How To Label Innovative Products

"Outsmart the everyday."

-- Dymo tagline

One of the biggest challenges of marketing truly innovative products is not knowing what to label them. (Why people called cars horseless carriages before they called them cars.) Until the public settles on a label (hopefully with the help of your thought leadership), you risk mislabeling the product just because you have to call it something people already know.

Choose the right label, and you instantly confer a whole bunch of meaning every time you use it — a branding principle that school children get at a very young age. If the label doesn’t fit, you’ll have a whole lot of explaining to do (which makes you look defensive and tends to legitimize the label even more). If it does fit, then half your positioning job may be over before you even use the label in a sentence (never mind a paragraph, ad, white paper, brochure or website).

By the way, one sign of how much innovation a product actually contains is by the method used to label it. Products that lack genuine innovation tend to be called by made-up words. Think FiOS -- fiber optic cable service offered by the phone company instead of the cable company. If you want to create an impression of differentiation where there is none, then one way to go is to use a made-up word and define it with heavy amounts of advertising.

But that’s not the problem most of my clients face. They tend to be smaller highly innovative companies whose challenge is to convey an actual value difference — one that target customers would likely buy if they only understood what it is. These clients have to use the same words that everyone else uses — even if the product category they invented has (by definition) never existed before.

One of the most straightforward ways to do this is with an attribute that distinguishes the product from the category it replaces. Take my client’s solution, for example -- essentially an email substitute that provides enhanced security (encryption, authentication, non-repudiation, etc.) outside the walls of a protected network.

Until now, this type of solution hasn’t happened because the necessary infrastructure has been far too expensive and requires too much effort for organizations to adopt widely. On the other hand, the need is huge — for example, if you are a government agency and you want to email local law enforcement a case file -- or if you are a doctor and you want to email test results to a patient.

To communicate both the familiar and the innovative in the same label, I chose the qualifying attribute “easy as email.” To create the label, I applied this attribute to a specific use case. For example, in a healthcare brief the label is: “Easy as email” HIPPA-Compliant Communications. For an intelligence community brief the label is: “Easy as email” Ultra Secure Communications.

The quotation marks allow me to make the logical connection without being too technical. On the one hand, we immediately establish that this product is definitely NOT email. On the other, readers understand that this is an equivalent experience with the added value of enhanced security (as relevant to a particular vertical).

The Excitement Starts Here

"Our next Marketing to the High-End Bride is all about how luxury brands are finally getting serious about the web."

-- weddingprof.com

Last week I blogged about how technical knowledge doesn’t give engineers a pass when it comes to creating an effective sales pitch. Getting people excited about your product is Job 1. That’s something consumer marketers already get since they usually don’t have the luxury of a clear-cut technical advantage to fall back on. And even when they do, most consumers probably don’t want it explained to them anyway.

So every once in while here is what even the geekiest of us technology marketers should do — try our hand at a real honest-to-goodness consumer marketing project. Take the technology out of the equation and see how good we really are at building a brand when all we have is whatever customer experience we ourselves can create using words, images and events.

And to make the challenge even more interesting, try doing that with a very small marketing budget -- where your actions (for good or bad) have the clearest impact on results.

Suppose, for example, your wife runs a small wedding invitations boutique and she turns to you one day and says, “Honey, would you help me with my marketing?” That's what happened to me. You can find her website here. Alternatively, you can just Google “invitations Boston” -- you won’t have to look far down the list.

Besides the website -- which itself includes several key elements missing from most competitors’ sites -- the campaign contains a number of differentiating features. The most interesting is “Marketing to the High-End Bride.” That’s a breakfast workshop held twice a year at a luxury Boston venue. Rather than going after brides directly, this event is oriented toward other wedding professionals (particularly high-end venues) who can and do provide a continuous stream of referrals. Typically these referrals are high net worth couples who are less apt to discount. They are also accustomed to lots of service and less prone to hassle with putting their wedding invitations together themselves online.

The event is always a sellout (100-130, depending on venue size). It is private, by invitation-only, and you must prepay. Producing the event affords multiple touch points using our proprietary list of 500+ Boston area wedding related contacts. The touch points include multiple print and electronic newsletters and invitations, the website and of course the event itself.

So, rather than doing what most wedding vendors do -- calling venues and requesting to get on their referral lists -- we are getting calls from high-end venues asking if they can host our next event, which will be number 10.

Essentially, this campaign has everything you would expect from a mid-size or even large consumer products company -- except that there are no net out-of-pocket costs. You just need to think of it, and know how to do it.

Why Engineers Hire Writers

"Written by Engineers … for Engineers"

-- Evaluation Engineering tag line

Most of my clients are engineers -- even if that is not their title or they delegate marketing to a non-engineer. At the end of the day, writing that sells technology translates technical value to business value. Most often that means writing in a non-technical way to a business audience. But sometimes, as in my recent ghost written article for Evaluation Engineering, it means writing in a technical way to a technical audience.

There is an old debate about whether better technical articles come from English majors or engineers. In my experience, they almost always come from engineers. Even before an article can sell, it has to be technically correct. Then, of course, some engineers are extremely good writers -- which is generally what you see when you read great technical copy on a website or in a brochure or article. As in any field, some engineers just have it.

Where some engineers get into trouble is by thinking technical accuracy is enough. It is enough if all you want to do is explain how something works, and the audience is committed to reading what you write because they are paid to. That’s a pretty low standard of performance.

A sales piece is a sales piece regardless of how technical or non-technical it is. All the technology does is add another layer of complexity, but does not fundamentally change the mission. Whether you are an engineer or not and whether you are writing to engineers or not, writing that doesn’t come to a point isn’t interesting. And coming to a point is always the same thing as selling.

We Get You

"I'd like to ask your cooperation by asking you to move all your belongings out of your office by the close of business on Friday."

-- Boston Office Head, Regis McKenna, Inc., 2/7/1990

So what’s with my cat on the home page? It was 20 years ago this week when I officially launched my freelance writing business — just as Regis McKenna, Inc. asked that I kindly vacate the building because the Boston office had been downsized. Not long afterward the office closed.


And “Writing that Sells Technology” began. This was actually what I wanted to do anyway. So thanks, Regis, for the push.

The sweetest part of marketing consulting is to fully “get” the client -- to completely understand them both cognitively and empathetically -- and then to bend the English language in a way that makes the client realize you really do get him or her. Everything starts there.

It’s a concept that animals -- including my cat, Emmy -- grasp intuitively. When they look at you there’s no bullshit. They get you.

Paying attention is also how you compliment someone. And so we say thanks: to my clients and everyone else who has paid attention to my mailings, my website, my blog and to me over all these years. We’re just getting started.