Vague positioning is better than dishonest positioning

As a marketer, it’s incredibly sad that this needs to be said, but it does: Your marketing should never lie. Your positioning underpins all of your marketing and sales (and, if you’re doing it right, your product development, too). If your positioning is dishonest, your entire marketing program will be build on falsehoods. That is not the way to build a growth machine.

Does this actually happen? For sure. You probably have experienced dishonest product positioning (and dishonest marketing) as both an engineer and a consumer.

I had the idea for this post because of a conversation I had a KubeCon with a representative from a company that I won’t name, which was talking about their ‘end-to-end’ solution, I believe for security. But they had no ops story. This felt dishonest, because I interpret ‘end-to-end’ as meaning “from the moment we have this idea to the moment our completed app is end-of-lifed.” It would definitely include the time the application is being run in production. (Is this a wrong way to interpret the phrase? Let me know if so). From a security standpoint, it would include forensics, too.

I left the interaction feeling misled and fundamentally unimpressed with the company. Of course, no one cares if a consultant like me feels like something is dishonest, but if I feel lied to, chances are the potential customers, potential investors, analysts and journalists who encounter the company feel the same way.

The problem is that there likely is something really unique that this company does. But by calling it “end-to-end” and then not delivering the functionality that people expect with an “end-to-end” solution, they are completely hiding the unique, valuable features the product does have. No one is going to stick around to figure out what that is, because who wants to deal with a company that’s dishonestly describing their product?

Sometimes clients ask me, “Should we say X?” My initial response is generally, “Is it true?” Because vague, undifferentiated positioning is bad for business, but positioning and messaging that’s dishonest is worse.