lustratus REPAMA

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OK so having arrived at the first cut of a segmentation model for the Cloud Computing market, I am now embarking on a series of Reverse Engineered Positioning and Messaging Analysis (REPAMA) studies.

The problem I now face though as I start tp look in detail at various cloud vendors’ marketing propositions is that their products, capabilities and value propositions all appear to blur into one.

I guess this is a symptom of the early market nature of Cloud Computing. I would expect that as the market develops, real prospects will make real decisions based upon their real needs, and real differences will be stressed and perceived between the products and services of different vendors/service providers.

But right now the general approach I see is that no matter which product or service of a particular vendor I’m looking at, the proposition to the prospect typically boils down to.

Cloud Computing is good

…and this fits for any product in the portfolio. I see…

Cloud Computing does this, Cloud Computing enables that,Cloud Computing reduces this and Cloud Computing increases that.

Fine. But there are a couple of problems with that.

Firstly, and somewhat obviously, if all vendors/service providers simply evangelise the category like this instead of focussing on what they specifically can do, there is zero differentiation. And with zero differentiation the business typically goes the way of ‘market leader’ or at least the vendor/provider with the greatest market reach.

Secondly, if I were a prospect and all I hear about is the generic capabilities and benefits of the cloud, how do I know what each of the different products in your portfolio could do for me? It might be good to talk to me in terms of what the individual products do, how they are each different from/superior to competitors’ products or alternative approaches, what tangible things each product changes for me and what I would be left with AFTER I’ve bought each product from you.

I should stress that there is another category of proposition developing in my analysis which says cloud is good BUT there are lots of problems and potential problems to address first.

This is an obvious proposition and one that vendors/providers in new paradigms like cloud quickly rally around. It goes something like this…

Cloud will do lots of great things for your organisation but you have to make sure you do it right or all sorts of bad things could happen…

The problem with this proposition is that there is an obvious implication.

…and if you don’t solve these things, you’ll lose your job.

This negative connotation and association with the potential failures of cloud initiatives are perhaps not the best way to attempt to mobilise prospects. Having said that, as the movement toward the cloud builds pace it will likely be this “proceed with caution” proposition that gains traction. As cloud becomes a given, so it will be the vendors/providers that can prove that they can quickly address the deficiencies inherent with current cloud strategies and mitigate the risks involved that will rise to the top.

Anyway these are some of my early findings that I thought I would share.

I’ve decided to first look at the Cloud Software / Cloud Management / Application Services Management category from the segmentation model. And I’ve decided to take a look at Appistry first – mainly because its a category that I’ve had direct experience of but also because in a market as broad and as complex as this one, well, you have to start somewhere.

I’ll keep you posted as I move forward.

Danny Goodall

The Unique Selling Proposition

Throughout this series of blogs I’ve been examining the format of the positioning statement that we use in our REPAMA consultancy and analysis services.

In this final entry in the series I’m going to close out by looking at the pay-off, the crescendo, the exclamation mark at the end of the positioning statement – the USP or unique selling proposition.

But first, and for one last time, let’s take a look at this element in the context of the complete positioning statement.

FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A[product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE[the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

USP is one of those over-used terms that has found friends at all levels of responsibility throughout sales and marketing organisations. I’ve heard everyone from line of business managers, to sales people to CEOs use this term.  Everyone feels they have a handle on it and over time the term has come to generically mean “differentiator”.  Whilst I’m in favour of strategic marketing concepts finding friends throughout an organisation, there is a considerable amount of subtlety and craft missing from the “common” understanding of the USP.  So let’s start with some definitions and perhaps a little bit of history.

Rosser Reeves – what a great name.  He sounds like he should have been some shady 1940s London underworld gangster.  But he wasn’t.  Instead he was an advertising man, one of the first in fact and it was he who brought us the concept of the unique selling proposition.  For him, its use and definition were rooted in (print) advertising and as such the formal definition assumes that the USP is being used in some form of promotional campaign.  There was also an implied assumption that we were dealing with business-to-consumer advertising too.  Since then we’ve broadened the definition to think of it as any general proposition made via any medium (adverts, web site, emails, phone calls, face-to-face conversations, etc.) whether that be business-to-business or business-to-consumer based.  Whilst the use of the USP may have changed, the disciplines and thought processes used in its creation are still valid today.

The definition below is taken from the book Differentiate or Die (survival in our era of killer competition) by Jack Trout and Steve Rivkin.  In this book the authors refer to Rosser Reeves’ 1961 work Reality in Advertising from which they quote Reeves’ three-part USP definition:

1. Each advertisement must make a proposition to the consumer.  Not just words, not just product puffery, not just show-window advertising.  Each advertisement must say to each reader “Buy this product, and you will get this specific benefit.”
2. The proposition must be one that the competition either cannot, or does not, offer.  It must be unique – either a uniqueness of the brand or a claim not otherwise made in that particular field of advertising.
3. The proposition must be so strong that it can move the mass millions (i.e. to pull over new customers to your product).

As I mentioned above, whilst many of these disciplines are still valid, there is now so much competition in just about every market category, segment and sub-segment that being “unique” is increasingly more difficult.  So it’s no surprise that many of the USPs I see when reverse-engineering vendor’s positioning statements are often just SPs - with little or nothing unique about them.

When looking at the USP in the context of the positioning statement its important to remember that the “OUR PRODUCT” positioning element is typically paired with the “UNLIKE” section.  The UNLIKE element sets up the main alternative and the OUR PRODUCT element describes the USP that the alternative doesn’t have.

As shown below:

UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition]

The biggest challenge in defining this element of the positioning statement is in defining that unique space (number 2 on Rosser Reeves’ list above).  With product categories, segments and sub-segments so granular across many markets and with ultra competitive competitors competing within each of those segments, finding a position that only you can own is not the work of a moment.  In addition its important to remember that we’re not just trying to find a unique space, but a unique space that has compelling value to the consumer/customer as outlined in Reeves’ point 1 above.

In reality what tends to happen (in my experience of the infrastructure software space) is that the first entrant to the market (first mover) aims for something unique which is then “flatteringly” copied by later entrants to the market.  To later entrants this makes sense as they want to have some of the pie of the first movers and are happy to trade uniqueness for being perceived as similar to the market leaders.  Understandably it makes sense to “look” like the first mover.  This tends to lead to what I call “standards-based marketing” and simply creates a homogeneity of messages and propositions amongst the market protagonists.  This leads to little real differentiation and leaves prospects studying highly technical features to really understand the differences between products.

Examples

• OUR PRODUCT removes up to 20% of data centre costs whilst reducing your carbon footprint
• OUR PRODUCT starts reducing risk from day one.
• OUR PRODUCT not only integrates with your existing systems but also provides comprehensive management capabilities
• OUR PRODUCT ends world hunger (Well maybe not – but you get the idea)

Real world example

(If you have a specific interest in the SOA and ESB market you might find this section interesting…)  In our latest REPAMA Segment Analysis Study we looked at how a number of ESB vendors approach the market.  The vendors and products studied included Oracle’s Service Bus, Progress Software’s Sonic ESB, TIBCO’s ActiveMatrix Service Bus and Microsoft’s ESB Guidance.  Reverse engineering these vendors’ positioning statements gave some interesting insights and as an example I’ve listed Microsoft’s USP section below:

OUR PRODUCT provides a superset of ESB functionality, extending the ESB pattern to include modelling and execution of business rules, workflow, and adapter integration.

Here Microsoft selects a pretty strong USP.  They claim that UNLIKE other ESBs they provide extended functionality.  Whilst other ESBs may legitimately say  that they also offer extended functionality, these vendors may not actually be making that claim.  So this certainly passes Rosser Reeves’ test above.

The basis for this claimed USP is that their ESB Guidance is underpinned by their BizTalk product – which features broader functionality than other “simple” ESBs.  I think this is a pretty well constructed USP – despite the fact that the rest of Microsoft’s marketing for the ESB Guidance is pretty poor.  Perhaps this is a function of the non-product nature of ESB Guidance.

In summary when defining the OUR PRODUCT element we’re looking to communicate a specific benefit that will be delivered that none of the competitors or alternatives is able to offer, all of this couched in language that compels the prospect to take action.

So that’s it for the OUR PRODUCT element and for the positioning statement series too. <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW
It should be borne in mind that Lustratus’ focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we’re dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

The Main Benefit or Reason to buy

In this series of blogs I’m exploring the format of the positioning statement that Lustratus uses in our REPAMA research methodology.

Today I’m looking at one of, if not the most important elements.  This is an element that in my experience vendors often find the most difficult to define about their own offering.  This is the “THAT PROVIDES [main benefit]” element.  First some let’s look at how this element fits into the context of the complete positioning statement.

FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A[product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

In my experience, this positioning element is often watered down so that it lacks any real convincing power.  The purpose of the THAT PROVIDES element is to describe the main benefit that your product or service provides your customer.  It details the value that your target customer can potentially derive and should be compelling enough to provide a reason for them to buy from you.  Instead of this, I often see this element used as a place to add another ho-hum feature or an also-ran benefit.  The question that should be asked is

“What benefit or value will compel the target customer to want to go through the process of buying from you?”

Whilst this is not a hard and fast rule, the THAT PROVIDES element is often paired with the WHO [has this specific pain or problem] element of the positioning statement.  So that the WHO section  sets up the main pain experienced by the target customer and the THAT PROVIDES section often outlines the solution or antidote to the pain.

It’s worth stressing one more time that the positioning process should produce a description of your overall approach to the market so that a target customer feels that you, and you alone a) understand their problem b) have the most compelling solution.  Ideally, they should be left feeling that you went into business simply to solve their specific problem.

Examples

• THAT PROVIDES a reduction of up to 20% in data centre costs
• THAT PROVIDES a 15% reduction in the time to bring new products to market
• THAT PROVIDES complete alignment between corporate objectives and IT infrastructure
• THAT PROVIDES complete, accurate and timely visibility into corporate risk
• etc.

The impact of this positioning element is improved dramatically If the benefit can quantified or at least expressed in detail.

There is often a temptation when creating this element to fill it full of technical features or justification.  This is especially true of early market technology companies.  Whilst it is a generally held rule that it is better to concentrate on what the product leaves behind (i.e. the benefit), it is OK to focus on the technical value of the product IF the target customer or at least the target audience within the target customer, is highly technically-focused.

(This section for those interested in the SOA and ESB market only…)  I’m using an extract from one of Lustratus’ REPAMA reports to illustrate “real-world” positioning statements.  Here I’ve reverse-engineered the positioning statement for Microsoft’s ESB
Guidance product.  According to their outbound marketing, Microsoft sees the following as the main benefit they provide their target customer (BizTalk developers):

THAT PROVIDES an infrastructure for enabling service oriented architectures

This example falls into the “vanilla” category and certainly doesn’t really cut it as a compelling reason to buy.  That said, for the target audience (technical) within the target customer (BizTalk Developers), it represents a clear and (albeit overtly technically) compelling proposition.

OK so that was the THAT PROVIDES section. In the next blog entry in this series I’ll be looking at the “UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor]” element.  <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW
It should be borne in mind that Lustratus’ focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we’re dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

The Our Product Element

In this series of blogs we’re looking at the elements of the positioning statement format that Lustratus uses in our REPAMA research methodology.

In this entry I’m going to tackle one of the easier elements, where little specific planning or strategy is needed.  Here we’re looking at the “Our [product name]” section of the positioning statement.  So as usual let’s look at the context of this element in the wider positioning statement.

FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A[product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

Having said that little planning or strategy is required here, what I should have said is that from the perspective of the product marketing task of creating the positioning statement, the product name is usually already in place.  But not always.  Obviously an incredible amount of effort, research and focus group feedback can go into selecting the product name. And whilst the name doesn’t usually change based on the ideal customer or the pain that they have, it might be that specific products are “created” so as to appear focused on a specific audience and/or problem.

I’ve had experience of companies (mea culpa!) where the engineering effort required to bring such a product to market stretches only as far as to add an adjective or a noun to a product name in order to make it appear more targeted at a specific problem or prospect.

Whilst the science of product naming is outside the scope of what I want to cover here, if you’re interested there is an good discussion on that subject, as well as many others in the seminal book by Ries and Trout “Positioning: The battle for your mind“.  It’s a good read even if its roots are in advertising and it appears a little dated now.  Perhaps I’ll revisit it later with a book review.

So other than that, that is the product name section – really just a place holder for, as you might expect, the name of the product (or service).

<More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW
It should be borne in mind that Lustratus’ focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we’re dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

Pain, problem, need or desire

Continuing  the series of blogs looking at the elements of the positioning statement I’m going to look at the customer pain or problem section.

In this entry I will look at the pain, problem, need or desire that we believe that target customer is looking to resolve.  So just so we have a the context for the discussion, here is the positioning statement format that Lustratus uses.

FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A[product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

In the last blog entry we had started to create the unique position in a prospect’s mind where our products and services uniquely sit.  We did this by first identifying the ideal client.  Now we’re going to expand on the ideal client segmentation by adding a specific pain, need or desire that the ideal customer can relate to or a situation that they find themselves in.  The “who” element describes the situation, nearly always negative, that the ideal customer finds themselves in and the implication is that we can positively alter the ideal customer’s situation.

The following questions often help to narrowing down the “who” element of the positioning statement:

• What is the ideal customer looking to do or achieve that they cannot do without help?
• What must the ideal customer do that they are struggling to do?
• What is the desired state that the ideal customer is looking to achieve?
• What is the problem that the ideal customer is wrestling with?
• What situation (needn’t be negative) does the ideal customer find themselves in?
• etc.

Some examples

In a previous blog entry on the positioning statement we looked at an example REPAMA reverse-engineered positioning statement for Microsoft ESB Guidance.  Here, we saw that Microsoft’s “who” section was was defined as:

WHO are building solutions that leverage the SOA pattern

For those readers who are not experts in SOA (service-oriented architecture) or the infrastructure software market in general, “SOA” here is an esoteric software architecture model that many organisations believe provides great benefits.  Microsoft, amongst other vendors, claims that its products help its users to implement SOA more effectively.

Microsoft is effectively saying that it believes that the situation its target customer (Microsoft BizTalk Developers) finds themselves in is that of ”building solutions that leverage the SOA pattern”.  Interestingly, in our attempt to reverse-engineer Microsoft’s positioning statement, we see that Microsoft has not aimed at an overtly negative pain for the ideal customer.  Rather it has chosen to simply focus on a situation the ideal customer finds themselves in.  Other vendors from the ESB REPAMA SAS report show a different approach to the pain.  Oracle with its Oracle Service Bus product chooses to identify the following area of pain in our reverse-engineered positioning statement:

WHO need to enforce quality of service, security and performance policies across an enterprise-wide network of multiple SOA domains

Progress with its Progress Sonic ESB product identifies this need

WHO need to connect many different IT resources using many different technologies in many physically different locations

So whilst Microsoft has chosen to simply state a situation, other vendors have chosen to highlight specific needs or deficiencies. Remember the positioning statement in its entirety should be used to make the ideal customer feel that you have designed and built the product (or service) specifically for them in response to their specific problems.  Other, more generic examples might include:

• WHO are struggling to implement the latest governmental regulation
• WHO need to remove costs from their IT operations
• WHO fail to bring new products to market ahead of their competition
• WHO are unable to ascertain their risk exposure in a timely manner
• WHO cannot currently meet their corporate governance requirements
• etc.

So that’s the main pain, need or desire section, I’ll tackle the “OUR [product name] section in a later blog entry.  <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW
It should be borne in mind that Lustratus’ focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we’re dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

The Ideal Customer

As mentioned in the previous blog entry on the positioning statement, I’m going to continue to flesh out the details of the seven other positioning elements.

This time its the ideal target customer, so let’s first revisit the format of the positioning statement just to give us a context.

FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A[product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

The ideal customer allows the organisation creating the positioning statement to express the characteristics of their ideal target customer for the product or service they sell.  This can obviously be done in many different ways and I’ll list some of the more common ones below.  In the previous blog entry I gave an example of the REPAMA reverse-engineered positioning statement for Microsoft ESB Guidance.  We saw that Microsoft’s ideal target customer was defined as:

FOR Microsoft BizTalk Developers

Between you and I, this is not the most definitive classification of ideal customer I’ve ever seen, but when reverse-engineering a vendor’s implied positioning from their outbound marketing communications, it’s often as close as we can get. I suspect that Microsoft’s internal classification will expand on this to include other characteristics that make their ideal target client more relevant to them.  That said, in the context of the ESB REPAMA Segment Analysis Study that we conducted, we’re pretty confident that this ideal target client is correct for Microsoft.

Other customer characteristics that can be used to segment the market to effectively define the ideal target customer include:

• Industry/Vertical – Can you define the industry or vertical market that the ideal client belongs to?
• Geography – Where are they based?
• Size – What size of organisation? – by revenue or employees
• Reach – The reach of your organisation – local, regional, national, multi-national?
• Budget – Is the client able to be classified in terms of how much money they have to spend?
• Pricing – Are they sensitive to price?
• Job title – What is their position/job title?
• User – Who will use the product?
• Decision maker – Who makes the decision on this type of product?
• Image – What image does this client have? – Leading edge, conservative, well know, leader in their own market.
• Benefit – What will the product do to improve the client’s life?
• Reason to buy – What compelling reason does the client have to buy the product?
• Use – What other complimentary or competitive products are they using?
• Concerns – What are the main concerns of your target client?
• Business type – What is their type of business?
• Business model – What is their business model?
• Competition – Who is their competition?
• Clients – Who are their clients?
• Problems – What are their problems?

So examples for a company that sells products used by telecommunications organisations might include:

For…

• Mobile telecommunications organisations
• Mobile telecommunications organisations concerned with adhering to new governmental regulations
• Mobile telecommunications companies that sell through channels
• Mobile telecommunications organisations that have a prestige image
• Mobile telecommunications organisations that operate at the budget end of the market
• Mobile telecommunications organisations that compete with RingRingTelco Corp.
• etc.

What we’re attempting to do here is to segment the total available market so that we end up with a segment that is a) big enough to sustain us but b) small enough for us to dominate.  Obviously credibility and ability to reach these organisations comes into the decision.  So if I were a product marketing VP for a 10 man start-up software organisation, whist I might be attracted to an ideal target client of “the largest global banks struggling to implement a worldwide roll-out of XYZ application”, I might lack the credibility or the reach to be able to deliver on this.

So as we can see the ideal target client goes right to the heart of the business planning for the product unit or corporation and is incredibly important to define accurately.

So that’s ideal customer, I’ll tackle the “pain” section in a future blog.  <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Danny Goodall.

BTW It should be borne in mind that Lustratus’ focus is on the high-tech software industry and whilst positioning as a concept will transfer to just about any business to business industry, many of the classifications we use assume that we’re dealing with a technical audience for infrastructure software.  So please bear that in mind for your own industry.

Positioning

Happy 2009! I’ve been in debate with a number of correspondents about the layout and format of the positioning statement that we use in the Lustratus REPAMA-based research.  So I’m going to dedicate the next few blog entries to the positioning statement.  I hope to answer the following questions.

• What is the positioning statement?
• Why use a positioning statement?
• What is the value of a positioning statement?
• What is the format of a positioning statement?

The first thing to say is that over the years, having worked with some of the best product marketing people in the industry, I’ve seen many different approaches to positioning and equally many different formats for positioning statements. Each of them, to a greater or lesser extent has been valuable.  Most positioning statements that I’ve seen and used have had a very similar structure.  Although I have seen some that have been very different, in fact more like a what I would refer to as a value statement or a value proposition.  Perhaps I will revisit them in a future blog but here I’m going to focus on the classic positioning statement.  So as I’ve mentioned there is no single way to construct a positioning statement but Lustratus has settled on a specific format that captures and conveys the seven key product marketing elements and it is this format that I will concentrate on here.

What purpose does the positioning statement serve?

It’s probably best to start with a definition for positioning first.  And if positioning statements are contentious then the the broader subject of positioning is even more so.  Whilst there are many views on this, for me, positioning is about creating a unique, compelling and defensible space in the minds of your prospects where your product/service and only your product/service sits.  Your ideal prospect must feel that you created the product/service for them alone to answer their specific problems and very importantly they must understand exactly how you are different/better that the alternative/competition.  Most product marketing professionals understand this well but as mentioned above, the development of positioning strategies and the statements that captures those strategies can take many different forms.

In my experience most positioning statements are designed to be internal tools for the development and then internal communication of a unique and compelling market proposition.  The positioning statement seldom gets used externally (with customers or prospects) in its raw format.  External marketing communications strategies are typically developed using the internal positioning statement as a guide.

The positioning statement conveys the following seven product marketing elements:

1. The Ideal customer
2. The main pain that the ideal customer has or the negative situation they find themselves in
3. The name of the product
4. The name of the product category – the generic way to refer to the class of product (I often see this omitted)
5. The main benefit that the product provides and the key reason that the prospect should buy the product
6. The primary competition or alternative
7. The unique selling proposition (USP)

The format of a positioning statement

A positioning statement is natural language-based and should read fluidly and easily as a single sentence and yet should contain all seven of the marketing elements above.  This sounds like a complex task and to aid us in that development we use a specific structure for the statement.  This is shown below.

FOR [the ideal customer] WHO [has this specific pain or problem] OUR [product name] IS A [product category] THAT PROVIDES [this main benefit and reason to buy] UNLIKE [the primary alternative or competitor] OUR PRODUCT [has this unique selling proposition].

So the “for”, “who”, “our”, “is a”, “that provides”, “unlike” and “our product” elements give our positioning statement the structure it needs.

An example positioning statement

An example positioning statement is shown below. It is taken from the upcoming Lustratus REPAMA Segment Analysis Study into the Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) market segment. In the study we reverse-engineer the seven marketing strategy elements of positioning statement (as well as many others) used by a number of the vendors in the ESB space – in this case the products examined were Microsoft ESB Guidance, Oracle Service Bus, Progress Sonic ESB and TIBCO ActiveMatrix Service Bus.  In the example below we’ve attempted to capture Microsoft’s position and proposition in the ESB market.

FOR Microsoft BizTalk Developers WHO are building solutions that leverage the SOA pattern OUR Microsoft ESB Guidance IS A loosely-coupled messaging environment THAT PROVIDES an infrastructure for enabling a service-oriented architecture UNLIKE traditional ESBs OUR PRODUCT provides a superset of ESB functionality, extending the ESB pattern to include modelling and execution of business rules, workflow, and adapter integration

It’s notoriously difficult to be precise when reverse-engineering a vendor’s positioning statement and sections like the “that provides” and “our product” are especially difficult to define precisely.  But hopefully it shows how an organisation like Microsoft might set about defining its approach to a particular market segment.

In the next several blogs I’ll expand on the positioning statement and cover each of the seven elements in a bit more detail.  <More information can be found in the Lustratus REPAMA Guide here>

Other posts in this series

The Positioning Statement
FOR… positioning element
WHO…positioning element
OUR…positioning element
IS A…positioning element
THAT PROVIDES…positioning element
UNLIKE…positioning element
OUR PRODUCT…positioning element

Danny Goodall.

Despite being available in “beta” form to REPAMA users for some time, I finally got round to packaging up a publicly downloadable version of the Lustratus REPAMA Guide. This can be downloaded from Lustratus.com for no charge.

I should say a big thank you to clients, colleagues and everyone else who has provided feedback on the guide, which studies should be included and how they should be presented.

So “Thank you”!

And for those looking to understand the product marketing and go-to-market strategies of TIBCO’s competitors in the High Performance Messaging space – specifically  Solace Systems’ Content Router, 29West’s LBM and IBM’s WebSphere MQ LLM – I’ve also put the High Performance Messaging REPAMA Segment Analysis Study in the store.  I’ll be adding the individual reports on each of the vendors in the coming days

Danny Goodall

I remember using the phrase “You’re marketing 8 fingered gloves” with a client a few years ago.  And without wanting to show any disrespect to those unfortunate or fortunate enough to have more than 5 digits on each hand, I think it illustrates perfectly the dilemma that some technology vendors face.

Imagine you are the VP Marketing for Octodigit Inc.  – a manufacturer of 8 fingered gloves for men.  Your market is pretty small.  Really small in fact.  Getting new customers is quite a chore and involves some incredibly detailed research, focus and a lot of leg work.  However, when you find a prospect – an octodigit (or whatever the term is) male who works outside who has cold hands, he’d buy from you in a flash.  You alone understand his unique problems.  You have the solution (the 8 fingered glove) to his problem (cold 8 fingered hands).

But then again our friend has other possible solutions.  No, there isn’t another 8 fingered glove supplier.  Octodigit Inc. really can claim to be the marketing leading supplier of wool-based hand apparel for the discerning multi-digit male.  However our 8 fingered friend is looking for a solution to his cold hands problem, he’s not necessarily looking for a glove.  So he could consider a coat with big pockets as an alternative.  And there is even the option of surgery which would fulfil a life-long dream of being able to wear five-fingered gloves like the majority of the rest of the planet. So our friends at Octodigit Inc. still have some selling to do but chances are they’ll be successful – but only once they’ve managed to find a prospect.

The original client who prompted the 8-fingered glove anecdote was marketing an object database, the target audience for which were self-selecting.  They were highly technical individuals who were object software fanatics, they needed to persist objects to a store that maintained object properties and object-oriented principles and they needed to be able to carry out lightening fast searches of the resultant database.  However, as is often the case, the business making the purchasing decisions behind these techies just wanted a cost effective solution to store and retrieve complex, related information. And as time went by, plain old relational databases were “good enough” for the task.

The result for my client was that once the fashion of object-orientation had passed, their sales slowed and they had to put their energies into other areas and recognise Object Databases as the 8 fingered niche they really are.

I admire focus. As an early market software vendor it takes huge courage to turn your back on other potential markets.  As a result I really admire companies that have the self-control and self-confidence to stay focussed on their audience, their value proposition, their messages and their prospects.  The challenge for vendors therefore is to segment the total addressable market in such a way that there is enough of an addressable audience for whom you are a perfect solution but at the same time ensuring that the market size gives enough opportunity for growth.

And remember that a coat with deep pockets is a valid solution to the problem of cold 8-fingered hands.

This topic came to mind recently when I looked at Solace Systems and 29West who each take a different approach to high performance messaging.  One vendor certainly appears to be marketing a 5 fingered product that appears to a very broad audience, but the other, whilst not sporting 8 fingers per hand, certainly looks like a good 6 to me.  I’ll post the details on them both soon.

Danny Goodall

Post script.  I know the image has 6 fingers and not 8 but unsurprisingly since Octodigit’s sad demise finding a picture of a glove with 8 fingers has proved a little difficult.  I also know that the depending on where you originate from, the thumb may not constitute a finger.

Welcome to the Lustratus REPAMA blog from Lustratus Research.  I’ve never been a fan of mission statements for the sake of mission statements.  I guess that is because most that I read are painted in the blandest shade of beige or taste of vanilla.  This tends to make them less of an “inspiring,  rallying-call” type of mission statement and more of “a collection of boring indisputable facts that we think the CEO won’t fire us for putting down on paper” type of mission statement.

Mission?

That said, I think it’s worth setting out a plan for the type of material that we’ll be covering in this blog in future editions. So here goes.  I want to write about the efficaciousness or otherwise of the strategies and tactics that vendors in certain market segments use to reach their audience.  I’d like to compare and contrast the marketing efforts of certain vendors and even rank them.  I’d like to give awards for good as well as bad marketing and I’d like to start a discussion about best practices in B2B infrastructure software marketing.  I want to look at the tactical side of marketing such as press and analyst management and lead generation as well as the strategic side.  We’ll be looking to use our REPAMA methodology (more of that below) to infer actual vendor positions against the claims they make.

REPAMA?

Well REPAMA was created by a desire to get competitive intelligence on early market software companies.  I realised that analysts didn’t or weren’t able to track early market vendors which made creating competitive strategies very difficult.  Even in mature markets, it was tough to really understand the detail of how certain vendors were taking specific products to market.  So I set about designing some exercises that would allow me to infer key strategic marketing strategies from the way these companies address their market.  Since then we’ve expanded on these exercises to produce a methodology that allows us to build comprehensive comparisons of vendors’ positioning and messaging by reverse engineering their marketing strategy from the way they approach the market.

Hence REPAMA is our Reverse Engineered Positioning and Messaging Analysis methodology.

Who is we?

Well “we” is Lustratus.  I formed Lustratus with Steve Craggs and Ronan Bradley a couple of years ago as a marketing consultancy and market analysis organisation.  We’re very focused on a small number of infrastructure software segments and we help vendors to better understand the market landscape in which they compete and ultimately to clearly communicate why they believe their technology will be of benefit to their prospects.

Me?

Well I’m Danny Goodall but I’m sure that Steve and Ronan will also contribute to this blog.  For the first 10 years of my career I was a techie but moved into marketing when I realised that the company cars were much better.  I’ve worked for many vendors in field marketing, product marketing, product management and VP Marketing positions and for the last 4 years I’ve been consulting to many others helping them to set or correct corporate marketing strategies or to improve the effectiveness of their tactical field marketing programs.

You probably ought to know that I’m also a massive fan of Southampton Football Club.

Danny Goodall