Marketing is Dead*
*long live Product Marketing
April Dunford
rocketwatcher.com

My Background
• Big Companies
• IBM (Launch and growth of InfoSphere)
• Siebel (Global Marketing Financial Services)
• Nortel (head of incubation)
• Startups
• Infobright
• DataMirror (exit to IBM)
• Janna Systems ($1.4B exit to Siebel Systems)
• In-Between (as of a few weeks ago)
• Solarsoft ($100M revenue)
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Marketing Sucks
• Untargeted and
generic
• Interrupt-driven
• Way too pushy (most
marketing doesn’t care
if I’m ready to buy yet)
Marketers are yelling, and not even yelling at me in particular…

Plus There’s the Lying….

Nobody Believes Marketing Anymore
….and can you blame them?

The World has Changed
Vendors are no longer THE source of
Information
• Customers can broadcast to the world
• Prospects can easily talk to each other
• Product info is readily available
Prospects are far along the buying path
before vendors know about them

What Changes?
Buying vs. Selling
Earned vs. Bought Media
Customer Service
Visibility vs. “Branding”

Who Will Get us Out of This Mess?
You.
Yeah, Ms./Mr. Product Marketer, I’m looking at you.

Why Product Marketing?
• We get segmentation
• We understand the market
needs of our segments
• We have deep product
knowledge
• We know how those fit
together

A New Marketing Framework

Key Elements in this New Environment
Content
Visibility
Messaging
Engagement

Messaging
Needs to answer 3
questions for prospects:
• What is it?
• Is it for me?
• Why should I buy it from
you?
Stories, stories, stories.

Paris Hilton Marketing
13
beautiful but makes no sense

What You Do?
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Netflix – Watch as many movies
as you want for one low monthly
price.
SalesForce.com – the world’s
favorite CRM software as a
service.
Wikipedia – A free encyclopedia
built collaboratively using Wiki
software.

You do WHAT?
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Sun Microsystems – Innovative
products and services that
power the network economy.
Sterling Commerce – helps
companies optimize and
transform their dynamic
business network to accelerate
revenues and reduce costs.
Any internet b2C startup –
Personalizes the Internet!!

Step 1: What the Heck is it?
Keep it brief
Use simple language
Just come out and say it!
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Segmentation is not a Dirty Word
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Market to Everyone, Sell to No One

Explicit Targeting is Powerful
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ThinkGeek: Selling geek t-
shirts for programmers,
linux hackers, and open
source geeks.
VS
Customink: your t-shirt
expert for companies and
individuals.

Go Deep – The Janna Example
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CRM for Investment bankers:
• Use cases, day in the life of a
banker
• Demos, example data
• Whitepapers, articles, opt-ed
• Sales Enablement: the IB
dictionary

Step 2: Is it for Me?
Be explicit about who you target
Use their language
Go as deep as you can
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Why Buy From You?
The terrible secret they don’t teach you in
engineering school:
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Why Buy From You?
The terrible secret they don’t teach you in
engineering school:
Customers Don’t Care about FEATURES
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Why Buy From You?
Value Features
Make sales more productive Integrates customer data from
any source, show relationships
between customers.
Deploy new applications 20%
faster
Extract and transform data from
heterogeneous sources
Resolve IT issues faster Monitor cpu and memory usage in
real time.
Pay off your debt sooner View all account information in
one place, graph spending
patterns.
Sharper, more realistic images Megapixels
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(do that and you won’t need to lie)

Step 3: Why Buy it from You?
Value not Features
Focus on Differentiators
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Bring it to life with Stories
Go ahead April, tell them a story…..

Content for Customers (not sales)
Content needs to be helpful
Requires a strategy
Map to steps in buying
process
Provides the benefit of your
expertise in the market (not
necessarily about product)

Engagement
Community – an
increasingly important
communications channel
• Bring customers &
prospects together
• Help/incent customers to
carry your message
• How can Marketing help
Customer Service

Visibility
How non-users observe
that others are users:
• Product features
• Shareable content
• Reviews/awards
• Independent analysis
• Success marketing

Thanks!
RocketWatcher.com
Twitter: @aprildunford
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