The Confusing Thing about Confusing Things
Maybe don't tell prospects your product is confusing...and stop reading 'Play Bigger'
Hello Gobbledeers.
Selling software is difficult, but I’ve yet to see any homepage or ad that says, “It’s really hard to sell this software, please help us by buying it. Please.”
I haven’t seen that, but I did see this:
“CDPs are confusing.”
As someone who does think that CDPs are kinda confusing, I can understand the sentiment. As someone who writes about software marketing, that sentiment sounds bananas.
Simon Data is a Customer Data Platform - a CDP. And one would think that the responsibility to explain clearly the benefits of a CDP would lie squarely in the hands of a company like, say, Simon Data.
It might also behoove a company like Simon Data not to completely insult the readers of that ad (namely, me…tho I did just say earlier that I find CDPs confusing…life is confusing, I guess) by suggesting they’re not capable of understanding the technology.
This reminds me of an ad the Ford Motor Company ran in Collier’s 1943:
If you’re in a space where the tech is new, there’s a tendency to focus on category creation rather than clearly focusing on the benefits the new tech provides.
I blame the authors of the book Play Bigger for this, who talk about the importance of creating a new category, then becoming the leader in that category. (Now that I’m thinking about it, the authors can write whatever the hell they want. I blame the startup founders for talking about that book and giving it to the team and telling everyone to follow what it says so they can be the next Uber, tho without the founder being fired by the board, but also with Joseph Gordon-Levitt).
This has caused two things to happen:
Startup founders think that there’s a straight line between reading a book and a gigantic pile of cash.
Companies skip the part where they clarify the benefits of using the product and how it’s different from competitors’ products (the hard part!) and jump right to the category creation & domination (the fun1 part!).
I’m picking on Simon Data, but the CDP space is filled with companies that have read Play Bigger. Which is why nearly every CDP website is filled with nonsense like “The CDP for Customer-Centric Brands.” And why Simon Data’s site is filled with gems like:
Customer-centricity isn't a philosophy. It's a technical and operational capability.
(????)
Combine the CDP’s data flexibility and ease of integration with the orchestration capabilities required to deliver a seamless, future-proof customer experience that connects.
It’s a festival of Gobbledy.
The good news for marketers is that you can both be a leader in a newly created category AND clearly present the benefits of your product.
My friends, behold mparticle’s homepage:
That’s not confusing.
The subhead:
Collect customer data once through secure APIs and SDKs and connect it to all of your tools with mParticle's Customer Data Platform.
Notice a few things here:
The reason you’d buy a CDP is clear: It’s so you can “collect customer data once…and connect it to all of your tools.”
The CDP isn’t what you’re buying. The CDP is how they’re able to provide that benefit. Nobody cares about buying a CDP. They do care deeply about making it easier to share data across their tools.
I went back-and-forth about “through secure APIs and SDKs” and whether it should be in the top messaging on the page. I believe it’s in here so that the visitor knows that this is a technical product that will require technical resources on their team to be part of the buying process, which is important to know early on, and suggests it’s not a lightweight plug-and-play solution.
If you’re in a “confusing” category, you need to eliminate the category from your messaging as much as possible.
I know this makes founders uncomfortable.
There’s a belief that only very early stage companies focus on functionality. That at some point ($10mm in ARR?) the company graduates to, uh, play bigger. And they talk about the platform and stop talking about the functionality (because they believe it makes them seem small).
But great messaging - like the mparticle example - shows how you build a bridge from a focus on functionality to the benefits of the platform to how it’s powered by the leading product in the category for their target market.
(Here’s where I ask for a small favor - if you can forward this newsletter on to just one person you know who cares about language, marketing or the language of marketing, we can double the size of our community [assuming my math is correct]. I promise, those people will thank you [or they’ll just delete the email. One or the other.])
Fun = the CMO gets to talk about creating a category when they interview 8 months later.