Assume the Positioning: Words that work in Tech PR, Part 3

If you have read my first two posts in the series, and followed my instructions, then that means you have done a ton of research and your head is probably hurting right around now.

To help, I will switch gears, and revisit an earlier topic: understanding frames and root metaphors, and explore this within the context of technology categories and market positioning.

Further to the importance of doing the research needed to understand the technology and space (discussed in part 2), one of the key questions is: what is the space? What category of technology does your product fall under?

Categories are important not just to give trade press reporters beats, bloggers soapboxes and analysts toll machines and areas of specialty and reputation building. (If this all sounds too abstract, just think of the words that describe your company at the opening of the press release – the strapline – “Acme, an industrial widgets company, announced today…”)

They pave the way to a greater understanding of the tech universe through a (more or less) neatly ordered taxonomy that places whatever is out there into just the right bucket. Having a good understanding of the space you are playing in – the dynamics of the space, competitive arena, its history, trends, and associations – will inform the process of defining your positioning within the space.

Thus, determining the appropriate category is extremely important, and means quite a bit for how you build your story and the words you choose. Choosing the right category can be a springboard to describing your positioning and where you are going within the space (and perhaps how you will change the space or help it to evolve).

The limiting factor here is that your choice of space and positioning cannot be strictly opportunistic, of course, it must be credible; call yourself whatever you wish, people will place you in whatever bucket they feel is most appropriate and you will just cause confusion if your choice of category does not mesh with reality.

Also, inventing totally new categories poses challenges because you will need to educate people about the need for the category, and you will spend lots of time figuring out which reporter or analyst is the right one (and convincing them of the same). This is not to say that it is never right to invent a new category – someone had to go forth and market the first PC and network-attached storage appliance, for example – just that it should be done with the understanding that sometimes the only things pioneers have to show for their efforts are arrows in their backs.

Assume the Positioning: What Bucket to Fall Into

When you adopt a category, you also buy into its history, its energy (or lack thereof), and its root metaphors (as described in part I).

Each space has a trajectory, a beginning, middle, and end. You can get a better sense of the state of your category by checking out the Gartner Hype Cycle (see illustration above for a somewhat dated example), which seeks to show where technologies are on the adoption curve.

A challenge is that there really is not any single, definitive taxonomy of technology products. Analysts, publication directories and buyer guides, and Wikipedia don’t always agree and may well carve up the tech world differently. Further, it is not just the category you need to decide on, but the subcategory and parent category.

Fortunately, the world of Web 2.0 has given us folksonomies, and ways to get a bead on what really counts: the exact words that real people – customers and potential customers – are using to search for and bookmark Web pages related to technology. You can consult any number of social bookmarking and keyword mining sites to see the words people are using in their searches, and compare various combinations. You can even graphically chart the popularity of terms and phrases and compare them side by side over a given time period on BlogPulse.

These words can play an important role in optimizing your content for search engines. For now, we will concern ourselves with how your category can influence your market positioning.

We Hold these Truths to Be Self-Evident

Below I provide some examples that illustrate my points about technology categories – why it is important to understand their evolution, and the story frames that go along with them.

I started out my IT career designing solutions such as sales enablement software and similar IT solutions. I marketed one of the first distributed systems (SalesForce Information Manager was MS-DOS-based and synchronized data between field workers’ systems and a central server) from a company called XYZT Computer Dimensions. It was in the early ’90s, before the ascent of Windows. At the time, mobile computing meant schlepping around 24 pounds IBM “luggable” laptop computers. Even back then, the SFA field was a very competitive, fractured marketplace, with many contenders and no clear leaders.

Flash forward about eight years and a company that some guys from Oracle started called Siebel Systems is dominating the market. Only now the umbrella name for the category has morphed into Customer Relationship Management (CRM), with SFA occupying a subset of the category. Siebel was emblematic of a large vendor selling an enterprise-class solution amidst a pack of much smaller competitors.