I’ve created a monster… REPAMATron – A Search Engine for Competitive Marketing Intelligence?
…Well strictly speaking that should be I’m creating a monster. You see, I’m in the process of automating our REPAMA methodology. Let me explain.
I’ve been using the REPAMA competitive research methodology for many years to understand vendors’ marketing strategies. Long before the formation of Lustratus in fact. It wasn’t a strict methodology back then. It was a set of relatively loose processes, measures and classifications that I used to ‘score’ various elements of a specific software vendor’s marketing strategy.
I used the process when I worked on the vendor side in various senior marketing positions. It allowed me to understand how I could differentiate my company’s technology from our competitors. And to differentiate, first I had to know how… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, communication, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, ideal customer, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, pain, REPAMATron | 
analysis, automated, competition, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, competitive, Lustratus REPAMA, marketing intelligence, nlp, REPAMA, REPAMATron, search engine | 
6 CommentsTruth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited.
As I mentioned in my last blog entry I’ve had a minor disagreement with Blake Dournaee of Intel over…
…whether spin was used in the naming of the product category in which the folks at Intel have placed their SOA security/acceleration technology. You can read about our failure to find common ground as well as our apparent inability to handle each other’s blog comments correctly here. But whilst I was writing that blog I thought I’d dwell a little and idly speculate at what might lie behind Intel’s naming strategy. And before I do so I have to declare an interest. I am a big fan of the marketing techniques that Intel has used here. It’s a smart… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, marketing, Marketing Strategy, Marketing Tactics, positioning, product category, product name, SOA and Integration | appliance, competition, depositioning, intel, positioning, soa, soa expressway, software appliance | 2 CommentsTruth Denied?
Plagiarism is the sincerest form of flattery – or something like that. Anyway I’m sure Blake Dournaee of Intel will forgive me for borrowing the title for this blog…
…from his own “Truth Denied” blog entry on his Truth in SOA blog. Follow the link and you’ll see that Blake is a little aggrieved at a previous blog entry of mine where I suggested that Intel was using spin when describing something as both an appliance and software.
Now I’m also a little aggrieved because in his post Blake seems to suggest that he attempted to wield the sword of truth by posting a clarifying comment on this site but, he claims that his comment… Continue reading
Four Words
I was having a drink the other day with an old friend and potential future client.
We were discussing the competitive situation in the market in which his company competes. He knows that I’ve carried out some marketing positioning work for some of his competitors and so we got on to the subject of an industry event that he attended recently.
He told me that both he and one of his competitors (who I’ve carried out some positioning work for) gave a presentation at the event. Whilst he didn’t find his competitor’s presentation very credible (no surprise there), he did say that he was frustrated that in speaking to a couple of potential customers in the audience after the event,… Continue reading
Positioning, depositioning and the UK General Election
I watched the 2nd televised leaders’ debate the other evening and was struck by the maturity of some of the competitive marketing campaigns conducted by the UK’s political parties.
(Please get through this rather turgid and wordy description of the state of current political debate in the UK – there is a marketing-related point to this.)
Here’s the long-hand description of the most significant ideological and tactical difference between the two main parties contesting the UK general election.
To those readers who are not familiar with the subtleties of UK politics we have an incumbent government formed by the Labour party. The majority opposition is formed by the Conservative party with the minority opposition coming from the Liberal Democrats. There… Continue reading
A Lustratus REPAMA Guide to the Positioning Statement
I’ve just uploaded a document to Scridb which is based on a series of blog entries from the REPAMA blog.
In this series of 8 blog postings I described the format of the positioning statement that we use to help our clients capture their company or product strategy. I’ve finally got around to committing the description of the 7 elements…
- target customer/ideal client
- main pain/need or desire
- product name
- product category
- main reason to buy
- primary competitor or alternative
- the unique selling proposition – USP
…to ‘paper’. The document is embedded below and can be found on scribd.com.
[scribd id=23826456 key=key-15yeyrl8slzgx9uzm65p width=620]
Enjoy!
Danny Goodall
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Posted in All Blog Categories, marketing, Marketing Strategy, positioning, product marketing | alternative, competition, competitor, customer pain, ideal customer, main benefit, pain, positioning, positioning statement, primary alternative, primary reason to buy, product category, product name, unique sales proposition, usp | Leave a commentAppistry and 3Tera Under the REPAMA Microscope
I’ve just uploaded the first draft of my latest Cloud Computing REPAMA Segment Analysis Study.
This time I’ve looked at a couple of vendors in the Cloud Software / Cloud Management / Application Services Management segment (using the Lustratus REPAMA Cloud Computing market taxonomy / segmentation model). Specifically I’ve reverse-engineered the key go-to-market strategies of 3Tera and Appistry. I will add another couple of vendors to the study as time goes on but for the moment I thought these would be two good candidates to start with. They are very different companies with very different product approaches to solving similar, if not quite the same problems. I wanted to spend a little time here highliting some… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, marketing, positioning | 3Tera AppLogic, Appistry, applications services management, cloudiq, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, differentiation, positioning, positioning statement, REPAMA, segment analysis study, value proposition | Leave a commentCompetitive Differentiation in Cloud Computing – “The horse-less carriage and typing pools”
I had a meeting with a prospective client earlier in the week and we were chatting about how differentiation and positioning in Cloud Computing has to mature.
The contention was that cloud computing vendors and service providers today are too inwardly-focussed and that they should look at the external market to determine their competitive marketing strategies. Cloud Computing differentiation bears all the hallmarks of early market strategy and is very limited. It got me thinking. Imagine if competitive differentiation was carried out in other walks of life the way it is currently carried out by most Cloud Computing vendors and service providers.
Imagine if Porsche for example had spent 7 years perfecting its new sports car, a car that was… Continue reading
Reverse Engineering Force.com’s Approach to the Cloud Computing Market
I’ve been a bit busy recently and so instead of finishing off the complex REPAMA SAS into the “Cloud Computing / Cloud Software / Cloud Management / Application Services Management” study, I decided to produce a rough draft of the much simpler REPAMA into Force.com’s go-to-market strategy instead.
Whilst the segment analysis study only covers Force.com at the moment, I will add additional vendors/providers into the study over the coming weeks. If you have any suggestions who I should compare to/with Force.com, let me know.
I’m quite pleased with the result. Not because of any specific talent on my part but rather as I’ve already said here, Force.com’s marketing is a case study in how to take a… Continue reading
Posted in All Blog Categories, cloud computing, Competition and Competitive Intelligence, go-to-market, marketing, positioning, product marketing | competition, Force.com, go-to-market, market, marketing strategy, paas, platform as a service, REPAMA, Salesforce.com, sas, segment analysis study, usp | Leave a commentForce.com – Hat’s Off Time
Steve and I met with the good people at Force.com this morning to get an update on their approach to the Cloud Computing market and to hear their vision for the future.
I’d already carried out some REPAMA analysis of Force’s marketing proposition and, just like I found when I looked at Oracle’s ESB proposition,I was very impressed. With some vendors’ marketing propositions I have to spend a long time inferring what their strategic marketing strategy is, for others the strategy is so well communicated to their prospects through their out-bound marketing communications that my job is made easy.
And so it was with Force.com…
Unlike complex on-premise .Net and Java development tools, Force.com is half the cost and… Continue reading
- On Informatica, Evangelism, Audience Strata and BIG-DATA
- The marketing strategies of open source versus closed source ESBs
- Part 2 – First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- First output from REPAMATron – WSO2 versus FuseSource versus Talend versus the ESB market
- WSO2 – Fits in between Talend and FuseSource…
- WSO2, or rather one of its competitors, has thrown its hat into the ring
- Wordcount.org – it counts words…
Recent Comments
May 12, 2011 (12:01) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? Hmm. I really do like the name Sarah but what about my ego? If I were to call the index 'GoodRead...
May 12, 2011 (11:36) The Goodall Technology Reading Ease Index - How Complex is Your Marketing Copy? I suggest calling it the GoodRead Index. Maybe it's over-reaching a bit, but you'll just have to ...
October 14, 2010 (4:19) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. I hope you could tell that I was being more than a little flippant here Jacques. Perhaps I should...
October 13, 2010 (1:56) Truth Denied? The Software Appliance Revisited. Allow me to disagrre. At a customer, we have used Datapower for years to process XML (BTW, it is ...
June 7, 2010 (4:38) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Pete,Thanks for your comments, and those of your colleague. I think Danny has answered the 'mar...
June 4, 2010 (4:03) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hi,I'd very much like to develop a point made in the report where it is asserted that software ...
May 6, 2010 (12:35) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Thanks for your comment Blake. This is a marketing-focused blog that looks at different vendors' ...
May 5, 2010 (1:23) New Report From Lustratus Research: A Competitive Review of SOA Appliances Hello There - It seems that this is a very provocative report, especially with respect to the sta...
April 14, 2010 (2:57) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Nice Technology Related Blog. Will visit again.
October 16, 2009 (5:56) The Decision Making Unit for Cloud Computing Very interesting point of discussion. I would be very interested to hear your results.