Define Your Hill on Your Terms, Own Your Brand.
By Ellie Victor, CEO
Let’s face it; analysts have been influencing corporate marketing teams for decades. For start-ups and young companies, VCs and advisors pressure companies to conform. They stress the importance of fitting in a quadrant because creating a space is just too hard.
Big business is more likely to try and fit because it’s efficient. For enterprise marketing, positioning too often becomes just another transaction, a box to check, and conformity is rewarded because it takes less effort.
The exciting news is that in 2022, our clients broke free of those chains and defined their own hills. Leaders were no longer willing to trade off positioning choices to conform (read more about other findings).
Here are some examples of breakthrough positioning that broke the mold.
Scandit Smart Data Capture Delivers More Strategic Sales Engagements
Scandit was valued at $1B+ with $150M in Series D funding at the time of positioning. Typically, the company would be pushed into the “computer vision” category, but leadership was willing to break free and create their own hill: Smart Data Capture. The promise was their Point That Matters: Give superpowers to your workers, customers, and business with unmatched speed, accuracy, and intelligence.
Overall, 80% of prospects liked or really liked the category because it’s catchy, succinct, and defines the next leap beyond barcode scanning.
“Smart” implies built-in intelligence delivered by smart devices while providing value to their customers.
“Data capture” ranked #1 because it’s intriguing and suggests higher value. It suggests Scandit is more than scanning. This description covers customer benefits like providing critical decision-making information and identifying appropriate next steps.
The market rejected the analyst-defined hill of “computer vision.” 80% of respondents disliked the category because it was geeky, outdated, and narrow.
Since defining the new category, Scandit has moved beyond transactional “point product” discussions to deeper, more strategic conversations with bigger deals that solve complex business problems and foster business transformation.
Snowflake Becomes The Data Cloud, Blowing Away the Competition with a Legendary IPO
Valued at $48B, ZOOM Marketing has worked with Snowflake three times on its rise to the top. Snowflake captured the attention of everyone with the largest software IPO in history: a $70B IPO. By actively managing its positioning while they were growing, Snowflake was responsive to how the market was changing and what mattered most to customers.
In 2016, when we defined Snowflake's first category as Data Warehouse Built for the Cloud, Gartner or Forrester had no such category. By taking the courageous step of being bold, Snowflake got noticed.
Because Snowflake established a category, it defined its criteria as petabyte-scale with 200x faster performance; concurrency without performance degradation; and a fully-managed, pay-as-you-go model. Once defined, competitors were forced to scramble to keep up as Snowflake continued to set the bar higher.
Recently, we again worked with Snowflake to reposition them as The Data Cloud with a new set of criteria. And once again, Snowflake is the industry leader defining success as a single fully-managed solution, with almost unlimited resources, with collaboration that’s governed and secure.
After its first experience with ZOOM Marketing, Snowflake was equipped with a market-validated story and positioning guide to quickly onramp its marketing partners. Since then, Snowflake engaged us again in 2018 and 2019 to continue to own their space using our data-driven process and business experience.
Alteryx Analytics Automation Platform Finds Descriptive Positioning that Differentiates and Elevates
“Analytics Automation Platform sounds robust and interesting, and something that I would spend money on as either a layer above or a replacement for some of the other tools. The idea of having a uniform platform is compelling.”
Valued at $3.5B, Alteryx needed a way to break out from the “me too” position that can force a company to accept mediocrity. Leadership knew they didn’t want to be invisible; instead, they wanted to stand out and differentiate.
Overall, 80% of customers and prospects liked or really liked the category because it’s straightforward, succinct, and easy to understand—even for non-technical audiences.
The new positioning embraced the future. Analytics automation is considered the future of analytics, including data science, ML, prescriptive and predictive analytics. Alteryx is perceived as a first mover in a competitive landscape by aligning with the industry vision.
“The ability to do predictive, prescriptive analytics with the click of a button. That, to me, is partially the automation, coupled with the fact that it’s writing a lot of code for you. Which to me, is the heart of the automation.”
Contact us if you’re interested in breaking free and defining your own hill. We deliver incredible positioning results that streamline your marketing, shorten your sales cycle and increase value.