We were recently doing some PR planning with a client. The client had mixed emotions because they were for the first time going to be included in a major industry analyst report of their space (I'll keep the details intentionally vague, but to help in your understanding of the situation I will point out that the study was on par with a Gartner Magic Quadrant or a Forrester Wave report).
The client was ambivalent because they were unhappy with their positioning in the report. As such, they were considering opting out – a choice the analyst firm offered to them. Apparently, there was little else the client could do for the time being to change their standing.
In reviewing their situation, our team realized that the client had a point. The company has an offering which really is pretty innovative and disruptive for the space. The analyst firm clearly did not fully appreciate this or was not convinced that the client's differentiators were that significant.
I pointed out that opting out of the report was a little bit like cutting off your nose to spite your face. First of all, a lot more people would learn about the company if they participated. Secondly, participating was a first step and not a final step with the analyst firm. Participating would give them a better chance of building a relationship with the analyst firm and influencing the client's standing over the long term.
Finally, a beautiful thing about the emergence of social media is that it in some ways allows us to have our cake and eat it to.
We could stay in the report, and use the situation as an opportunity to educate the analyst firm and industry by blogging (in an informative way, not to flame or bellyache) about why our client's differentiators are important. In this way we could call attention to our inclusion in the report, which some might consider to be an achievement; we could also start a dialog with industry watchers and elevate issues we feel are important; and we could leverage another channel to engage and hopefully influence the analyst firm – a public channel which would be difficult to ignore.
It was an interesting situation and emotions ran high because we were pretty evenly split on both sides across the agency and client side teams. In addition to our team's counsel, one thing that seemed to tilt things in favor of staying in the report: we solicited the opinion of a Fortune 500 CIO, who said that in his experience most IT organizations take these reports with a grain of salt, and on balance it would be better to be in the report. In other words, they probably would not use the report to rule a vendor's technology in or out assuming the vendor otherwise met their needs.
I agree with your reasons on recommendaing staying in the report;however,engaging with the analysts on a regular basis and creating a relationship with them–will help your client understand why they were positioned where they were and what would it take for them to move up or over on the quadrant/vendor measurement tool. Sometimes it is about how many customers or revenue you have but in the past we have convinced analysts to move our company up on the quadrant once we understood the reasons for their decisions. Good luck