Changing your company’s tagline is so much fun; said no marketing team, ever. In this blog post, I will share how the decision to change our tagline came about – how we made the decision, and how it reflects our mission – to help our customers win with their data, analytics and AI.
I hope that by sharing our process, we can help other business leaders when they’re facing similar situations.
Prelude, or: “Why Change What’s Working”
When something isn’t working, it’s easy to eliminate and replace it with something that does. The problem we faced was different. We had a functional tagline that was working for us: “Secure and Automated Access to Data.” It resonated with prospects and customers, but we felt that it just wasn’t enough. We felt that the high level messaging was not completely representative of what we do. And so we decided to ask around and find out if this was more than just our gut feeling.
The overall response we received through deep-dive calls with customers and analysts about our messaging and positioning as a whole, was that the existing message is underwhelming. As one of our leading analysts put it:
“Knowing what the product does, and the business impact from companies that want to get value from sensitive data fast, just isn’t reflected on the website. Instead, I see – ‘secure and automated access to data’ – which, while helpful, is not representative of the full value companies gain from Satori.”
Moreover, calls with customers confirmed this: that the value they gained from Satori was greater than just “secure and automated access to data.” In their words, Satori is their Data Security Platform that allows them to use data much faster in a controlled way. In contrast ‘secure and automated access to data’ is just another capability that doesn’t accurately depict the total value they get from Satori.
Taking in all of this feedback, we felt that a stronger message would not only more accurately reflect Satori’s true value; but, would also resonate with potential customers who need a broader range of solutions for data access, security, and compliance pain than just ‘secure and automated access to data.’
What is it that you really want?
And so we started the process of revising our tagline. We devised a plan to divide the process into quantitative and qualitative steps to choose the right message for us. We used the following steps as a good starting point from which to base our ideation process:
- Spoke with customers and prospects to deeply understand what they actually want from a platform like Satori, regarding the problems solved and business value gained, rather than technical capabilities.
- Market analyst discussions. We engaged with market analysts who speak with hundreds of professionals in our market. We obviously aggregated this data, but it provided a much wider perspective, than what we could gather from individually speaking with customers or prospects.
- Collected data from our field teams (mainly account executives) about the problems Satori solves for our customers and the potential opportunities and business value Satori brings. Additionally, in cases involving competition, we explored why these companies chose us.
- We reviewed other platforms’ messaging and paid attention to companies in our space and companies in other spaces. This helped us get a sense of some of the things we liked and, more importantly, some of the things we did not like.
After carefully reviewing the collected information, we developed some guidelines:
- When aiming for a message, we want it to be bigger rather than smaller to reflect greater business value rather than referencing a capability. This helps us “land” a more exact subtitle and lose the vagueness.
- We want a positive message about the value we bring. There is enough negativity in the world. The positive value has to resonate with the personas we interact with.
- The personas we interact with most are not security teams but data teams. So, we wanted to make sure that the message resonates with them.
From here, we started an internal process of iterating ideas, eliminating options that did not fit. Once we had a couple of good alternatives, we started asking for feedback from the extended Satori team, customers, and analysts. Based on the feedback, we continued the fine-tuning process.
We learned a lot. Not only about the tagline we want to use, but also about the value we bring, what matters to our customers, and what sets us apart from other players in the space.
Iterating through the messaging, we eventually came up with the tagline: “Win With Data. Never Lose Control.”
This emphasizes the main value we bring to our customers – the ability to win with their data, mainly for analytics and AI purposes, but also in an operational way.
The “Never Lose Control” fits a big concern our customers share – that although they must run fast with their analytics and AI initiatives, they must not lose control over privacy, compliance, security and governance.
In our subtitle, to compliment the messaging and also connect it with the top challenges companies are solving with Satori, we’ve added:
Basically, data teams feel that they’re wasting precious time on manual tasks and projects for access, security and compliance, rather than pushing core value. The value they’re getting is, once again, time. They “Go fast” (either data engineering spending less time on manual provisioning or data consumers spending less time waiting for their data) with our Data Security Platform for their AI & analytics projects.
So We Now Have a Tagline Forever, Right? Right?
If there’s one thing that’s certain, it’s that whatever we change, we will change again, at some point. It can be when our product evolves, the market advances or another good reason to change emerges. Falling in love with our messaging does not mean it won’t change when the time comes.
On this note, if you’d like to Win With Data, while Never Losing Control, be sure to set an intro meeting with our team, or learn more about Satori.
