Reviewed by by James Forr, Head of Insights Olson Zaltman
Columbia, Missouri, jforr@olsonzaltman.com
“Positioning is a long-term game, while messaging is a shorter-term one. But success with both requires a combination of perseverance (as you find what works) and patience (as you build on it).”
Tech companies often get ahead of themselves. One of the latest examples is the AI Pin, a wearable AI device that its manufacturer calls “a second brain,” but which noted tech influencer Marques Brownlee calls “the worst new product I have ever reviewed in its current state.”
In Loved: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products, Martina Lauchengco advises tech product marketers how to avoid missteps like this—by staying in closer touch with their consumers and creating the necessary dynamics inside their organizations for products to achieve their full potential.
A 30-year tech veteran, partner at an early-stage VC firm, and former product manager at Microsoft, Lauchengco discusses the delicate dance among product marketing, product management, and sales. The beat that drives this dance is a clear message about the role that a product can play in consumers’ lives.
Lauchengco notes that tech firms often seek out attribute-level solutions when their products are struggling. Additional features, better functionality, more, more, more. But all those attributes won’t be sufficient without a unified story that makes them all stick together as a single, coherent solution in the consumer’s mind.
Qualitative research is the key to developing such a message. Lauchengco describes a vice president of global marketing at Dropbox, whose team had its eyes opened by simply talking to consumers and seeing how they used the product. They had plenty of quantitative data in hand, but without the deeper context, that data led them to assumptions that proved to be off the mark.
Emotion, Lauchengco writes, should be a central focus of that research. Silicon Valley marketers sometimes struggle with emotion because it isn’t a hard metric that can be readily measured and correlated with sales. Nonetheless, positioning and messaging that don’t acknowledge the emotional needs that a product fulfills are unlikely to make an impact.
Furthermore, knowing where to target a brand message is just as important as the content of the message. Lauchengco illustrates this with a tale about an online backup company that snagged new customers through paid endorsements from radio hosts. Only after a deeper dive did they realize that their customer base was skewed toward senior citizens, who tend to listen to a lot of radio but usually don’t evangelize about tech brands. (Fair or not, how often have you asked someone over the age of 60 for advice about new technology?)
The company’s growth had begun to stagnate. Narrowing the target market to focus on 30-somethings who listen to public radio and who also talk about tech products with friends and family changed the trajectory of the brand.
One of the most immediately applicable takeaways from the book is Lauchengco’s rubric for assessing marketing communication. She calls it CAST—clear, authentic, simple, and tested. In the early days of Expensify, for example, the brand deployed messaging that read, “Expense reports that don’t suck! Hassle-free expense reporting built for employees and loved by admins.”
It was a statement that used clear, down-to-earth verbiage, touched on the emotional needs of customers, clearly articulated the brand benefits, and appealed to multiple audiences. The language was clear, not explanatory, and was refreshingly free of business jargon or tech mumbo-jumbo.
If you have worked in marketing for any length of time, some of what is in Loved will read as common sense. Nonetheless, hearing it from Lauchengco’s perspective on the frontlines in Silicon Valley is instructive. She offers valuable reminders for anyone in any company—not just those in tech—about assuring that marketing works collaboratively with other parts of the organization; that marketing’s job is to be an ambassador, strategist, storyteller, and evangelist; and, perhaps most critically, that seeing your product through the eyes of the consumer is central to ultimate brand success.
