Guy Smith breaks down seven marketing pillars: market definition, segmentation, genotype analysis, whole-product definition, positioning, branding, and messaging. He walks through each with SUSE Linux as a concrete example, showing how to target different buyers like CTOs and position for enterprise customers. Launch with 75% of your product ready.
Chapters
First, define your market. This includes not only what is the big market, but what is your addressable market, what is your realistic market. In other words, keep whittling it down. The next one, segment. You got to go through segmentation in order to figure out where you can realistically play. After that, genotype analysis. Who in your target segment do you have to sell to, and what do you need to sell them? After that, whole product definition. Are you sure that your product meets all, or at least most of the needs of the people in your target segments? Positioning. In the grand world of this segment, considering all of your competitors, all of your customer needs, and your key differentiations, where do you position yourself in the map? Because that's going to guide your communications a lot. Branding, what do you want people to think and feel about your product? And finally messaging, what is the actual stuff you will be saying to people and why should they believe you? You'll notice that these are layers. I call them pillars, layers, I use the term too interchangeably. You cannot go to the next step until you complete the step below it. Is well you can, but you'll screw up. Imagine trying to brand your product if you don't know what your segment and your genotypes are. Sure, you could do it, but you'll be saying the wrong things to the wrong people at the wrong time. Yes.
Can you use an example of a solution that we often use by using this model?
A product that you're familiar with?
Amazon, like how they do this code, like how they can actually do the procedure? Because I'm very not aware about how to actually—
Let me use SUSE Linux, because I've given this talk so many times that it's like tattooed on the inside of my frontal lobe. Can you repeat what the question was? Yeah, oh, I'm sorry. The question was, give us an example of a product that we know and how you would go through all these different steps. All right, so SUSE Linux, the market was pretty obvious. It was anyone Who had money who might need to want to use Linux? That basically meant companies. However, we narrowed it down through segmentation. There are a lot of uninteresting Linux buyers, people with little mom-and-pop shops, people who are doing experimentation, people who are running stupid little print and file servers and not doing anything else. So we decided our segment was going to be enterprises, and then specifically people who had global aspirations for Linux. They saw it as their future. Genotype analysis. We had to eventually sell to the techies, because they were going to at least test drive the product. We had to sell to the chief technology officer, whose job it was to figure out how all the technologies worked together. But primarily, we had to sell to the CIOs who were trying to come up with a 5-year strategy. And what I did, and you can still find this on the web, is an article titled What CXOs Think About Linux. This tells you how old this piece is. But all I did was I went out and I talked to every CIO I could find. I said, tell me your 5-year plan. We're not even going to talk about Linux today. They told me their 5-year plan. I told them their stories back to them, but using Linux as the example of how they could achieve that. That's how we got Ford Motor Company to say that SUSE Linux was going to be the default Linux Whole product definition. So a whole product is one that addresses all the needs and possibly all the wants and desires of the key buyer. And so you have to make sure, you have to define what that is. You have to go do your research and find out what people want. Then you have to design your product so that you at least come close to meeting all those things.
So, things.
And don't be afraid to go out to market with a 75% product. A lot of times people will settle for good enough. After that, we had to position SUSE Linux. One of the interesting things at that particular point in time was SUSE was the only Linux that ran on IBM mainframes. And a lot of people thought that that was a really strange thing to do. But I interviewed CIOs who were doing that to explain their case. And what we were doing was we were positioning Linux as such a serious, business-oriented, no-holds-barred, absolutely reliable Linux that you could put on your mainframe and serve your entire company on the hardware you already know. So if you're an IBM owner and you hear, I can put Linux up in a partition, you know, you don't even think about Red Hat at that point. So that was the positioning, putting in the mind of the buyer what the differentiation was in relationship to the competition. Branding. That was the biggest problem that I had with the guys at Souza because it didn't matter how much I explained the concept to them, they could not get their brains around it. So what I did was internally I composed my own branding statement, and the branding statement was the only serious enterprise-grade Linux available. That's why I wanted people to think and feel. There's a feel aspect to that. That sounds like a think statement, but the feel aspect inside of IT, and I know this because I used to work there, is that failure is painful. And so if you position yourself and you brand yourself as saying this is the only serious thing that can be used in a modern enterprise, then you get this sense of assurance and this sense of peace of mind that you're not going to fail. And then finally, messaging. And this was a funny one. Our messaging changed year to year. And the reason was that when we would tell a CIO this in the year 2001, we knew that they would be talking to their techies in that language during 2001. So, 2002, we would start telling CIOs a different story, but we would start telling the 2001 story to the techies. And what the techies were hearing was, oh, this is what my CIO wants. I need to pay attention. So, the messaging needs to reflect the brand, but it also needs to reflect the individual needs of each of the buyers. So, when you come up with your message manual, a little book, maybe 5 or 6 pages, of all the different core messages, you have different messages for each one of the different genotypes. And when you get up to the point where you have 5 products spanning 27 different segments with an accumulation of 84 different genotypes that you all need to come up with messaging for, that's the time to retire because it just gets way too painful after that.
