Our Product Is Entering a New Industry. Don’t Recycle the Messaging

Positioning a product for a new industry is not about taking your existing messaging and adding a few industry terms. The buyers are different, their priorities are different, and the problems and business outcomes they care about may be very different.

Having led industry marketing for a major ERP vendor, and more recently working with a large Master Data Management client to position a strong horizontal product across multiple industries, below is the process I follow (that has worked for me well).

Start with industry research: understand the major business priorities, trends, challenges, regulations, technology environment, competitors, and how companies in that industry talk about their problems.

Then build your messaging framework around five questions:
1. What problems matter most? Which industry challenges/business drivers are important enough to get attention and budget
2. Where can we make a difference? Which of those problems can our product credibly help solve?
3. Who cares and why? Who are the buyers and influencers, and what matters to each of them?
4. What makes it real? Which industry-specific use cases and customer examples demonstrate the value?
5. Why us? Why is our approach better suited to these problems than the alternatives?

If your answers could apply just as easily to four other industries, you probably don’t have industry positioning yet. You have generic product messaging with an industry label on it.