“Public health officials and consumers wanted stronger warning labels on tobacco products and their advertisements banned from television and radio, where they could easily reach impressionable children. (Tobacco companies were the single largest product advertisers on television in 1969.)”
President Richard Nixon stepped in.
“On April 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signs legislation officially banning cigarette ads on television and radio.”
We’ve come a long way…baby?
Does your product suffer under advertising restrictions? How do you respond and find alternatives?
When Bredemarket begins an engagement with a client, I usually have no idea what processes, templates, or practices the client already has. So I have to handle whatever is or is not there and either understand what is there, adapt it, or create what is needed.
Understand
In some cases clients already have a process.
For example, as I delved into the Sharepoint library for one of Bredemarket’s clients, I found a complete set of branding guidelines that covered logos, colors, and many other aspects of the company’s branding.
In that case, my job is to simply make sure that I align with the client’s branding, and that my content, proposals, and analysis work for the client aligns with the branding guidelines…or with whatever other process the client has.
Adapt
Sometimes the client has a process, but it needs to be adapted in some way.
Here’s an example I can publicly share: not from a Bredemarket client, but from my former employer Motorola (back when Motorola was one company). I was a product manager at the time, and products were developed via a “stage gate” process. At Motorola, of course, it was called M-Gates.
Our “Printrak” group (automated fingerprint identification systems, computer aided dispatch systems, and the like) was the odd group out in our part of Motorola (the part that would later become Motorola Solutions). Most of the people in that part of Motorola sold police radios that were manufactured in bulk. Therefore the stage gate process included a step for a limited production run of police radios before moving to full production.
That didn’t apply for the software we sold to government systems. For example, the entire production run for the Omnitrak 8.1 release was no more than a half dozen systems for customers in Switzerland, Oklahoma, and other places. A limited production run wouldn’t make sense.
So OUR stage gate process eliminated that step and went straight to full production.
Create
And then there are the clients who don’t have anything. In these cases, my invention hat goes on.
For one Bredemarket client, I was asked to develop several pieces of collateral, such as (ironically) one on process maturity, and several random pieces of content tied to a product release.
I decided to approach it more systematically by introducing a simple go-to-market process that defined the external and internal collateral required for a “high” tier product release and a “low” tier product release. Resisting my urge to define something thorough, I simplified the GTM process as much as possible, while still providing guidance on what a product release should contain.
The client rejected the idea: “we don’t need no steenking process.”
Not surprisingly, the process maturity content was never released either.
I’ve had better luck with other Bredemarket clients, defining go-to-market, proposal, and other processes for them as needed.
Be Prepared
Providing product marketing expertise is much more than writing about a product.
Before I write a word of text, I ensure that the content aligns with the client’s strategies…or my own strategies if the client doesn’t have any.
“[Product marketers are] told to be data-led, technical, commercial, and customer-obsessed—all while moving at lightning speed. Someone in your company likely thinks you own everything from win rates and pipeline to product roadmaps and internal comms. But the best PMMs don’t try to be everything for everyone.”
However, it’s tough to maintain focus when prospects, or employers, are looking for ways to save money.
Once I applied for a product marketing position in which the job description talked solely about product marketing.
The interview went fine…for the first five minutes.
Then the interviewer asked about my experience in leading demand generation programs, and my experience in leading analyst relations programs.
While I’ve contributed to such programs at Motorola, Incode, and some of my Bredemarket clients, I’ve never actually led these programs.
The interview ended five minutes later.
(Incidentally, if the job description had actually stated that experience running demand generation and analyst relations was required, the interviewer would have saved a lot of time. Me also.)
So no, Bredemarket won’t run your account-based marketing (ABM) program to market your products…but I’ll ensure you have the customer-focused benefit statements to ensure ABM success.
After all, I know what to ask.
I ask, then I act.
So if Bredemarket can help you with product-focused strategy and content for demand generation, account-based marketing, or analyst relations, talk to me.
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.
Bredemarket 