Trust Is at the Core of Software Marketing
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For example, they would avoid changing materials/tooling for their products that have been manufactured for decades without rigorous testing that showed it improved the product or unless supply chain issues out of their control forced them to (which my understanding was rare, because they engineered their supply chain to avoid it).
Some of this is pragmatic. It takes a century to build a brand and a day to kill it. And in that industry, brand loyalty is as important as specs. But much more of it is genuine care for their products and customers - they hired people who gave a shit, and the culture wasn't one where a penny pinching decision that harmed quality would have been made, let alone tolerated.
My point is this - a brand with "trust" as a core value isn't derived just from transparency, sharing code, auditing and communication. It's built by the people that work on those products, sell them, and make decisions about the product roadmap. Much the way that software architecture reflects organizational architecture, brand value reflects culture and values of the people that work on it.
It also reflects the priorities of their customers: those who can only ask for "cheaper" will not get anything else than "cheaper".
Would you rather own all the plant and equipment of Coca-Cola, or would you rather own the brand?
The answer is obvious and this sort of thing is taught in every business program. Which makes it a shocking when companies do self-destructive things with their brands: Microsoft advertising candy crush and adding pervasive telemetry; Dropbox selling/oversharing user data; chipotle failing to ensure integrity in their supply chain.
Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is terrible?
I see companies tout them but I can't tell if they're effective.
Enterprise purchasing stakeholders value these endorsements to the point that they would be more likely to take a meeting with a vendor positioned in Gartner's magic quadrant or covered favourably in Forrester's Wave reports.
This does not mean that purchasing teams will solely base their decisions on these types of reports, but it certainly can (and often does) positively influence your funnel momentum for a particular year. After securing one or several meetings with various stakeholders in an organization, you'll then have to do the rest of the legwork in your standard sales cycle to close the deal (e.g. demos, tender bid responses, deployments, onerous commercial negotiations, etc).
Purchasing decisions are made later but it is used to narrow the field.
In my experience, these things work largely as a barrier of entry thing. No one will buy something just because Gartner endorsed it, unless they're really clueless, or trying to sabotage their companies while maintaining plausible deniability. However, getting this kind of endorsement requires some level of organizational stability, business connections and money. The fact that you have one is an indication that people can do business with you without jeopardizing their bonuses.
That won't convince anyone to make the purchase, but it will get you through the door.
The endorsements and studies themselves don't mean much. I personally know of at least one such study that was highly effective, and cost an unspeakable amount of money to conduct and market, and was absolutely bollocks. It showed that one company's implementation of a failsafe feature was "at least as efficient" as the industry standard. It was a 20-page-ish whitepaper, with graphs and benchmarks and whatnot. What it didn't even test for, let alone mention, was that exposing that feature to the kind of conditions it was meant to protect against caused it to fail, and then crash the whole system.
Those two firms have done well in building up their credibility in the enterprise market, which means anyone they recommend gets carry-over credibility.
Getting onto those is hard (not going to list all the steps and tactics here for brevity's sake). A relatively easier accomplishment would be to get mentioned in one of their dozens of reports that get published year-round, which focus on a particular use case or subcategory of products.
Easier still is to get mentioned by one of the second-tier (but still valuable) analysts such as IDC and 451 Research.
Edit: I've also been in the position to purchase marketing software with a six-figure budget, and used Forrester's Wave as a shortlist of reputable and popular products. Otherwise I would have to sort through (literally) hundreds of marketing platforms and tools.
An important thing these firms do is aggregate customer feedback. For a consumer tool I can look on Quora and for a development tool I can look at Hacker News. But for enterprise tools the people that use the product are often not allowed to share feedback themselves. However they are allowed to talk with analysts.
That is why the opinions of these analysts are often really important to convince new customers your product is any good https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/
BTW We just won a 451 Firestarter award https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2020-01-14-gitlab-re... which we're stoked about.
BTW Gartner now has an online review tool called Peer Insights https://www.gartner.com/en/products/peer-insights Here you can read the customer reviews https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/application-release-o... I might be a bit biased because in 2018 GitLab won Gartner their customer choice award and recently we won another awards based on peer insights https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2019-07-26-gitLab-re...
That said, other companies don’t care two hoots about it and prefer to evaluate against their own criteria. Even for this it doesn’t hurt though - it can only add weight to the test results.
So yes, it’s valuable for many reasons.
> I see companies tout them but I can't tell if they're effective.
They are very important; their models shape how enterprise thinks about a domain and their recommendations basically make sales. The contents of their expensive reports goes into countless slide decks within the Global 1K.
So working with them (as with the parallel comment from someone at Gitlab points out): you have to be on these companies' decks, which means you have to do outreach to them and shape the technology landscape for them.
They are cheaper than hiring McKinsey who will write a report for you -- Gartner et al will sell you a report they've already done, and then also come discuss it with you.
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Oh wait, you were asking for the quality of the work? It's better, but not much better, than those clickbait review sites that summarise the vendors' spec sheets.
I had a college friend who worked for one of the "major" enterprise analyst companies. My friend had a degree in French literature and needed a paying job. They could write well, so in exchange for a low salary plus benefits they wrote reports on laptops, CNC tools, servers, you name it. They never actually clapped eyes on an actual CNC mill until visiting me one day at work.
<rant> The last two sentences of this quotation illustrate the perniciousness of they as a singular pronoun for an individual. The first rule of writing (unless you're a egomaniac) is Serve Your Reader; when a reader encounters these last two sentences, it disserves her to force her to look backwards at context to figure out how many individuals the writer is talking about in those sentences. If you want to be inclusive, then just use she as your gender-neutral pronoun, as here.</rant>
The singular “they” has a long history.* Yes, words change (“elite”, “peas”, and even “you” as the article points out). But I think it is past time to put the tyranny of a prescriptivist plural-restricted “they” to bed.
https://public.oed.com/blog/a-brief-history-of-singular-they...
Strongly disagree on this point. With the exception of 451 Research, the major analyst firms do not share any of their research methodologies. Did they interview/research 10 orgs or 1,000? You don't know. The biases of the research analysts is also suspect. At Gartner, many of their analysts haven't actually used the software they are covering. As a consequence, we have no idea about the depth of their research at all.
The role of these analysts is to give C-level executives a "cover your a$$" excuse if things go wrong with the software. From my experience, most technical level decision makers rely more on their peers to develop trust than on analysts.
What I've found over the years is that most people who sell software think of security as a value-add. At best, it's something to bill enterprise customers for. At worst, it's a cost center that will only be invested in if a big paying customer asks for it explicitly, and not a moment sooner. [1]
For background: I spent years pushing the PHP ecosystem forward in cryptography and security. I published a lot of open source libraries [2], cleaned up a lot of StackOverflow answers [3], and had a lot of discussions with small and medium businesses about security improvements that ultimately went nowhere because they couldn't find budget for security.
I don't believe it's fair to say that trust is "at the core" of software marketing if so many successful software companies can get by without investing in making their products trustworthy. After all, deception can obviate trust in this context.
(I do believe that software ought to be more trustworthy, and society should reward companies that act with integrity. But at the end of the day, that's not my call to make.)
[1]: https://sso.tax
[2]: https://github.com/paragonie
[3]: https://paragonie.com/blog/2018/01/our-ambitious-plan-make-i...
What you're seeing is companies that ignore security and trust at their own peril. There are plenty of them, and the vast majority of startups, that don't realize how important trust and security is to large customers. Then they wonder why they can't get their foot in the door at certain companies.
The place I work for runs every software purchase through a security committee. For that reason, we tend to go with the big brands that take security seriously. But it's not exclusively big brands.
I worked on a particular project that needed a particular type of software. None of the big brands had anything similar. I put together a list of five options and sent it over to the people who actually get to make the decisions.
All five options were small developers (fewer than 50 employees). Only two of those five bothered to respond to the initial inquiries from our security people. Of the two that responded, only one provided answers to the follow-up questions. Guess which one got a ~$250K purchase order the next month.
How many times have you been promised the world by a sales person and then you speak with an engineer and get a whole different story? I've learned to always speak with an engineer and find the manager of an existing customer.
Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so much.
Good enterprise software is almost never one size fits all, and there is responsibility on both sides to end up with something great.
The first start up I worked for built a piece of software that was adopted by large enterprises in regulated industries with 3 engineers, because they got to piggyback off of the Salesforce foundation.
It’s just a different flavor of abstraction.
This mostly only builds trust with fellow developers. I can see why it would be seen as trust building, but I don't think it builds as much trust as developers would like to believe. Not an argument against open source at all, just interesting to think about how you sell open source as a feature to an end user.
There's a significant collection of software that I didn't trust out of the gate, and I now trust a lot less after reading the source (Apache projects, I'm looking at you).
Trust is highly transitive for highly technical developer focused products though. The core of stripe's trust, even among non technical decision makers, is down to their killer APIs and docs.
Building a brand is a long, disciplined process.
I'm in the very early stages of building a personal brand. I don't expect it to have much to show for itself for another year or two.
Part of that, is being careful and thoughtful about what I post in public forums, whether online, or in-person.
I have made it a point to hold myself accountable for what I post. If you look at my HN handle, you will see that I link to my corporate Web sites and Stack Overflow story.
I may come across as pedantic and "stuffy," but I'm done with damaging my personal brand.
Everything I do is meant as a part of brand-building.
I have had trust as part of my personal brand for a couple of decades. I was a senior engineering manager for a very conservative Japanese company. You don't get to stay long in those types of positions without a demonstrable degree of personal integrity.
That reads like a sensible statement, but I'm not sure it's true or if it's true I'm not sure how the scale factors fit in.
Just raising the obvious counter-example, Facebook is pretty wildly distrusted, and yet is widely used by people who distrust it. Did they "purchase" FB? Not literally, but they certainly engage with it in ways similar to purchasing and pay for it with ad viewing.
As to the data question, I'd think the best approach would involve looking for explicit measures of trust (eg surveys) and seeing how those map to revenue growth or subscriber growth for software companies.
The brand strength you called out may be relevant as a proxy for trust, but I think that's assuming the thesis to be true and then proving it to be true by saying strong brands have strong sales numbers therefore trust is the key to sales (without ever proving trust is key to software brand strength).
Another approach might be to look at sales numbers following data leak incidents, but I think that's more complex because these days those announcements are so prevalent they may not stay in the news cycle long enough to matter (which arguably is itself a sign trust is not as key a differentiator as one would expect).
As one more thought, I'd expect b2b software purchase decisions to have a steeper dependence on trust than b2c, but that's just a guess.
Your thesis is certainly an important one to explore, and I think all of us hope it's true because an economic incentive like this is a powerful force encouraging companies to treat our data in a trustworthy manner.
Most business focused Gartner analysts are not developers, but understand the technical merits of products and services. Most of this research is aimed at a non-technical audience.
When your firm starts using new category terms like DevSecOps and AIOps, how much of that is due to Gartner trying to create new categories (so that you could dominate the analysis of said category) versus relaying actual terms you're hearing in the market?
There are no specific "steps" to be part of a Cool Vendors document. Something you should consider doing though is conducting a "vendor briefing" with the analysts who may be interested in your offering so that they are aware of your company, etc.
At what point do such firms start developing 'quadrants' for smaller, niche services or industries? There are surely a lot of SaaS type platforms out there that just don't make the cut into your reports, so where is that threshold?
We typically do not produce Magic Quadrants for small, niche oriented sectors. We will use another document type called a Market Guide for such markets. Market Guides do not rank vendors like a Magic Quadrant.
As well, near term profit and long term brand goals are never decoupled. You don't one day decide "our brand is X" but "our brand will be X" and you need to do Y and Z today and every day following to build up to X.
And I firmly reject the idea that near-term profit is disjoint from long-term consumer trust, at least for professional products and tooling. If they don't trust you not to screw them today or tomorrow, they won't pay you. I think this is why Google and Facebook can't make money from anything but advertising, they have to give away everything else for free or at a loss because no one trusts them at all.
I'm not sure about this. Google at least was not broadly considered untrustworthy for the first half or more of its existence.
Indeed, the key reason that they're considered untrustworthy is the decisions they've made in support of making their money from advertising.
Eventually, higher-ups would notice that these services were costing money, and shut them down. Today you'd be a fool to invest in the long-term stability of a Google service that doesn't have an obvious tie to the advertising firehose, because they've yet to figure out how to make money any other way.
It takes even longer for word to spread that Tool Company A is no longer a quality brand.
Company B sacrificed the long term brand, but they managed to increase short term profits.
But that doesn't really work until either the company is in a situation where you need to pump and dump to exit or it's in late enough stage that the leaders/owners want to exit/retire. Either way the long term health of the company and brand don't matter, by that point it doesn't matter to build trust with customers.
>Either way the long term health of the company and brand don't matter
It's does matter because the long term option will often result in more value overall to the new owners and customers. There is definitely a tension between short term profit and long term profit. It's well recognized and has been studied extensively.
In order to defend the long-term brand, short-term profit needs to incorporate some estimation of the net present value of that brand as part of its calculation. It could be bonus clawbacks or other conditionality on rewards; but it needs to be something, or else there is a natural temporal arbitrage.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/time-arbitrage.asp
I say mature companies because in younger companies, the leadership knows how the whole company works, and can spot the problems when smart-asses come along to pull their short-term profit tricks. The older a company gets, the more likely it is to have generalist leadership who use delegation, metrics and financial incentives to run different divisions of the company. Get the incentives wrong, and get exploited.
Not a single product that was spoken about had a genuine impact on the buyer? Not a single product actually worked as advertised?
What would you call it when someone, say, the product creator, speaks the truth about a product to get the word out? That would fall under "marketing."
"Marketing" is as general a term as "programming." There are all sorts of bad things accomplished with programming, but I think you'd agree that generalizing all of "programming" as something negative would be ridiculous.
The best that marketing can do to convey trust is to use social proof. After all, if everyone is using Brand X, it must be good, right? Of course, social proof can be faked, exaggerated, or bought with a lot of money, as is commonly done.
To continue with my analogy, it's like saying "spam is bad, therefore all email is bad, and email is created by programming, therefore all programming is bad."