Wordy Rappinghood

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, a CMO, trusted advisor, strategy consultant and Chief Bottle Washer at Rockstar CMO. In this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of what’s caught my eye from our community, our podcast and our street knowledge blog.

Hello there!

If you know me, you’ll know I spent a lot of my career in the content management industry, an industry that is notorious for its alphabet soup of terminology. I say “a lot”; it was over 20 years in various vendors, as an analyst, agency side, and as an advisor.

Buyers may find it slightly baffling to look at the broader categories like web content management, digital asset management, product information management, and content marketing platforms.

That’s before you pile on the terminology that vendors use to differentiate themselves within these categories, like MACH, headless, decoupled, or something that one vendor is trying to resuscitate as “universal.”

I’ve been reminded of the word soup recently and have seen two sides of this.

In a WhatsApp group of senior marketers, I saw a post from a B2C CMO looking for a solution to manage the workflow of editing, collaborating on, and publishing pieces of content. A buyer who is clearly looking for help with a content management system (CMS).

Simultaneously, I watched a discussion on LinkedIn amongst the “inside baseball” CMS community, mainly of sellers and consultants passionately discussing the validity of whether a specific web content management solution can be described as “universal,” hard on the heels of the many heated conversations about whether a platform can be described as “MACH” or “headless”.

Neither of these paragraphs may make sense to you if you don’t have an interest in this category, but I use this as an example because here we have two sides of the same discussion: a buyer expressing their needs looking for help in a peer conversation and the solution providers blathering away in blah blah high geeky speak amongst their peers.

As my chum Cathy McKnight recently shared recently on the podcast, when we discussed a vendor describing themselves as a “Universal Content Management System,” nobody, especially the buyer, cares.

Nobody cares until you can frame this as being relevant to their business problem.

If you are not familiar with MACH, which I have referred to, it means “a content management system that builds a digital ecosystem on the concept of microservices-based, API-first, Cloud-native SaaS, and Headless architecture.”

Compare this with the problem as described by the buyer in the WhatsApp chat:

“Do any of you use a content-managed system that allows different teams within an org to update and collaborate during content development, which allows the other teams to acknowledge their plans to use /promote that content once it’s finalised with various stakeholders?”

Later, she posted, “I need an asset management system, apparently.”

Maybe she does, but that “apparently” suggested scepticism. She doesn’t care what label the industry applies; her problem was her problem. And I don’t think asking her if she wanted it microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native SaaS, and headless would have helped.

Maybe the CMS industry is particularly f**ked up, and maybe I should resist riding this particular hobby horse around, but I think this equally applies to many B2B technology categories.

I am working on some messaging with a client in a very different category, and it’s so easy when chatting with the bright folks who created the product to lapse into describing the important features/functions in business speak and techno-babble that only we understand and fail to express this in the context of the actual problem being solved.

It’s also super easy to look at competitors, and rather than focus on the business problem the buyer is trying to solve, we rush into putting the slim differences (in the buyer's eye) between us and them front and centre.

A buyer, in the first flush of solving their problem, wants to know who can solve it. Patiently explaining the difference between an API and Microservices on your homepage isn’t going to help gain that trust. It’s focusing on messaging the very things most buyers care least about.

So, this week, for the subject line, I'm dropping deep into my 80s childhood with Tom Tom Club and Wordy Rappinghood. Check out the live performance below, or search for their music video on YouTube. It’s the most 80s thing you’ll ever see!

Thanks for reading this far, I hope you enjoy your week!

Cheers!

Ian

Ian Truscott | Chief Bottle Washer Rockstar CMO

Say hello, reply to this email or find me on LinkedIn or my personal website.

On the Podcast

Street Knowledge

In this video, from [gasp!] 2018 Cathy tackles this very issue.

Finally

Here is a very fine example of the craft, I was going to link to the vendor website, but thought it’s probably best not:

Oooooh! I got to get me one of those!

Get your Monday Marketing Mojo Working

Maybe one of the 80’s things you’ll ever hear, but perfect for this topic.