lustratus REPAMA

Posts Tagged ‘competition’

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 are also a number of fringe political parties representing varying degrees of extreme views and specific geographic areas.

A significant difference in ideology between the Labour and Conservative positions is found in their approach to the method and timing for addressing the massive budget deficit that the UK has since borrowing to prop the economy up. The Labour government proposes to increase individual and corporation National Insurance (NI) tax payments which is a secondary taxation levied on earnings in addition to our Pay as you Earn (PAYE) income tax. The Labour government argues that this taxation is needed in order that the country can start to pay off borrowing. The Conservative opposition agrees that there is an urgent requirement to bring down the deficit BUT they believe that this money can be found by cutting fat from what they see as a bloated government.

These productivity savings, they argue, will more than equate to the money that would have been raised from the increase in NI. The labour goverment disputes that this level of saving can be achieved through productivity savings and say that services will suffer as a result. The Conservative opposition refutes this. And so we have some real differentiation between the parties’ policies..

The problem that both parties have, as I hope I’ve proved with this rather dry analysis of UK political prattling, is that the electorate at large finds this sort of debate boring, complex, difficult to break down and of little tangible importance to them. It’s just an inscrutable academic discussion between people that they’re not really sure they trust.

What has this got to do with a technology marketing blog?

Jobs Tax

The Conservative opposition has encapsulated this entire argument into a single, easy to use, easy to remember, difficult to refute and highly damaging phrase – “Jobs Tax”. The term has become the banner under which the Conservative opposition has united behind and which they use to succinctly describe the key difference between themselves and labour and the main benefit one would enjoy if one were to vote for them. All senior members of the Conservative party election team have obviously been drilled to repeat these two words ad nauseum,

They claim that Labour’s “tax on jobs” will result in companies hiring less people, laying off  more people and ultimately slowing down economic recovery. As proof they have enlisted a large number of business leaders who are willing to say that if the Labour government is re-elected then jobs will be lost through this “jobs tax”.

Without betraying any political leanings whatsoever, I have to say that this is a well executed positioning campaign and a wonderful example of competitive depositioning. It takes the power of a “competitor’s” feature, uses the energy with which they promote this in the market and turns it against the competitor and to their own advantage. Every time that the Labour government “advertise” their NI policy, large swathes of the electorate deposition this in their minds as a “jobs tax” which they associate as being a bad thing.

What effect this will have on the result I do not know but I have to applaud the spin doctors (not something I am given to doing lightly)  behind such a nifty piece of competitive marketing.

Danny Goodall

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.

Enjoy!

Danny Goodall

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 specifically engineered to be better than the comparable Ferrari in many very specific ways, a car that can do many things for its prospective owner. Imagine then if at the car’s launch it’s main differentiation was:

The Porsche 912 – you no longer need a horse to pull it along the road

Imagine if Xerox copiers, in an attempt to differentiate itself within the highly competitive markets in which it is present made the bold claim that:

The Xerox X987 – eliminates the need for corporations to maintain a typing pool full of typists to make copies of documents.

When the car was a disruptive new technology it was important to explain to its potential users how it was different from the paradigm it was replacing – the horse and cart. Likewise this was true with the discontinuous innovation introduced with the photocopier / photostat / copier. But once these technologies matured to the point where the paradigm was accepted and there was a genuine choice of suppliers to source it from, vendors then had to focus on their real competition and their real differentiation.

But today this is exactly how much of the differentiation in the various segments of the Cloud Computing market is currently carried out. Vendors and service providers have not yet made the leap that Cloud Computing is “an idea whose time has come”. So instead of aiming their fire at other cloud computing vendors, their differentiation strategies focus on the thing that they are replacing – the corporate data centre, on-premise hardware, non-virtualised operating systems, non-scalable web applicatons, etc.

Don’t get me wrong, it is absolutely essential that the prospect knows how cloud technologies differ from traditional technologies, but Cloud Computing vendors must also realise that they are in real competition for this business and lead with clearly drawn lines of differentiation between themselves and their actual, cloud-shaped competition.

The good news is that there are many “positions” still available to cloud computing vendors. And once these positions are established in the minds of  prospects, it will be doubly difficult for their competitors to change these perceptions.

Taking such a position now will give some vendors a great advantage in the nascent Cloud Computing market but others will just feed the horse and call “walk on”.

Danny Goodall

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 new, disruptive technology to market. They understand their audience, they know what problems they solve and they know why they’re better/different. They communicate in clear language and they repeat their positioning strategy again and again and again consistently in all of their out-bound marketing communications. They’ve had successes and they’ve been able to document this and use it as proof of the claims they make. It’s been a joy to reverse-engineer it. That’s not to say that I think it’s perfect – they do tend to mix their audience and messages (audience strata mismatch) but it is very good indeed.

As I’m working through the cloud computing market and helping some vendors with their go-to-market strategies I’ve decided to share this and some  future studies on here because as I said in my ironic blog mission statement all those months ago, I want to highlight best practice in marketing communications and product marketing through this blog. So I thought it would be useful to share what value propositions and messages a market leader is using to address their prospects.

Anyway, below is the positioning statement that I’ve reverse engineered for Force.com’s proposition to end-user organisations. (I don’t plan to tackle the ISV or SI propositions yet)

It’s a little woolly and raw at the moment but even in that state it’s clear that Force.com knows its market, its competition and its USPs. The REPAMA SAS containing just Force.com at the moment can be found online at  Slideshare.net and is embedded below.

[slideshare id=2147195&doc=platformservices-generalpurpose-repamasegmentanalysisstudy0-90-091006182316-phpapp01&w=576]

If you’d like a copy of the slides let me know. For details of how to interpret the results of the REPAMA study please review the Lustratus REPAMA Guide.

Danny Goodall