Wednesday, November 28, 2007

On Security Marketing

Answer one simple [but slightly philosophical :-)] question for me, please: if you look at a security company website and, upon reading it, you have no idea whatsoever what they ACTUALLY DO, does it lower your opinion of their technologies?

Or, in other words, are you able to notice good technology through the sleaze-veil of bad marketing?

Here are some fun examples from recent history which kinda explain what I am talking about:
  • 'we just added a GRC feature'
  • 'we moved into the risk management business'
  • 'we simplify threat monitoring'
UPDATE: this is in part inspired by this MJR post to fw-wiz.
UPDATE2: another very fun example today from Mike: '"unrivaled SaaS technology that represents a tipping point in enterprise security." Who writes this stuff, and how can I get some of what they are smoking?'

3 comments:

PaulM said...

100% absolutely. If your product doesn't serve a clear function or meet an easily explained need, it's probably bunk.

If merely explaining what your product does gives away so much info that it can be easily copied by your competitors, then you haven't done anything cool to begin with.

Unknown said...

You know, I'm sorry to say this isn't limited to security. My favorite exercise is to walk around a trade show and see if I can tell what a company does from its signage.

Unfortunately, too much writing in marketing is either a) outsourced or b) written by people who don't think like a customer. Not to plug my own blog, but I was just writing about this in my CMO 2.0 blog. In it, I suggest a very simple thing: read a magazine to improve your marketing. You will read professional writing and understand what your customers care about, and how they say it.

Anton Chuvakin said...

@timmy: good point indeed. Many IT product suffer from it as well. Trade shows are pretty funny this way: what's worse, sometimes people in the booth don't know better :-)

Please post a link to your CMO 2.0 blog ...

Dr Anton Chuvakin