Tag Archives: product marketing

The Art of the Pivot: When to Re-position Your Product…Or Your Company

Hey, it happens.

You spend months or perhaps years working on a product. Maybe you work on it in stealth, maybe with a few trusted confidants, or maybe you are transparent about what you are doing.

You create the vision, code the product, create the go-to-market materials, and train the salespeople.

After the months/years of preparation, you launch your product. And something’s not right.

Sometimes you need to re-position the product.

Sometimes you need to trash the product and re-position everything.

Glitch didn’t work

Johnny Rodgers tells the story of joining Stewart Butterfield’s company Tiny Speck, which had worked for years on an ambitious multi-player online game, Glitch.

“Glitch was an unusual, clever, heartfelt game. Within the realm of Ur, dreamt by eleven magical Giants, players created playful new identities for themselves. They designed and clothed their avatars to their heart’s content, delighting in new hats and a rainbow of possible skin tones. They crafted working music boxes and decorated their architecturally-unlikely homes.

“They planted and grew gardens and milked the local butterflies. They collected pull-string dolls of modern philosophers – including plausible Nietzche and Wittgenstein quotations. They climbed into enormous dinosaurs, passing through their reptilian intestines and out of their helpfully sign-posted butts.”

Users loved it, but Tiny Speck’s revenue wasn’t covering its expenses. Butterfield tried several different re-positionings, but nothing worked.

And the future looked even worse.

“Moreover, with the rise of smartphones and the incompatibility of our Flash-based game with mobile, we didn’t have an easy way to meet new players where they were spending their casual gaming time.”

Butterfield told Rodgers his idea: shut down Glitch entirely.

The alternative idea

And concentrate on an internal tool that Tiny Speck had developed for its own benefit.

Rodgers was shocked.

“Our IRC server?”

They were discussing an internal tool (based upon an old technology called Internet Relay Chat) that Tiny Speck used for chat, and many other things.

  • File uploads into the chat.
  • Categorization of the chats into channels.
  • Integrations with external systems.

“[W] whenever a new user signed up for Glitch, or bought credits, or wrote in for support, it showed up in a channel. Whenever we deployed code, or got a new review on the App Store, or tweeted from our Twitter account, it showed up in a channel.”

  • Storage of everything in a searchable database.

Talk about a pivot. Butterfield was going in an entirely different direction. What was the sign on Stewart Butterfield’s butt? He told Rodgers.

“I’m thinking of calling it Slack. We can come up with a better name later.”

They never did.

Knowledge of Age Without Birthdate Does Not Provide Complete Privacy

In the past, I have gone on ad nauseam about how mobile driver’s licenses are more private than physical driver’s licenses. Here is how I stated it in July 2024:

“When you hand your physical driver’s license over to a sleazy bartender, they find out EVERYTHING about you, including your name, your birthdate, your driver’s license number, and even where you live.

“When you use a digital mobile driver’s license, bartenders ONLY learn what they NEED to know—that you are over 21.”

Which is extremely limited information.

But some age verification systems may provide your age in years, without necessarily revealing your exact date of birth.

That single number—whether it is 17, 27, or 57—reveals a lot more than we realize.

Let’s say that we know that Jill is 57 years old. This means that she was born in either 1968 or 1969. If Jill has lived her entire life in the United States, we immediately know several things about her with some certainty.

  • First, we know that she is part of Generation X, which means she may exhibit skepticism rather than corporate loyalty, and a comfort level with email rather than Telegram or what we now refer to as “voice calls.”
  • Second, we know the types of experiences she probably had in her childhood and teenage years. She probably played with Star Wars toys as a kid. She knew a little bit about Billy Carter, the funny Presidential brother. She feared for the lives of the hostages in Iran.
  • Third, we know the types of experiences she didn’t have. She never saw a cigarette commercial on TV. If she watched Star Trek, she saw it on an “independent” station, not on NBC during prime time. She never feared for the lives of the Israeli Olympians in Munich.

It’s not a lot to go on, and it may not be 100% accurate if Jill grew up in a household that viewed television as demonic.

But it’s enough for a product marketer to shape age-sensitive product marketing.

This isn’t true for all products. Biometric system marketing, for example, isn’t affected by the age of the government procurement officer who is buying the biometric system.

But if your product appeals to some ages more than others, knowing the ideal age of your target audience personas shapes your content. If your target audience is just out of college, “I can’t believe I ate the whole thing” is meaningless to them.

CITeR and Combating Facial Recognition Demographic Bias

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) isn’t the only entity that is seeking to combat facial recognition demographic bias. The Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) is doing its part.

The Problem

NIST and other entities have documented facial recognition accuracy differences related to skin tone. This is separate from the topic of facial analysis: this relates to facial recognition, or the identification of an individual. (As a note, “Gender Shades” had NOTHING to do with facial recognition.)

It’s fair to summarize that the accuracy of an algorithm depends upon the data used to train the algorithm. For example, if an algorithm is trained entirely on Japanese people, you would expect that it would be very accurate in identifying Japanese, but less accurate in identifying Native Americans or Kenyans.

Many of the most-used facial recognition algorithms are authored by North American/European or Asian companies, and while the good ones seek to employ a broad data set for algorithm training, NIST and other results document clear demographic differences in accuracy.

The Research

The Center for Identification Technology Research (CITeR) is a consortium of universities, government agencies, and private entities. The lead entity in CITeR, Clarkson University, has initiated research on “improving equity in face recognition systems.” Clarkson is using the following methods:

  • Establish a continuous skin color metric that retains accuracy across different image acquisition environments.
  • Develop a statistical approach to measure equity, ensuring FR results fall within a precise margin of error.
  • Employ new FR systems in combination with or instead of existing measures to minimize bias of results.

In this work, Clarkson is cooperating with other entities, such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the FIDO Alliance.

The final goal is to make facial recognition usable for everyone.

Your problem

Is your identity company and its product marketers also working to reduce demographic bias? How are you telling your story? Bredemarket (the biometric product marketing expert) can help with strategic and tactical solutions for your marketing and writing needs.

Bredemarket services, process, and pricing.

If I can help your firm with analysis, content, or even proposals in this area, talk to me.

On Illegal Product Marketing

You want to market your product, but should you? And will the authorities allow you to do so?

In 2026, there is a worldwide debate regarding social media products to younger people.

In the 1960s in the United States, the debate was about tobacco.

Not that kids could legally buy tobacco. (Wink wink.) But kids could certainly see television ads and hear radio ads for tobacco.

The country was Marlboro Country.

And the kids were paying attention, causing concern.

“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?

Ask questions.

Understand, Adapt, or Create

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.

And of course I ask questions.

Fantastic Creatures Can’t Thrive in the Real World

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.

Take care in how you market your products.

“We Use AI” Marketing Goes Beyond the IDV Realm

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.

Now we have things like AI pens.

“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”

And lest you think that such efforts are fringe, Open AI and Jony Ive are reportedly working on one.

But AI pens make as much sense as AI influencers. If you have AI, why do you need the influencers? And if you have AI, why have a pen?

But that won’t stop people from hawking AI pens, and pencils, and erasers, and 3 hole punches, and maybe even…paperclips.