Jennifer Johnson Schools on PR and Positioning at NYETM
I attended and really enjoyed last week’s NY Enterprise Tech Meetup, which focused on 
marketing. Jennifer Johnson, the keynote speaker, was a real dynamo. Her bio on the NYETM agenda said: Jennifer is CMO of Tenable, was formerly CMO of Tanium, a Partner at a16z, and CMO of Coverity, so she’s got very legit enterprise marketing chops! Chops, indeed, Jennifer brought Silicon Valley cred and her talk delivered on the promise.
She spoke about topics I love (and have covered here): tech industry categories and positioning. Jennifer started out with a visual sure to strike fear in the hearts of anyone seeking to compete and differentiate in tech (and confuse all, in general): the vaunted technology landscape (see image).
How to stand apart? It gets down to creating and owning a category. According to Jennifer, “category kings” take 76% of the markets they compete in. The strategy is covered in Play Bigger, the book and consulting firm of the same name – who Jennifer worked with in a previous life.
To do this, you need to frame a problem from the customer’s POV. Do it well and you box out the competition and win. She shared examples; Salesforce, No software. Airbnb: Live anywhere.
Jennifer also gave out a shout out to the power of PR: “Some say PR is dead; I disagree completely.” (Here here, not dead yet!) Winning in marketing is about conducting “air wars and ground wars,” she said. “Great press casts that big shadow; in the ground war you try to reach every persona.”
Also, there were two great vendor demos at the meetup: Kustomer and Vendorful.
Kustomer was demo’d by their COO Rob Bailey. It’s a CRM for customer support teams that looks like a great way to reduce churn.
Vendorful brings much needed improvement to the RFP process. Their CEO David Wadler, and co-founder and head of product Peter Bonney presented.