Friends and colleagues have asked me to provide the Glossary of marketing terminology contained in my book Asymmetric Marketing, Tossing the 'Chasm' in the Age of the Software Superpowers. Here it is.
Asymmetric Marketing: The winner-take-all marketing wisdom developed by the software superpowers over decades of market experience. A system of marketing that rejects disruptive technology innovation against the superpowers, in favor of the practice of effective symbiosis with incumbent market leaders. The application of asymmetric warfare thinking to software marketing across the full spectrum of the marketing challenge, including strategy, market development framework, products, sales approaches, customer lock-in, operating culture and brand messaging.
Bark-itecture: One of four aspects of asymmetric product shark-itecture. It refers to that aspect of an asymmetric offering that allows it to easily become "OEM-able" or 'powered-by'-able for inclusion in superpower and other incumbent leader offerings. The external 'bark' of the product tree may be another company's branding, user experience, etc., but the trunk of the tree is yours. This aspect of product strategy helps enable symbiotic cooptation of the market power of incumbent leaders.
Big Hat, No Cattle Syndrome: Grandiose marketing strategy (based on chasing the software fad-du-jour) coupled with anemic execution. A gap between strategy and execution in the superpower sandstorm based on cargo cult marketing addiction. Symptoms of Big Hat, No Cattle Syndrome include inability to identify a qualified sales prospect and leads falling through the organizational cracks.
Bubbleboy: A cargo cult marketer from the bubble period of history. A term shoplifted from the Seinfeld episode titled 'The Bubble Boy', loosely modeled on the experience of an individual raised in a germ-free, plastic bubble and protected from life's dangerous realities. Refers to marketers protected by, and dependent on, a cocoon of invested cash, and whose businesses never become self-sustaining due to their rejection of the best practices of the software superpowers, and their embrace of 'new rules for the new economy' in the context of the software fad-du-jour.
Cargo Cult Marketers: Marketers that are guided by delusional 'new rules' belief systems, and/or abstract market development models from the laissez-faire period of tech market development. Marketers that romanticize disruptive technology innovation (e.g. Geoffrey Moore's 'Chasm theory). Cargo cult marketing came to the fore in the bubble period during which 5000 'disruptive innovators' are estimated to have gone extinct. See 'cargo cult science'.
Cargo Cult Science: An expression coined by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman to describe those persons following the appearance of science, but not its substance. Term originates from Feynman's description of a tribe of tropical islanders who engaged in various imitative rituals designed to make cargo planes land. The rituals were unsuccessful.
Category Regime Change: The replacement of a category market share leader in an adjacent category by an asymmetric marketer possessing category-extensible market power. Example: Microsoft's defeat of WordPerfect and Lotus in desktop apps; Microsoft's defeat of Novell in network servers; Microsoft's defeat of Netscape in web browsers.
Cellularity: Underlying business biology of dotcomplexity-advantaged business. The natural end of a customer relationship. Customer churn as the normal state of affairs. Cells live, cells die, cells are created. Marketing apoptosis (programmed cell death).
Channel Colonization: The symbiotic relationship between a superpower and their loyal solutions partners. The state of the channel in the age of the software superpowers, resulting in the channel partner focus on superpower marketing agendas, and the abandoning of non-aligned vendors.
Cooptation: Creatively leveraging the market power of another through the practice of market symbiosis, in order to further one's own marketing agenda.
Culture Management System (CMS): Internal software platform designed to foster a sober, candid, self-organizing, ownership-driven asymmetric marketing organization. A mechanism to enable Marketing by Garage Values (MBGV). An asymmetric marketing tribal 'OS'. Can incorporates intranet, team weblog, conferencing, groupware, and Employee Incentive Management (EIM) capability.
Customer Barrier Management (CBM): The market-craft of locking in customers, and pre-emptively defeating parasitic competitors. The customer management strategy of asymmetric marketers. The conscious attempt by asymmetric marketers to make the law of path-dependent increasing returns operate in their favor, by implementing the best practices of the software superpowers.
Dark-itecture: One of four aspects of asymmetric product shark-itecture. The conscious incorporation of stealth into your product strategy. Dark-itecture is what you hold back in the form of undocumented features and APIs that can provide you with asymmetric advantage in follow-on markets.
Desertification: The over-cultivation of market landscapes. An important driver of the superpower sandstorm. Results from both the IT 'do more with less' agenda, and the no-fly-zone market behaviors of the superpowers.
Digital Political Correctness: Refusal to dominate customers, often rationalized in the name of 'customer power', 'openness', and the Bubbleboy 2.0 'Participation Age'. Often used by big companies to attack the growing market power of smaller, asymmetric competitors. A form of intellectual elitism that attempts to invalidate the lessons of the rise of the software superpowers.
Disruptive Technology Innovation: Technology that obsoletes a prevailing paradigm. The primary market religion of Silicon Valley technical and financial elites.
Dotcomplexity Advantage: The embedding of one or more native web effects into the fabric of an asymmetric offering. Can take multiple forms, e.g. update-ness effect (never-ending product approach popularized by Windows update), self-organizing effect (eBay marketplace and platform), visibility effect (ability to see how discrete customers use your SaaS or on-demand application, and thereby optimize offering for all customers and/or sets of customer), network effect (Skype client download), and more. Complexity science applied to real-time, networked markets.
Ecoregion: A subset of an ecozone. Superpower market geography defined by a specific product-centric customer lock-in, e.g. the Oracle database ecoregion, the Adobe Acrobat Reader ecoregion, the eBay PayPal ecoregion. Often presents as a product/partner/customer cluster, e.g. the Microsoft .NET developer ecoregion. Target of Asymmetric Opportunity (TAO) for marketers seeking to practice superpower symbiosis.
Ecozone: A well-demarcated opportunity landscape defined by the market footprint of the software superpower that dominates it. An installed base of locked-in natural monopoly customers. Target of Asymmetric Opportunity (TAO) for marketers seeking to practice superpower symbiosis.
Graphically Correct: Intentionally sarcastic expression used by this author to describe abstract, symmetrical market development models, e.g. Geoffrey Moore's 'chasm' theory.
ISV (Independent Software Vendor): Includes companies leveraging one or more software deployment models including conventional on-premises, web on-demand (also called SaaS-software as a service), appliance model, embedded, etc.
Inverse Selling: A selling model based on trialware. Use/sell vs. sell/use. The prospect invests human bandwidth to use the product, and conventional 'selling' is only done on the basis of a successful trial evaluation. Helps eliminate Big Hat, No Cattle Syndrome by providing tangible evidence of 'qualified' lead.
Law of Increasing Returns: Developed by Brian Arthur. That which is ahead gets further ahead. Complexity science applied to economics. The basic law governing software economics in the age of the natural monopoly superpowers.
Market Power: Ability to influence the behavior of a market to conform to your marketing agenda, up to and including the ability to progressively displace incumbent market share leaders. The end result of practicing asymmetric marketing across the full spectrum of marketing activities, including products, selling approaches, and customer management.
Market Share: Percentage of a defined market category using your product. In and of itself, not necessarily a reflection of asymmetric market power.
Marketing by Garage Values (MBGV): The kernel values of a culture of asymmetric marketing. Sobriety, candor, self-organizing across silos, shared ownership of the revenue objective. 'Garage' refers to the legacy of pre-bubble high technology bootstrapped entrepreneurism, and is no way designed to infringe on the well-deserved brand equity and market reputation associated with Guy Kawasaki's Garage Technology Ventures or Garage.com.
Marketing Defense-in-Depth: A layered customer barrier management (CBM) approach incorporating barriers to customer exit, barriers to competitive entry, and barriers to product imitation. See Customer Barrier Management (CBM)
Messaging Mashup: Composite 24/7 market conversation in the age of the software superpowers that provides a working framework to develop ISV brand messaging strategy. Comprised of 4 conversational threads, including the superpower(s) thread, the anti-monopoly-on-principle or 'monoculture' thread, the 'best of breed' ISV or pragmatic anti-superpower thread, and the symbiotic, complementary, asymmetric ISV thread.
Narc-itecture: One of four aspects of asymmetric product shark-itecture. Means systematically designing in dotcomplexity advantage in two forms. 1-Update-ness that increases customer dependency, and 2-Continuous feedback , user profiling and actionable business intelligence. Narc-itecture in action is Windows Update, Symantec anti-virus signature updates, Yahoo's MyWeb personal page, Google's 'search history' capability, etc.
Natural Monopoly: Software vendor possessing a customer-sanctioned market lock-in. Distinguished from government-sanctioned monopoly, e.g. original AT&T. That natural state of software markets in the 21st century software industry.
N-glish: An unorthodox model description language used to describe self-organizing, dotcomplexity-advantaged business. E.G. N-formation (a many-to-many market), N-stitution (stable vendor-controlled market community, the 2nd stage of an N-formation), N-duplicatability (a high level of customer barrier management-in order to overcome or commoditize an N-duplicatable business it is necessary to equal or surpass the associated 'N' or network effect.)
No-fly-zone Imperative: The natural marketing behaviors of the software superpowers designed to pre-empt parasitic competitive encroachment on their market territory. Includes strategic control of installed base ecozones, containment of emerging market threats, colonization of partner networks, creation of new markets, and collusion and contention with each other. Based on the military metaphor, 'no fly zone'. The no-fly-zone imperative of the superpowers is the primary marketing 'GPS' (geo-positioning system) used by asymmetric marketers to detect Targets of Asymmetric Opportunity. It is the working alternative to the TALC in an age of natural monopolies.
Path Dependence: The initial market 'groove-in' that determines what product and which ISV will benefit from the law of increasing returns. Example: Microsoft's groove-in as the IBM PC operating system vendor defined the natural 'path' along which PC clone markets (Windows platform), adjacent markets (desktop Office Suite), and derivative markets (web browsers) developed.
Powered-by Deal: The SaaS (or on-demand) equivalent of an OEM agreement. It enables the 'powered by' provider to capitalize on the momentum of its customer.
Quark-itecture: One of four aspects of asymmetric product shark-itecture. The smallest aspect of your overall offering designed to be adopted by the greatest number of users in the shortest amount of time to begin driving and/or expanding a customer groove-in. E.G. Adobe Acrobat Reader, Skype client, free trial subscriptions to on-demand applications (Webex, Salesforce.com.).
Reverse Tornado: The 'death spiral' effect that regularly occurs when a market share leader deficient in market power faces category regime change from one or more software superpowers.
Sandstorm (aka superpower sandstorm): A metaphor to describe the marketing challenge facing ISVs in the age of the software superpowers. Characterized by reduced market and revenue visibility, positional confusion within eroding categories, board/investor heat and/or intervention into day-to-day management affairs, and broken marketing machinery. Exacerbated by both the desertification of IT and the no-fly-zone imperative of the superpowers.
Shark-itecture: Key element of product strategy implemented by asymmetric marketers to maximize customer dependency and pre-empt competitive encroachment. The product strategy of the software superpowers developed over the life of their offerings that allows them to 'eat' their competitors and carry out category regime change. Sharkitecture is how the superpowers anchor and defend their ecoregions, migrate their installed base of customers to their new products, and achieve multi-generational, cross-category product dominance. Comprised of 4 components, quark-itecture, bark-itecture, narc-itecture, dark-tecture. See all.
Software Superpowers: Natural monopoly, asymmetric marketers with cross-category and category-extensible market power. The superpowers dominate their installed base customers, i.e. their ecozones and ecoregions, dramatically outpace VCs in software R&D investment, and define the 21st century software market landscape. Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, Cisco, SAP, Symantec, Adobe, Yahoo, eBay, and Google.
Sound Bite Sandstorm: Polarizing, values-driven media coverage of software superpower issues. E.G. Press frenzy around Google's business deal with Chinese government, Microsoft legal battles, pedophiles in Yahoo chat rooms, etc. A messaging opportunity for ISVs.
Superpower Symbiosis: The basic foundation of asymmetric marketing strategy, grounded in the natural sciences. Living together with the software superpowers. Can take multiple forms including mutualism (win/win), parasitism (win/lose), commensalism (win/neutral). Superpower symbiosis provides the conceptual framework for the development of marketing strategy, products, sales approaches, messaging, and more.
TAO (targets of asymmetric opportunity): The ecozones and ecoregions of the superpowers to which asymmetric marketers symbiotically attach their offerings. An approach to marketing strategy that shifts focus from 'end customer' markets to the locked-in ecoregions of the superpowers in order to capitalize on the momentum inherent in superpower (or incumbent leader) installed base dynamics. Microsoft's target of asymmetric opportunity was IBM. Google's target of asymmetric opportunity was Yahoo.
Tribal Chieftanship: The leadership style of asymmetric marketers. Hands on, lead by example, thought leadership-driven, individual value contributor/doer. Personal reputation equity-rich model which results in the 'street-cred' needed for rapid response to competitive threats and market opportunity.
2-Dimensional value proposition: An ISV value proposition that benefits the end customer and the ISV. A characteristic of many dead bubble companies that abandoned pre-existing value chains in favor of go-it-alone disruptive technology innovation, e.g. WebVan, Napster, GovWorks.
3-Dimensional value proposition: An ISV value proposition that benefits the end customer, the ISV, and the 'host' superpower or superpowers with which the ISV is practicing symbiosis. The value proposition of "Microsoft-the-startup" is a good example of a 3-D value prop. PC users received benefits, IBM received benefits, and Microsoft received benefits. An important aspect of both asymmetric products based on continuous technology innovation on top of superpower platforms, and asymmetric brand messaging that carries a 'complementary' storyline.
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