically important things Bredemarket can do for you and your company.

To find out how John E. Bredehoft of Bredemarket can serve as your “CPA” (Content-Proposal-Analysis marketing professional), go to my CPA page.

Postscript

And no, I’m not going to share an Eagles song. I’m going to share a Madness song.

(AI wildebeest “Keep Moving” image from Google Gemini)

Bredemarket Health Page Updates

Most of you who developed a sudden interest in healthcare this week WON’T be interested in this, so move along.

I’ve added 3 new posts (so far) to the Bredemarket Health page since November 2024:

  • Dr. Jones MD, NPE
  • Saving Money When Filling Prescriptions: Not You, The Companies
  • Medical Fraudsters: Birthday Party People

(And no, I have no real interest in addressing the recent murder of a healthcare executive. It’s a crime. End of discussion.)

I approach health and health product marketing from both an identity and technology perspective, recognizing the similarities and differences between biometrics and biometrics, and between PHI and PII.

Health

How Jumped is Unwrapped?

My product marketing observation: “Bredemarket Unwrapped” would be pretty pointless.

For those who DID create their own “Unwrapped” product promotion, congratulations on looking just like everybody else does with your lack of differentiation.

When everyone heads down, you should head up.

(Image from Google Gemini. This wildebeest doesn’t use ChatGPT.)

Repurposing My Competive Analysis Analysis

I recently wrote a non-published document explaining, among other things, how I would perform competitive analysis as a product marketer for a particular firm.

Since the firm elected not to use my product marketing services, I will now publish a very small portion of my document, with proper redactions, explaining how Bredemarket (or I as an individual) could perform competitive analysis for YOU.

Background

I recently applied for a product marketing position with a firm outside of the identity/biometrics industry (“Firm X”). This required extensive research on the firm and the industry.

Objectives and Key Results

I framed this research using a tool that I learned about through Phyl Terry’s Never Search Alone program. Specifically, the “Job Mission with OKRs” tool.

You draft your OKRs (objectives and key results) yourself, while you are still interviewing for the job. Sure they may be off—when I performed a similar exercise in early 2022, I assumed I would have to create social media content, but subsequently discovered the firm had a very talented social media manager. But even OKRs that are only 25% accurate are better than no OKRs at all.

Not a fit

Returning to 2024, I started drafting my “Job Mission with OKRs” for Firm X’s product marketing position before I went to my first interview, and iterated it through the second one, creating OKRs for seven key areas.

I planned to iterate my OKRs through subsequent interviews with peers and non-marketing executives, then present them to the hiring manager before my offer.

Unfortunately, I never got the chance. One day after my second interview, the Firm X recruiter sent a personalized letter to me.

While we really enjoyed getting to know you, and after careful consideration, we have determined that there is not a fit at this time, and we will not be moving forward in our process.

I know its not the news you were hoping to hear, but we appreciate your interest….

Have you ever written something and then found out it’s not needed any more? Well, now I had these seven OKRs and no immediate use for them…

…except for one of the OKRs that ties into something I’ve discussed before.

I excel at competitive analysis

One of my seven OKRs dealt with competitive analysis. And I have a lot to say about that.

Tips from the wildebeest

Earlier this year I started a LinkedIn newsletter for Bredemarket called “The Wildebeest Speaks.”

The July 12 edition of the newsletter was entitled “Three Tips That Show Why Bredemarket Excels at Product, Market, and Competitive Analysis.”

From The Wildebeest Speaks.

As you can probably guess from the title, the tips in question are Excel-specific and relate to how I format my investigative workbooks. So they’re more nuts-and-bolts than high-level.

Despite this, early this morning I reshared those Bredemarket tips on my personal profile, just in case someone from Firm X happened to take a look at my LinkedIn profile. (They didn’t.)

Sadly, my wildebeest discussion of competitive analysis confined itself to nuts and bolts, and I needed a higher level discussion of how Bredemarket performs analysis for its clients.

It turns out I had already written it, when I described to Firm X how I intended to perform competitive analysis for them.

Competitors. By Dr Bob Hall – https://www.flickr.com/photos/houseofhall/6000668660/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130630400.

So here’s a redacted version of the competitive analysis OKR I prepared for Firm X, last revised yesterday, but never shared with the firm.

Using techniques developed at IDEMIA, Incode, and Bredemarket:

  1. Identify true competitors (approximately 20 possible competitors identified as of 11/26/2024).
  2. Perform feature comparison to indicate closeness of competitors, [FIRM] strengths, and [FIRM] failures.
  3. Identify key collateral required for each competitor (SWOT analysis, one-page battlecard, messaging/positioning document).
  4. Identify key competitors (high, medium, low).
  5. Complete collateral for high competitors.
  6. Complete collateral for medium competitors.
  7. Complete collateral for low competitors.
  8. Revisit collateral on a regular cadence, revise as necessary.
  9. Identify new competitors as necessary.

Now that I have the chance, let me elaborate on two of the points.

Identify true competitors

Have you ever heard a company say “we have no competitors”?

Bull.

Every single company that sells something ALWAYS has one competitor: “do nothing.”

And many companies have competitors that are not always apparent at the surface. For example, your average U.S. satellite television network (CBS, Fox News, Game Show Network, whatever) doesn’t only compete with other satellite television networks, but also competes with YouTube, TikTok, and other sources of information.

But no company has a truly infinite number of competitors. Yes, one could argue that a View-Master is a legitimate competitor to a U.S. satellite television network…but how much market share will View-Master steal from CBS?

By ThePassenger – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6487250.

So you need to identify the POSSIBLE competitors to your product, and then see if they TRULY compete.

Perform feature comparison

One way to do this is to compare the features of your product against the features of other firms’ products.

But you have to do it right.

If you are completely enamored with your product, you may choose to ONLY list the features that YOUR product has, and compare only those features against possible competitors. By definition, your product will have every feature in the comparison, and therefore it’s the best product ever.

Perhaps you can start with this…but then you need to look at your competitors’ features and determine which ones your product DOESN’T have.

For example, your product may be the best on-premise solution ever, but if your competitors offer SaaS implementations and you don’t, that’s one way in which your product sucks.

Once you have a true feature comparison, you can proceed with ranking the competitors as high, medium, or low, then with enunciating your benefits and closing your weaknesses.

How do my competitive analysis strengths benefit you?

If your knowledge of your competitors is lackluster, perhaps I can help.

  • Even though my consulting contract didn’t explicitly allow it, I regularly fed one of my consulting clients information about its major competitor. This allowed the client to respond to questionable statements the competitor made.
  • Two of my employers directly benefited by my competitive analysis, not only by identifying key strengths and weaknesses of their competitors, but also by knowing who their competitors actually were. One company’s worldwide sales force competed against dozens upon dozens of competitors, and the headquarters had no idea…until I asked the salespeople.

Does your firm want to employ me to spearhead your analysis services? Contact me on LinkedIn.

Or, if you only require my services on a consulting basis, contact me through Bredemarket’s “CPA” page. Unless I’m employed by one of your competitors.

When AI Jumped the Shark

Most product marketing references to artificial intelligence are meaningless. Some companies think that they can simply promote their product by saying “We use AI,” as if this is a sufficient reason for prospects to buy.

I’ve previously observed that saying “we use AI” is the 2020s equivalent to saying “we use Pentium.” 

It’s a feature without a benefit.

It’s gotten to the point where meaningless references to AI have jumped the shark.

Literally.

“(Several organizations) received a three-year, $1.3 million National Science Foundation grant to teach Florida middle school teachers and students how to use artificial intelligence (AI) to identify fossil shark teeth….Florida teachers learn to use a branch of AI called “machine learning,” to teach computers how to use shape, color, and texture to identify the teeth of the extinct giant shark megalodon.”

(From https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/earth-systems/shark-ai/)

Now I come from the identity/biometrics industry, which uses machine learning extensively. But customers in this industry don’t really care about the “how,” (machine learning). They care about the “why” (identify individuals). For all the customers care, the vendors could use Pentium for identification. Or blockchain. Or Beatrice. As Loren Feldman says, “It doesn’t matter.”

Remember this the next time you want to identify extinct megalodon shark teeth. Now I admit the exercise serves an educational purpose by exposing teachers to the capabilities of machine learning. But if your sole interest is tooth classification, you can simply purchase the non-expurgated version of Olsen’s Standard Book of Extinct Sharks and get the job done.

Marketing executives, AI is no longer a differentiator. Trust me. If you need assistance with a real differentiator, I can help.

If you want to win business, learn more about Bredemarket’s content – proposal – analysis services here.