Product Strategist: Strategic Marcom

Yesterday, I came across a comment to the On Product Management blog post "Should Product Management and Product Marketing be parts of the same department?" at http://tinyurl.com/db5xad. The commentor claimed that marcom is tacticle.

The claim is correct for complementors. It is true for software being sold into the consumer market. It is true for products marketed to geeks. It is true for SaaS. It isn't true for B2B software that productizes a discontinuous or radical technology, which implies that the software is going through the technology adoption lifecycle. It wouldn't be true for something like SAP or Oracle databases. It would be true for something like Twitter.

Marcom covers a lot of ground. Advertising can be either strategic or tactical. This would depend on how long the creative platform would remain unchanged. The individual ads, as a story within a story, could change, but the larger story would remain the same. Bartles and James ran for a very long time. The GEICO geko has been around for a while. Promo ads is another type of marketing communications that is deliberately short lived. The weekly specials at the grocery store drive traffic to the store and determine which chain comes out on top for the week those specials ran. Complementors do business on this basis. Their promo spend determines market leadership in the period where that spend was spent. Next week, a new race for market leadership. Brand content across all marcom platforms will tend to be long term and strategic.

Marcom includes whitepapers. Whitepapers may make a small brand contribution, but their role is to market through specifics, build a preference for a specific set of purchase criteria, and provide a persuasive argument for the analytical minds in the purchase decision. Brand will influence the purchase, but the persuasive argument must be available to cover the fact that the buy was made on the basis of emotions, not logic. It is this kind of marcom, the persuasvie content that should be strategic. It takes a chain of these documents. That chain should be at least 5, some say 7, documents. That chain would be the enactment chain, which I discussed in the articles on conversion and interfaces: http://www.noozit.com/article/.ee84d0d and http://www.noozit.com/article/.ee84d7c.

In a B2C situation, you can write one single sales letter, and it can generate significant business. In B2B, a single letter or document won't work. In B2B, the complexity of the sale increases with each person involved in the purchase decision. You have to sell the economic buyer, the producing users, the functional managers of those users, the CIO, and stakeholders across the prospect's company. That said, each of your prospect companies will be similar, so this document set can be reused, and its cost distributed over a wide population of prospects.

But, I've got ahead of the graphics. So lets start with a single document.

In a corporate setting, a document is built from a template. That template is built around a framework. AIDA is the typical marcom document framework. AIDA has numerous variants. One framework I use RISE: Recognition, Image, Specifics, and Enactment. RISE is useful across customer communications where you do not make competitive claims.

A document meets the recognition criteria when the prospect recognizes that your company or product exists. Image conveys your brand. That might be a logo, a look and feel, a format, or a voice. Specifics provide the details about some aspect of your product. Enactment makes an offer, embodies the offer in persausive conversion text, provides contact addresses across numerous response channels, and convinces the prospect to take an action to get the offered information, service, or good.

In the B2B situation, several documents are chained.

A fulfillment chain makes a series of offers. Each offer is a self-identifying offer. A prospect that wants more details about the business case is more likely to be an economic buyer than a user or an IT admin person. These fulfillment chains work online or offline. The B2B purchase involves many people. Each role in the purchase should be addressed with their own fulfillment chain.

Marcom maintains a wide document set. These fulfillment chains partition that document set. The volume of content in these document sets is expensive to create, but the production costs get distributed over all the receipents of the documents. This document set grows over the life of technology or product. This document set grows over the life of the company as well. The production costs grow in parallel as the cost structure of the company grows. Media proliferation has exploded the number of documents the company must create and maintain. This cannot be done on a tactical basis.

This figure shows how production costs are distributed over the prospects at various points over the lifecycle of a product. It is fastest when customer pool is growing quickly. The grown in the customer pool slows down, so the costs decrease slower. In the late market, price pressure erodes the ability to create additional documents even as the product is embodied on a new platform (SaaS). It becomes critical that the software no longer require documentation, or present learning barriers to customers. At the same time, growth has come to an end, so the population over which the cost is distributed is getting smaller and smaller.

This figure presents another view of the cost situation.

When we develop our roadmaps we have a technology roadmap for the technical platform. Our differentiation will be found in our technical platform. The technical platform also embodies our innovation. The innovation has a technical realization, and a conceptual basis. As we bring that conceptualization into existence we deal with the concept, its conceptualization, the terminology that we use to express the conceptualization, the definitions of that terminology, and keywords that we can use to test our terminology, concepts, markets, and to increase traffic to our relevant websites.

We deal with all of these things in both development and marketing. There are XML languages to move you seemlessly from ontology to terminology to UML and beyond.

Since we embody concepts in our development efforts, you can imagine that conceptual platforms exist while the concept is valid across the life of the technology and product platforms involved. Eventually, as code is depreciated, the concept are likewise depreciated. Since the technical and product platforms have strategic lives, their underlying conceptualizations have strategic lives. Those conceptualizations drive the document set, so the documents in that document set would have strategic lives as well.

This figure ties concepts to the release cycle.

This figure ties the concepts in the technology platform to the concepts in the productization and to the promotion content. Notice that the promotional content is shown as a series of points to echo its tactical nature.

Some marcom is strategic. Some is tactical. For a product manager, knowing the difference will provide you with some guidance on allocating your focus when you find yourself overwhelmed.

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