Episode 79: Gerardo A. Dada - Winning with Strategy

Speaker A: The key learning about positioning is not the position you claim is the position you have in the customer's mind. And that's a fundamental difference. Right? It's in the customer's mind. So you need to understand first what are the other things in the customer's mind? What is important for them, how do they think about the market, what problems are they trying to solve, et cetera.

Speaker B: You are listening to this is Product Marketing brought to you by Product Marketing Hive, the product marketing community that gives back. I'm your host, Luis Liu, Product Marketing Hive and this podcast also supported by Product Marketing Edge, a technology product marketing consulting firm. In this episode, Gerardo Dada, author of Opposition, shares his thoughts on how strategy, differentiation and positioning help companies build sustainable market leadership. Let's dive into it right now. Hi Gerardo. Welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Thank you, Luis. It's a pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

Speaker B: First, tell us a bit about yourself and your product marketing journey.

Speaker A: Yeah, I started out as a business person, so I started with my own businesses and I think that gave me a different perspective and just looking at everything from a business perspective than a job. Right. Actually it's a great story. Beside, I started reading the book Positioning by Al Ris and Jack Trout back in the 80s. Uh, I was in middle school and that's uh, when I read that book I decided I want to be in, in marketing. Uh, I fell in love with marketing. I also got into technology and I ended up being a, uh, technology marketer. Since then I had a number of business on my own, moved to the US in 1999 and I've been working with a number of software companies. So I was very lucky to be in one of the first web application technologies, uh, here in Austin, database software as well. Then I went to Motorola to work on the first smartphones. I was a product manager for some of the first mobile development tools in the world back in 2001. Uh, I then went to Microsoft, uh, run audience Marketing, which is kind of a different flavor of product marketing. And I spent the next couple uh, of years building product marketing teams at different companies including Rackspace and SolarWinds. And then I've been a CMO for the last, uh, four jobs I've had. And uh, that's been my journey. I found that product marketing is the most strategic part of marketing. And it is kind of the gel that connects every aspect of the business, not, ah, only internally, but also externally with customers and with reality, which is uh, a big role.

Speaker B: Looking back, how has your career journey helped shape the way you think about strategy today?

Speaker A: Well, so the book actually came, came about because somebody asked me to do a course on product marketing, which, uh, then I made available online for free on YouTube. And it has, the first lesson, has something like 35,000 views. I haven't promoted it at all. So that tells me there's an appetite on knowing more about this. The second thing I observe is that even today, most companies don't really understand what product marketing is and how to do it. And my third observation, which actually came about when I was actually writing the book, because I started writing the book 10 years ago, is that two important observations. One is that product marketing is strategy, and they're often disconnected. So as a product marketer, you often are told, hey, go and write, um, messaging document. Go launch this product. And it's often very tactical work. I remember when I first joined Rackspace, they told me, you know, when the product is ready, we'll call you so you can do the press release and update the website. And I tell them, like, that's not how product marketing works. That's just, ah, you just need a webmaster or a PR person for that product. Market is completely different. And this person, super smart guy, really nice person, said, like, tell me more, what do you mean? He was an engineering leader and it was a great conversation, educating on the value and the power of product marketing. And I think it's really important for me that product marketing, often you feel bad because you don't have a big team, you don't have a lot of, uh, direct influence. Influence. Um, nobody reports to you, right? So you need to bring, uh, you need to create that authority. That authority is earned. I've heard people complain we don't have a seat on the table. Well, you have to think, how do you earn that seat on the table? And the way you earn the seat at the table is by bringing customer knowledge. Uh, one of my mentors, Sam Decker, used to say, you need to bring customer oxygen, right? Like customer oxygen. The analogy is like you're sitting in the office, everybody's working internally, and the customers are out there. So the product marketing person is the one who opens the window and lets that customer oxygen come in. The feedback from customers, right? And, and that becomes really valuable because if you go to a meeting and say, I think this is very different from, you know, I spoken with five customers and they told me this and they validated that through market research, then it's not my opinion. Right. When I started in product management, I love one of the sayings that Was, uh, your opinion, while interesting, is relevant. And that means that it's only the facts that matter. So you come to a table with facts, with information about customers. If you are the person who really understands the market, then you will gain that influence and then sales will be looking for you. Demand generation will be asking for your guidance. Every part of the business will be hungry for that customer value, that insights that will make the company better.

Speaker B: Congratulations on your new book Outposition. I absolutely love it. Tell us a bit about the context of your new book opposition. Why did you decide to write the book?

Speaker A: You know, it's interesting because I've been actually making notes and positioning for, for a long time. Like I said, it's one of the earliest concepts of marketing. Actually got to meet uh, Al Ris and his uh, daughter who writes a couple of really good books. And just about, I think about a year ago I wrote a blog post about the main rules of positioning. Then I started working on the book and I realized, you know what, those rules are wrong because it is not really about positioning. It's really about strategy. The gap is that you need to first understand what is a company strategy, what is the differentiation of the company where the competitive differentiation that actually is supporting that strategy and how do you feed that differentiation and then how you extension that uh, true positioning. So the three things are connected like a triangle. It's a system. They are usually worked in separate things. So oftentimes strategy has been like a topic for the boardroom and marketing does not get to touch it. And the CEO will hire McKinsey or Accenture to come up and develop a strategy or they go to Harvard and it's very academic. Right. A lot of the strategy books are very uh, intellectual. Maybe it's the way you put it. And they're very disconnected from the real world practice of marketing. The gap I wanted to fill is like look, I've been doing marketing for 30 something years. I'm older than I look. Uh, and I wanted to bring that real world perspective in how actually position gets in st instantiated and how it's made real in real world situations. Right? So I don't come to it from a research perspective or from a professor of uh, marketing perspective. I come from it from uh, the things that I've learned in my career and how the three things are connected. So it was actually a discovery process. It took me a while to actually find the right way to connect those three concepts and then later to realize that that was the most important value of the book. So I tried to make strategy clear, I try to make competitive differentiation clear. And what are the sources of competitive differentiation and then positioning and how the three work together and how to actually implement them in the company.

Speaker B: You've worked with startups and large enterprises. What are the strategic mistake companies tend to make regardless of size?

Speaker A: So I worked at two Fortune 50 companies, right? Motorola at the time was uh, one of the most, it was the most innovative companies back in the year 2000 and then Microsoft, which was the most admired company back then. And like you said, I, I worked at very small companies. I think people don't put enough effort into product marketing to be honest, at ah, any size company. You know I, I've seen companies who say we need to launch this product. Uh, at one of the recent companies I was working for, they uh, told me we're going to buy this company, we need you to launch this product, start working on the press release. And what is natural for most of us is, is that you get head downs on doing the task right? So you, you want to write the press release, write the messaging brief, et cetera. Instead of taking a step back and saying wait, before we do that, let's really understand the idea. What is the actual problem in the market? What is the problem the customer wants solve by this? What is the competitive landscape? How does launching this product do anything in the market? What is the role? Are we lowering the price? Are we democratizing a solution? Do we have, I don't know, whatever is the strategy of the product, capture that in a document. Uh, I wrote a messaging and positioning document that I need to share with you Luis. And, and then once you fill that document people say but we don't have time, like trust me, it's going to, it's going to be better. You spend a little bit of time building that document and then everything from, flows from it. The press release, the messaging, the emails, the demand generation campaigns. It serves as an educational tool to get everybody on the same page. So that doing that groundwork in the beginning, uh, before getting into the tactics not only forces you to think about things that you haven't thought about before, but also make sure that everything is consistent, aligned with the same concepts. And the second uh, mistake I think a lot of people uh, have or make is that they. We've been told that marketing needs to be a content factory, right? Uh, I think uh, a lot of markets have said marketing teams are now publishers. Right? And with AI so easy to create content, I could create an AI, ah, agent that writes a blog Post every hour if you wanted to. All of it is going to be terrible or most of it useless. But we've been creating tons and tons of content. Like, it's not uncommon. If you join a company, they have 2,000 pieces of content, right? White papers that have been written five years ago, 10 that were written this month. And the task is, let's write five more case studies. And the question is why? Nobody's going to read any of that. None of these are going to even be aware that it exists. It will be much better if we decide what are the five pieces of content going to help people move people from one stage to the next in the buying process and spend all of our time improving those five pieces of content. Build five, uh, case studies, uh, maybe one per industry, one per buy role, etc. Whatever you want to do, and make sure that those are fantastic. Spend more time improving them, bring more quotes, bring more examples, uh, or create new ones that replace those. So I think that's, that's a big learning for me is that less content that has more thinking behind it is far more powerful. So I recently wrote a blog post called Stop the Content Machines that speaks about that.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: And, and then on top of that, we, we then gate the content. And as we know, 99% of people will abandon a form when it's gated. So you are turning away 99% of your customers with your gated content.

Speaker B: So you took the definition of strategy from the book Playing to Win. Strategy defines where to play and how to win. I'm a fan of playing to win and I appreciate that. Uh, in your opinion, why do so many companies still confuse strategy with vision, priorities, or even annual plans?

Speaker A: Well, it's two reasons. The one thing I actually added to that definition is that strategy is a choice. Right. If you remember the book, I started with the definition from Lafleet Martin and, uh, say, like. But the key here is it's a choice. And that is very, very important because when you decide where to play, that means what markets you're going to serve, what customers you're going to serve, but also which customers you're not going to serve. Right? So a great example is when I was at Rackspace. I don't know. Hopefully the people listening are familiar. Rackspace was known for fanatical support. Right. So if it's a very high quality, hands on, uh, not cheap, not the cheapest product. Right. So one day I was actually, I sent an email to a bunch of customers and I started responding to those emails myself because I wanted to get that customer interaction. I wanted to bring that customer, become knowledgeable with customers. And one customer said, hey, I actually want to buy. I'm, um, thinking about buying from this other company. The service is similar to yours, but it's cheaper. My response to them was, you want what? If you want it cheaper? Here's another one that's actually cheaper than that. I don't know if it's going to work, but it's super cheap. So I was actually pushing the customer. The customers were saying, I want cheap. Like, okay, go for cheap. We don't want you. You're not our customer. Right. That's not who we serve. And that's really hard for CEOs and business owners to turn away customers. Right. That's the important part about the choice, the choice of selecting what customers to serve. And what is your core strategy? The second problem of why strategy is misunderstood is that the word strategy is being misused. Right. I remember speaking with, uh, somebody I was interviewing and said, like, what do you want to do in the future when you grow up? Like, what is your vision? Five years? And he said, I want to do the big strategic stuff. We made the word strategy to mean something that's important or something that is complex or something that is worth doing. Well, I understand that that's kind of the colloquial meaning of the word. The actual word of strategy is very specific. So when we say, oh, do you have a strategy? Uh, I've heard literally from CEOs of companies that are worth a billion dollars. Yeah. Our strategy is to grow our revenue 2x in the next five years. Our strategy is to launch this product. Well, that's not my strategy. That's a very tactical goal. In fact, uh, most people, when they say, we want to become $100 million company, that is not even a plan. That is a desired outcome. So I think that's the second part of the problem. That strategy is being misused and therefore is being misunderstood.

Speaker B: Ah.

Speaker A: As the key plan that is needed at the beginning so that you can develop the plan so that you can execute so that you get those outcomes that you've been expecting.

Speaker B: Why is it saying, no, the hardest strategic skill for leaders to develop.

Speaker A: And another company, one person that I had a lot that was really smart is like, what is our strategy for this year? We want to acquire new customers, we want to grow existing customers, and we want to cross sell customers like anything else. Right. You want everything. So it's. The principle is, uh, when you serve every customer, you don't serve anybody, right? Um, my brother was working on web technologies and he was serving a customer that was ah, in automotive and then manufacturing, then a retailer, etc. And I told him, imagine if you picked one of those customers or you feel like they're more in love with your solution. Imagine if was, I don't know, a restaurant. You made a great application for a restaurant. Now if you go to the second restaurant, you can use the first restaurant as, as an example of your work. And then once you have three restaurants, then you have a lot of knowledge about the restaurant industry. You have a lot of software that you can reuse and you don't need to start, you need to be coding all the time and then you can become the, the expert on restaurant software, right? That's a lot more productive, differentiated and profitable than building software for everybody. But then he gets a call from somebody who wants an application for a delivery service, right? And then he goes and does it. Like it's, it's that kind of the balance between the need in the short term for revenue and the need to have a path and a focus in, in your, in what you're doing, right? That's, that's why that is so difficult. As a business owner, as a small business owner, or as a large CEO, it's really hard to say we're not going to pursue that, right? Like you, you see the most disciplined, the best sales leader will say, we're not going to pursue that rfp. It's a waste of time. We're not going to pursue that customer. They're looking for a completely different solution. We're never going to win. That is kind of the principle of focus, right? Like really understand where you bring value so you can actually dominate that market instead of trying to chase everything.

Speaker B: In your book, you challenge several popular business beliefs, including cultural eats, strategy for breakfast. What do most leaders get wrong about the relationship between culture and strategy?

Speaker A: Well, I think first culture has been misunderstood. Uh, I think a lot of companies think that culture is uh, you know, you have a ping pong table, you have a lot of snacks in the kitchen and you get Friday stuff. And what they're talking about are perks. You're pampering your employees. That's not culture. Culture is who gets promoted and how the company operates, right? So as an example, our company I was working with recently, one of the reasons I left is that people inside companies, especially in larger companies, when there's a lot of politics, the goal for individuals, instead of serving customers or doing their job Properly is looking good after their manager. Right. And why? Because managers promote their friends or the people that have, I don't know, good relationships or they have good PowerPoints or play good politics. That is a culture, Right. How the company operates is really the instance what is allowed in the company. And so that's the first misconception what culture is. Culture is the operating system of the company. And the second problem is that culture alone is not going to make you successful. In the book I speak about companies with bad culture that are successful, companies with good culture that are not successful. So there's not really a direct correlation between the two. I was at Rackspace, which was known as it had one of the best cultures on the planet. It was both of the best company to work for their Harvard Business School, uh, case studies on the culture, et cetera. And yet the company was not, uh, you know, lost its way after a while because the culture was not enough. The key challenge is that culture, uh, needs to support the strategy. Right? So once you, and again, they work like a system. When you have a good strategy and one of your competitive differentiators can be the culture. Like in the case of Rackspace. In the case of Rackspace, if the goal is to be fanatical support, your culture needs to be designed so you can actually deliver on that fanatical support. If you're a Walmart and the culture or the strategy is to bring the lowest cost to the market, your culture needs to be about bringing that lowest cost, uh, to the market. So the point is not that companies think that there's good culture and bad culture, like bad culture is politics and backstabbing good culture is, uh, perks. The reality is that, uh, companies need different cultures. If you think about Southwest and American Airlines, two different companies, both are successful. Imagine when you border plane, the message you hear in one, it's very professional, right. And the other one is very playful. If you put the playful person in, American alliance is going to feel out of place. If you put the professional person, Southwest, it feels out of place. It's not that one culture is bad and the other one is good, is that each culture serves a different need for a different type of customer and a different strategy.

Speaker B: Another myth you tackle is that agility can replace strategy. Especially in B2B tech. People love agility. How can leaders tell whether they are adapting execution versus constantly changing strategy?

Speaker A: Well, I, I, I'm actually been surprised about how many good, smart people are saying, you know, you don't really need a strategy anymore as long as you move fast and you're adaptable. Right? I, I titled my blog is called the Adaptive Marketer because I believe in adaptability. I'm a firm believer on speed. You know, I used to have my Tony, just have a little hamster that run around all the time. The hamster didn't do anything. He was super agile, but he didn't get anywhere, right? Because he was changing direction constantly and going very quickly, nowhere. Uh, that's what agility can look like. I think, uh, most of us have been around in multiple companies, have been maybe victims of leadership, uh, teams that say, hey, we're going to go chase A and then six months later we'll go chase B. Or the CEO that has a lot of ideas and throws one idea every day. And then what happens is people say like, you know what, you can ignore the idea because tomorrow he will have a different one. He will be, have forgotten about the first one, right? Guess what, the customers are the same way, right? If you have one idea and then you know, six months later you change your strategy or your, your positioning or your go to market, it doesn't work. One of the best examples which I speak about in the book is BMW. BMW started, I think it was, uh, I have the actual date in the book, I think was in the 70s using the ultimate driving machine. They're still using the same tagline, right? Uh, why? Because it works. Uh, our job is not to change all the time. Our job is to be consistent and reinforce what makes the company stronger. Reinforce value proposition. Especially now where there's so many messages and so many AI powered, uh, content and outreach and all that. You have very limited ability to talk to a customer, to influence a customer. So if every time you talk to a customer you have a different message, it's not going to stick. If you use the same message consistently over years, customer will know who you are and what you stand for. But the only way to do that is to be consistent. Yes, you can adapt the tactics, right? You can always change the tactics. You always need to adapt to different conditions. But the core strategy and the core message need to always be consistent. Obviously not forever, but until there's a really good reason to change that.

Speaker B: You make a distinction between differentiation and the competitive advantage. Uh, why is that distinction so important?

Speaker A: Differentiation is how you're perceived in the market, right? And that gets to the core of the problem we started talking about. If you're a product marketer, you cannot come up with differentiation, right? That's when marketing fails and that's when Marketing feels, uh, empty and lying. That's why marketing is just one step above used car salesman in terms of reputation and credibility. Seriously, it's sad, uh, because you're forced to make up stuff, right? If your product is the same as everybody else, then your differentiation is not real. Competitive advantage is something that your company has inherently, that you have designed, developed and reinforced over time to make you stronger and give you really an advantage that is valuable for customers that then you can express to the market in a way that they understand why this is valuable, which then creates that differentiation. The differentiation that matters only is preference, right? It's not enough to be different. Like, if you think about, uh, you're too young for this, but the Pontiac Aztec was a horrible car, very different. Nobody bought it. So being different is not enough. It needs to be valued and appreciated. Meaning people are willing to change their buying preferences or, uh, pay more for your product, when it's actually that differentiation helps them discover the value it brings to them.

Speaker B: Let's say a leadership team believes they have a strategy. What are the key questions you'd ask to determine whether they've actually chosen the rest strategy?

Speaker A: Well, the first question is ask 10 people what the strategy is, right? If 10 people inside the company cannot say what the strategy is, then you don't have a strategy, right? Because nobody understands it. Even if somebody, uh, even if the CEO has one and it's very clear for him, it doesn't really matter. The company itself does not have strategy. The second thing that I like doing, I think everybody has heard about the press release, switching the brand, right? Like, do a press release and put the brand of your competitor and see if it works. That will tell you if the strategy is working or not. Uh, but a nicer one, especially now that we're out of COVID When I was at SolarWinds, we used to say we are hybrid monitoring for it or something like that, right? We like using the words that people like using. Um, so I went to a trade show for marketers relatively recently, I think it was two months ago. Every single booth had AI agentic, uh, customer engagement. You could spend an hour in Treasure Floor if you didn't speak to people or dig deeper. There's no way to understand what 80% of the companies did. Like, forget about different being differentiated, just even understand what you guys do. Right? So what I did at SolarWinds is I went to a trade show and I found our top 10 competitors and I wrote down their taglines and I came back to the office and I Got a couple executives, sales and uh, sales leader, uh, marketing and others. And I showed a list of the top 10 taglines. And I say, okay, uh, who can name which company goes to that tagline? Nobody could do it. Then in the same slide I showed here are the companies who can make that connection. Nobody could get, okay, now who can identify our tagline? And less than half of the room were able to even identify our own tagline because everybody was following the same wording. Because your strategy was not implemented from the CEO saying, this is going to be your strategy. Down to competitive advantage, down to positioning, down to the actual messaging used in a treasure booth so that people walk in the floor when they only have three seconds, they turn your head, you read 10 words and you keep going. Did you understand that company, what it does, what is the differentiation? What is the strategy, how they can help you? That's the test at the end of the day. Whether it's a threshold floor or it's an ad or it's an email from the CEO, it should always be evident.

Speaker B: Great. Thank you for sharing. Any final thoughts.

Speaker A: Well, I think uh, I just want people to appreciate, uh, if you're in product marketing, uh, you're lucky, right? Because it's the most strategic part of marketing. Uh, you have a lot of influence but you need to step up uh, and play the role that you have the opportunity to play. Product marketers, uh, have a big responsibility in thinking like business people, in understanding the market and being good marketers. But also building those bridges with sales and with product is not an easy job. And the job of product marketer never ends.

Speaker B: Right?

Speaker A: You're the CEO of the product. Sometimes you're the co CEO with a product manager. If you're lucky to have a good partner in product management, I think that's the best. When both of them are uh, like a couple that makes decisions for the CO CEOs of the product. But that's also a big responsibility. Right. But at the same time it's a big opportunity. So if you want to be successful in business, I think that in the future we will see more CMOs and CEOs that come from a product marketing background because it's so uh, strategic and is such a key part of the success of the company.

Speaker B: That's very helpful. Thank you for sharing. Thank you for joining us today.

Speaker A: Thank you Luis. Appreciate the opportunity.

Speaker B: Thank you for tuning in to this is product Marketing brought to you by Product Marketing Hive, a product marketing community that gives back. Check out our website productmarketinghive.com to join our community, meet fellow product marketers and access free resources. If you enjoyed our podcast, please subscribe and give a five star rating on the platform of your choice. See you next time.