Which IDV solution is this?
I will give you another hint. In addition to using the word “AI” in its product marketing, the company also uses the word trust.
Hope that narrows it down for you.
Identify the IDV Solution
Tag Archives: product marketing
Why Product Marketers Repeat Themselves
How many times have you seen a SINGLE advertisement for a product or service and IMMEDIATELY rushed out and bought it?
As Email Tool Tester notes, product marketing doesn’t work that way.
[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.
- And it also means that my customers need to take advantage of the 22 types of internal and external content Bredemarket can create.
But you can repurpose.
- 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.)
- But that’s nothing. Once I created 31 pieces of content from a single idea. (Only 19 to go that time.)
And if you’ve seen Bredemarket’s messaging 49 times in the past, now is the time to act and discuss your content, proposal, and/or analysis needs with Bredemarket.
A Little Help For Entry-Level Workers
Over a year ago I shared this:
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.
One firm is (big) blue on people
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.
Delivering Bad News: How Motorola Overcame the FpVTE 2003 Results Announcement
I just realized that I have never told the FULL story of FpVTE 2003 in the Bredemarket blog. I’ve only told the problem part, but not the solution part. Bad on me.
The problem part
I told parts of this in a 2023 post entitled “The Big 3, or 4, or 5? Through the Years.” One of the pivotal parts of the story was when the “big 4” became the “big 3.”
It happened like this:
These days the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is well known for its continuous biometric testing, but one of its first tests was conducted in 2003. At the time, there were four well-recognized fingerprint vendors:
- Cogent Systems.
- Motorola, which had acquired Printrak.
- NEC.
- Sagem Morpho, which had acquired Morpho.
There were a bunch of other fingerprint vendors, but they were much smaller, including the independent companies Bioscrypt and Identix.
I was a product manager at Motorola at the time, managing the server portion of the company’s automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), Omnitrak. This featured a modernization of the architecture that was a vast improvement over the client-server architecture in Series 2000. The older product was still in use at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), but Motorola was in the process of installing Omnitrak in Slovenia and upgrading existing systems in Oklahoma and Switzerland.
Yes, I’ve worked in biometrics for a while.
This is the environment in which NIST released its Fingerprint Vendor Technology Evaluation of 2003 (FpVTE 2003).
“FpVTE 2003 consists of multiple tests performed with combinations of fingers (e.g., single fingers, two index fingers, four to ten fingers) and different types and qualities of operational fingerprints (e.g., flat livescan images from visa applicants, multi-finger slap livescan images from present-day booking or background check systems, or rolled and flat inked fingerprints from legacy criminal databases).”
So the companies listed above, among others, submitted their algorithms to FpVTE 2003. After the testing, NIST issued a summary report that included this sentence.
“Of the systems tested, NEC, SAGEM, and Cogent produced the most accurate results.”
You can see how this affected Motorola…and me. We were suddenly second-tier, via independent confirmation.
We first had to go to the RCMP and admit that we weren’t as accurate as other systems. This came at a particularly bad time, since the RCMP was engaged in a massive system upgrade of its own. While Motorola’s FpVTE performance was not the ultimate deciding factor, we lost the massive RCMP system to Cogent.
But Motorola did something else at the same time.
The solution part
The accuracy of an automated fingerprint identification system falls in the laps of the algorithm developers, whether the vendor develops its own algorithms or buys a third-party algorithm from another AFIS vendor.
Motorola developed its own algorithm…and one of the R&D leaders was Guy Cardwell.
Motorola held a User’s Conference after the FpVTE results announcement, and Cardwell spoke to our customers.
- It wasn’t a flashy presentation with smoke and mirrors.
- It wasn’t an accusatory presentation calling NIST a bunch of crooks.
- It was basically Guy, on stage, saying that we didn’t do well.
- And that we would do better.
Now of course that in itself means nothing unless we actually DID better. The R&D team went to work and improved the algorithm, and continued with other advances such as supporting complete 1000 pixel per inch systems as Sweden demanded.
But from a product marketing perspective, Motorola’s initial messaging to its customers was critically important.
Because if Motorola didn’t publicly address its FpVTE 2003 performance, then the only people talking about it would be Cogent, NEC, and Sagem Morpho.
And you don’t want to let your competitors deliver your message and steal your prospects.
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:
- Product marketing strategy.
- Product marketing environment.
- Product marketing content.
- 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.”
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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.
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.
