Identity/biometrics/technology marketing and writing services
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
One of my seven OKRs dealt with competitive analysis. And I have a lot to say about that.
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.”
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.
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:
- Identify true competitors (approximately 20 possible competitors identified as of 11/26/2024).
- Perform feature comparison to indicate closeness of competitors, [FIRM] strengths, and [FIRM] failures.
- Identify key collateral required for each competitor (SWOT analysis, one-page battlecard, messaging/positioning document).
- Identify key competitors (high, medium, low).
- Complete collateral for high competitors.
- Complete collateral for medium competitors.
- Complete collateral for low competitors.
- Revisit collateral on a regular cadence, revise as necessary.
- Identify new competitors as necessary.
Now that I have the chance, let me elaborate on two of the points.
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?
So you need to identify the POSSIBLE competitors to your product, and then see if they TRULY compete.
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.
If your knowledge of your competitors is lackluster, perhaps I can help.
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.
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.
“(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.
Not enough attention is paid to the critical importance of zip codes for U.S. tech product marketing job applicants. Identity experts know that geolocation can serve as one of the five factors of authentication. But geolocation (via zip code) can also serve as a factor of disqualification.
This video doesn’t directly have to do with Bredemarket—my clients ARE remote-friendly—but since it involves my status as a biometric product marketing expert I thought I’d share it here.
For more detail, see my LinkedIn post from earlier this morning.
I shouldn’t be telling you this, but…
…well, you’ll have to watch the video for my deep dark secret.
Contact me if I can help with the product marketing for your identity/biometric company.
#biometricproductmarketingexpert
#id30and9
My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbredehoft
This video is, in marcom words, “for immediate release.”
It was fun to convert my Never Search Alone “candidate-market fit” text statement into a video with AI-generated music.
The text version:
“Proven Senior Product Marketing Manager who drives growth. Expert in identity/biometrics. Seeking an individual contributor role on a co-creative team delivering exceptional business results.”
Except that’s not the COMPLETE version.
To see the full version, you’ll have to watch the video. Then you will know why I had to change one of my hashtags this month.
#biometricproductmarketingexpert
#id30and9
My LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jbredehoft
One of my more popular posts during the past year (October 2023 to September 2024) was one that I wrote way back in 2021, “Pangiam, CLEAR, and others make a “sporting” effort to deny (or allow) stadium access.”
A lot has happened since then. (The aquisition of Pangiam by BigBear.ai closed in March of this year.)
Here is how BigBear.ai describes its digital identity offerings in 2024:
All these products, including Dartmouth, were developed before the BigBear.ai acquisition. (Where is Pangiam Bridge?)
We’ll have to wait and see what happens next.
The next paragraph is inaccurate.
Go-to-market initiatives have ONLY two audiences: the external prospects who are the hungry people (hopefully) wanting the product, and the internal staff in the company who deliver the product.
You know who I forgot? The partners.
Such as the very important partner for MorphoTrak’s Morpho Cloud back in 2015:
“Morpho worked with Microsoft Corporation to develop a cloud service for Morpho’s flagship Biometric Identification Solution (MorphoBIS). Morpho Cloud is hosted on Microsoft Azure Government, the cloud platform with a contractual commitment to support several U.S. government standards for data security, including the FBI’s CJIS Security Policy. Backed by the Microsoft Azure Government platform, Morpho Cloud complies with the stringent security standards for storage, transmission, monitoring, and recovery of digital information.”
Then there was the time I was performing U.S. go-to-market activities for a global identity/biometric offering.
The product marketing launch went great…
…until the home office received a communication from a competitor.
A competitor with a previously existing product with a name VERY similar to that of our subsequently launched solution.
Oops.
We definitely made a mistake by not thoroughly checking the name.
Of course, with the way that some companies want to imitate the things their competitors do, I’m sure some firms perform this intentionally, rather than accidentally.
(McDowell’s 2017 West Hollywood pop-up image from Buzzfeed, https://www.buzzfeed.com/morganshanahan/we-went-to-a-real-life-mcdowells-from-coming-to-america-and)
In my post “Seven Essential Product Marketing Strategy and Process Documents, the August 30, 2024 Iteration,” I alluded to the fact that not all go-to-market efforts are the same.
You can’t just slap a few things together in three days and say your go-to-market is complete. You need a plan on how you will go to market, including the different tiers of go-to-market efforts (you won’t spend four months planning materials for your 5.0.11 software release)…
Unless you’re in very unusual circumstances, your go-to-market efforts will encompass variable efforts.
In its simplest form, you will have two tiers. For example, Holly Watson of Amazon Web Services distinguishes between “launches” and “releases.”
Release to me relates to the update of an existing product vs. a net-new addition to a solution offering. It’s common to have multiple releases a quarter vs. large launches 1-2x per year.
You can get fancier.
My former product marketing team devised a three-tier system, in which the top tier encompassed a full-blown effort and the bottom tier just had some release notes, a bit of internal education, and maybe a blog post.
But as I said on August 30, you need to define the tiers beforehand. Don’t just shoot from the lip and say you want a blog post, a press release, and a brochure…oh, and maybe a cool infographic! Yeah!
Establish your tiers.
Establish the content for each tier.
Execute.
And repeat.
Bredemarket