Marketing is Dead**long live Product Marketing

April Dunford rocketwatcher.com

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My Background

• Big Companies• IBM (Launch and growth of InfoSphere)

• Siebel (Global Marketing Financial Services)

• Nortel (head of incubation)

• Startups• Infobright

• DataMirror (exit to IBM)

• Janna Systems ($1.4B exit to Siebel Systems)

• In-Between (as of a few weeks ago)• Solarsoft ($100M revenue)

Marketing Sucks

• Untargeted and generic

• Interrupt-driven

• Way too pushy (most marketing doesn’t care if I’m ready to buy yet)

Marketers are yelling, and not even yelling at me in particular…

Plus There’s the Lying….

Nobody Believes Marketing Anymore

….and can you blame them?

The World has Changed

Vendors are no longer THE source of Information• Customers can broadcast to the world• Prospects can easily talk to each other• Product info is readily available

Prospects are far along the buying path before vendors know about them

What Changes?

Buying vs. Selling

Earned vs. Bought Media

Customer Service

Visibility vs. “Branding”

Who Will Get us Out of This Mess?

You.Yeah, Ms./Mr. Product Marketer, I’m looking at you.

Why Product Marketing?

• We get segmentation

• We understand the market needs of our segments

• We have deep product knowledge

• We know how those fit together

A New Marketing Framework

Key Elements in this New Environment

Content

Visibility

Messaging

Engagement

Messaging

Needs to answer 3 questions for prospects:

• What is it?

• Is it for me?

• Why should I buy it from you?

Stories, stories, stories.

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Paris Hilton Marketing

beautiful but makes no sense

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What You Do?

Netflix – Watch as many movies as you want for one low monthly price.

SalesForce.com – the world’s favorite CRM software as a service.

Wikipedia – A free encyclopedia built collaboratively using Wiki software.

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You do WHAT?

Sun Microsystems – Innovative products and services that power the network economy.

Sterling Commerce – helps companies optimize and transform their dynamic business network to accelerate revenues and reduce costs.

Any internet b2C startup – Personalizes the Internet!!

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Step 1: What the Heck is it?

Keep it brief

Use simple language

Just come out and say it!

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Segmentation is not a Dirty Word

Market to Everyone, Sell to No One

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Explicit Targeting is Powerful

ThinkGeek: Selling geek t-shirts for programmers, linux hackers, and open

source geeks.

VS

Customink: your t-shirt expert for companies and

individuals.

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Go Deep – The Janna Example

CRM for Investment bankers:

• Use cases, day in the life of a banker

• Demos, example data

• Whitepapers, articles, opt-ed

• Sales Enablement: the IB dictionary

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Step 2: Is it for Me?

Be explicit about who you target

Use their language

Go as deep as you can

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Why Buy From You?

The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school:

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Why Buy From You?

The terrible secret they don’t teach you in engineering school:

Customers Don’t Care about FEATURES

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Why Buy From You?Value Features

Make sales more productive Integrates customer data from any source, show relationships between customers.

Deploy new applications 20% faster

Extract and transform data from heterogeneous sources

Resolve IT issues faster Monitor cpu and memory usage in real time.

Pay off your debt sooner View all account information in one place, graph spending patterns.

Sharper, more realistic images Megapixels

(do that and you won’t need to lie)

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Step 3: Why Buy it from You?

Value not Features

Focus on Differentiators

Bring it to life with Stories

Go ahead April, tell them a story…..

Content for Customers (not sales)

Content needs to be helpful

Requires a strategy

Map to steps in buying process

Provides the benefit of your expertise in the market (not necessarily about product)

Engagement

Community – an increasingly important communications channel

• Bring customers & prospects together

• Help/incent customers to carry your message

• How can Marketing help Customer Service

Visibility

How non-users observe that others are users:• Product features• Shareable content• Reviews/awards• Independent analysis• Success marketing

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Thanks!

RocketWatcher.com

Twitter: @aprildunford