The Market Element Distribution (MED) charts below show the vendors’ marketing strategies - reverse-engineered from the language they use to take their products to market. Representing this information graphically allows multiple vendors’ strategies to be easily compared and makes differentiation, represented by the distance between their results on the chart, clear to see.

Where the chart contains a market mean value, this represents an average marketing strategy calculated by combining multiple vendors’ results. Comparing a vendor result to the market mean makes it possible to see how differentiated the vendor is from the average strategy in their market.

Currently two main studies are provided - Product Features (PIPESCOM) and Value Propositions / Benefits (MITICOR). Each chart shows the relative commitment of the vendor(s) to the different strategies. The higher the score, the greater the vendor’s commitment to that particular strategy - as inferred from the vendor’s marketing copy.

More information can be found in the panels below and throughout the Lustratus REPAMA web site.

REPAMA is a new breed of competitive intelligence that provides detailed information on the go-to-market strategies of high-tech vendors. The REPAMA methodology reverse-engineers and infers marketing strategy from the language vendors use to take their products to market.

You can read more about REPAMA here.

REPAMATron is the working title of the ongoing project to automate the REPAMA methodology. REPAMATron can collate and aggregate results far more easier than the manual REPAMA methodology, making it easier to visualise and benchmark the stratagies of different vendors and different market segments.

REPAMATron is currently in alpha phase and as such the results of the studies are indicative but not necessarily accurate. Over time the algorithms and inferences behind REPAMATron will improve as will the accuracy.

REPAMATron was created to visualise the competitive differentiation between different vendors’ marketing strategies within a given market segment. This is especially important in markets where little apparent differentiation exists between the competing vendors.

The early results from REPAMATron have shown that even amongst vendors that have broadly similar products; the way they describe, promote and generally take their products to market can be very different indeed.

REPAMATron was developed to identify ‘hidden’ differentiation and present it graphically so that it could be easily understood.

By grouping together a number of vendors’ results it is possible to create a notional 'average marketing strategy'. This is referred to as the market mean. It then becomes possible to benchmark and compare each vendor’s strategy to this market mean as well as to specific competitors in the market segment.

Benchmarking a vendor's marketing efforts against another vendor, a group of vendors or even a market segment can provide valuable competitive intelligence and can help explain poor marketing performance and lost sales.

If I told you that I’d have to kill you. But in general terms, REPAMATron collects examples of marketing communication from vendors – usually marketing and product collateral from web sites, press releases, emails, etc.

This text is analysed using phrase matching, natural language processing and statistical likelihood methods to determine if a specific marketing strategy is present or if a specific claim is being made.

All of these inferences are then processed as if being read by a human so that text found on popular web pages ranks higher as does text near the top of a document as do multiple clusters of the same inference, etc.

The MED Chart (Market Element Distribution), is used to show the relative commitment a vendor has to a specific marketing strategy. A score of 11 is apportioned across the various marketing strategies in the chart. Vendors that focus their marketing communications on a small set of strategies are rewarded with a higher scores. However vendors that water down their focus by aiming at many strategies will score less for each strategy.

Let’s take an example of a two vendors that are describing the value proposition (the benefits) that their respective products confer. Let’s say that vendor A makes one claim repeatedly that his product reduces the cost associated with some task or other. Vendor B also makes repeated claims that her product reduces cost, but in addition she also claims that her product will increase her customers’ revenue and will also reduce the risk of project failure.

Now both vendors make a value proposition to their audience associated with reducing cost but for vendor B her cost claims are watered down because she also makes additional claims about income and risk value propositions (or benefits).

The market mean represents an average strategy and is produced by calculating the average MED value for two or more vendors. Market Mean series are denoted in the charts by the suffix "mean(n=..)" on the series description.

The market mean allows an average strategy of a group of vendors or an entire market segment to be calculated. By comparing a vendor's differentiation from the mean (how far apart their plot lines are), one can infer how differentiated they are from the average marketing strategy for the segment in which they compete.

The MITICOR MED chart captures the major category of benefit or value proposition that a vendor believes their product provides. Broadly speaking, business to business value propositions for infrastructure software are categorised into the following categories: Market, Income, Time, Institution, Cost, Operational, Risk.

A Market value proposition might be a claim to increase a customers’ market share or that they will get some form of competitive advantage, whilst an Institutional value proposition might instead talk about delivering improved company image or reputation, increased shareholder value, better corporate governance, etc. You can read more about MITICOR here.

The PIPESCOM MED chart captures the category of product features that the vendor communicates most prominently. The feature categories used are: Packaging, Interfaces, Process, Ease of use, Speed, Commercial, Operational, Management.

For example, if a vendor describes their product as having “the ability to interface with other systems” then that would suggest they are making a claim about the product’s Interfaces. Similarly if the product is described as ‘inexpensive’ or ‘commercial-off-the-shelf software’ then that would fall into the Commercial category. You can read more about PIPESCOM here.