Branding
Every day I hear more and more about the “sea of sameness” from founders, CEOs, CROs, and CMOs. The dialog goes something like this: * There are so many products out there, * They are getting more similar, * Customers are more confused than ever, * Unable to see the differences between them. * Thus,
Communications
[Cross-posted from LinkedIn, see note.] <rant> I can't tell you the number of times I applied this rule when I ran marketing from $30M to $1B at Business Objects back in the day. It's 1:00 AM, I'm doing final edits on
Competition
Does your competitive analyst introduce themselves like this? If so, you’ve got a problem. Not only because his younger brother Big is a controversial employee over in DOGE but, more importantly, because old Harvey is not defining his job correctly. Many competitive analysts effectively define their job as product
Marketing
"If a bird walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck." -- James Whitcomb Riley Many marketers are in such a hurry to talk about topical issues that they forget the duck test: if it walks like
Communications
Once in a rare while, I address political issues in my blog. Why? Well, because when it comes to messaging and positioning, it's the big leagues. Politics is Major League Baseball, consumer packaged goods (CPG) is AAA, and here in Silicon Valley we're only AA. It&
AR
Using the Marketing Fundamental Tension Quadrant to Map Your Demandgen and Communications Strategy Years ago I wrote a post on what I call the fundamental tension in marketing: the gap between what we want to say and what our audience wants to hear. For example, let's say we&
Demandgen
I hopped over to London a few weeks back to visit my friends at Balderton Capital (where I'm now working as an EIR) and during the visit we decided to host a meetup for portfolio company founders, CEOs, and CMOs to discuss the question of how to build
Marketing
Lately, I've received some consulting inquiries where companies are asking for help with positioning and messaging. While that's definitely an area of interest and passion, my business model is advice-as-a-service (AaaS) -- I work with a smaller set of companies, on a broader set of issues,
Demandgen
Back in the day I was taught that marketers do three things, memorized via the acronym STP: segment, target, position. * Divide the audience into different segments. For example, dividing consumers by demographics or dividing businesses by size or industry. * Select the segments that the company wishes to target for its
Positioning
This morning we announced that Vector Capital has closed the acquisition of Host Analytics. As part of that transaction I have stepped down from my position of CEO at Host Analytics. To borrow a line from The Lone Ranger, “my work is done here.” I’ll consult a bit to
Communications
Ever hear this story? VP of Marketing: "OK, well, you know, pretty good." VP of Sales: "Why are you hemming and hawing?" VP of Marketing: "Well, I could tell they didn't love it." VP of Sales: "Do you know why? I
Marketing
Theodore Levitt At some point in every marketer's career they produce a data sheet that looks like this: Our product uses state-of-the-art technology including a MapReduce distributed backend processing engine with predictive analytics including multivariate adaptive regression splines, support vector machine classification, and naive Bayesean machine learning. When