
Trust Is at the Core of Software Marketing - gk1
https://tomtunguz.com/trust-core-marketing/
======
unlinked_dll
I was once at an audio manufacturer that will be coming up on the 100th
anniversary in a few years. I distinctly remember the presentation given to
all of us where it was hammered home that the company was optimized for
preserving and expanding the brand.

For example, they would avoid changing materials/tooling for their products
that have been manufactured for decades without rigorous testing that showed
it improved the product or unless supply chain issues out of their control
forced them to (which my understanding was rare, because they engineered their
supply chain to avoid it).

Some of this is pragmatic. It takes a century to build a brand and a day to
kill it. And in that industry, brand loyalty is as important as specs. But
much more of it is genuine care for their products and customers - they hired
people who gave a shit, and the culture wasn't one where a penny pinching
decision that harmed quality would have been made, let alone tolerated.

My point is this - a brand with "trust" as a core value isn't derived just
from transparency, sharing code, auditing and communication. It's built by the
people that work on those products, sell them, and make decisions about the
product roadmap. Much the way that software architecture reflects
organizational architecture, brand value reflects culture and values of the
people that work on it.

~~~
pif
> brand value reflects culture and values of the people that work on it.

It also reflects the priorities of their customers: those who can only ask for
"cheaper" will not get anything else than "cheaper".

~~~
beamatronic
There could be such a thing as cheaper in a specific way. If I buy a
screwdriver from Harbor freight, I know exactly what I am getting. My only
surprise would be to the upside. And likewise if I buy something from snap on.

------
omarhaneef
"Enterprise buyers use third parties to buy software. They consult Gartner,
Forrester, and others to establish trust in vendors. These research agencies
diligence software products directly and through surveys. This is the reason
analyst relations are so important. Presence on the magic quadrant confers
trustworthiness."

Does anyone involved with enterprise purchasing decisions know how valuable
Gartner/Forrester endorsements are? And if being in the unmagical quadrant is
terrible?

I see companies tout them but I can't tell if they're effective.

~~~
sytse
At GitLab we spend a substantial amount of effort on Analyst Relations (AR)
which is working with groups like Gartner, Forrester, and 451 Research. On
[https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-
chart/](https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/org-chart/) you can see we have
two people who are a dedicated Analyst Relations Manager. They manage the
relationship but many of our product marketing managers and product managers
are involved to answer questions and give presentations.

An important thing these firms do is aggregate customer feedback. For a
consumer tool I can look on Quora and for a development tool I can look at
Hacker News. But for enterprise tools the people that use the product are
often not allowed to share feedback themselves. However they are allowed to
talk with analysts.

That is why the opinions of these analysts are often really important to
convince new customers your product is any good [https://about.gitlab.com/is-
it-any-good/](https://about.gitlab.com/is-it-any-good/)

BTW We just won a 451 Firestarter award
[https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2020-01-14-gitlab-
re...](https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2020-01-14-gitlab-recognized-
as-451-firestarter.html) which we're stoked about.

~~~
techpop10
An important distinction (as I mentioned in another comment) is that you have
no idea how much "aggregate customer feedback" Gartner really has, they don't
disclose their research methodologies at all. That's a real problem. 451
research does... and sincere congrats on your award.

~~~
sytse
Thank you!

BTW Gartner now has an online review tool called Peer Insights
[https://www.gartner.com/en/products/peer-
insights](https://www.gartner.com/en/products/peer-insights) Here you can read
the customer reviews [https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/application-
release-o...](https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/application-release-
orchestration-solutions/vendor/gitlab/product/gitlab) I might be a bit biased
because in 2018 GitLab won Gartner their customer choice award and recently we
won another awards based on peer insights
[https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2019-07-26-gitLab-
re...](https://about.gitlab.com/press/releases/2019-07-26-gitLab-recognized-
in-gartner-peer-insights-customers-choice-for-EAPT.html)

~~~
techpop10
Yes, very familiar with it... unfortunately there's a bit of vendor
gamesmanship with these and they don't inform the MQ. Sorry, I've had too many
years working with these tools, I'm cynical.

------
techpop10
"Enterprise buyers use third parties to buy software. They consult Gartner,
Forrester, and others to establish trust in vendors. These research agencies
diligence software products directly and through surveys. This is the reason
analyst relations are so important. Presence on the magic quadrant confers
trustworthiness."

Strongly disagree on this point. With the exception of 451 Research, the major
analyst firms do not share any of their research methodologies. Did they
interview/research 10 orgs or 1,000? You don't know. The biases of the
research analysts is also suspect. At Gartner, many of their analysts haven't
actually used the software they are covering. As a consequence, we have no
idea about the depth of their research at all.

The role of these analysts is to give C-level executives a "cover your a$$"
excuse if things go wrong with the software. From my experience, most
technical level decision makers rely more on their peers to develop trust than
on analysts.

~~~
pidg
Everything is ass-covering. The "trust" tech marketing builds is to say "I
trust these guys won't lose me my job", not "I trust their software works
exactly as advertised".

------
CiPHPerCoder
If it was true that trust is enough to market software, there would be _much_
more investment in application security by the long tail of startups,
consultancies, and webdev "shops".

What I've found over the years is that most people who sell software think of
security as a _value-add_. At best, it's something to bill enterprise
customers for. At worst, it's a cost center that will only be invested in if a
big paying customer asks for it explicitly, and not a moment sooner. [1]

For background: I spent years pushing the PHP ecosystem forward in
cryptography and security. I published a lot of open source libraries [2],
cleaned up a lot of StackOverflow answers [3], and had a lot of discussions
with small and medium businesses about security improvements that ultimately
went nowhere because they couldn't find budget for security.

I don't believe it's fair to say that trust is "at _the core_ " of software
marketing if so many successful software companies can get by without
investing in making their products trustworthy. After all, deception can
obviate trust in this context.

(I do believe that software _ought to_ be more trustworthy, and society should
reward companies that act with integrity. But at the end of the day, that's
not my call to make.)

[1]: [https://sso.tax](https://sso.tax)

[2]: [https://github.com/paragonie](https://github.com/paragonie)

[3]: [https://paragonie.com/blog/2018/01/our-ambitious-plan-
make-i...](https://paragonie.com/blog/2018/01/our-ambitious-plan-make-
insecure-php-software-thing-past)

~~~
reaperducer
_I don 't believe it's fair to say that trust is "at the core" of software
marketing if so many successful software companies can get by without
investing in making their products trustworthy. After all, deception can
obviate trust in this context._

What you're seeing is companies that ignore security and trust at their own
peril. There are plenty of them, and the vast majority of startups, that don't
realize how important trust and security is to large customers. Then they
wonder why they can't get their foot in the door at certain companies.

The place I work for runs _every_ software purchase through a security
committee. For that reason, we tend to go with the big brands that take
security seriously. But it's not exclusively big brands.

I worked on a particular project that needed a particular type of software.
None of the big brands had anything similar. I put together a list of five
options and sent it over to the people who actually get to make the decisions.

All five options were small developers (fewer than 50 employees). Only two of
those five bothered to respond to the initial inquiries from our security
people. Of the two that responded, only one provided answers to the follow-up
questions. Guess which one got a ~$250K purchase order the next month.

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
"Slimy sales practices provokes distrust"

How many times have you been promised the world by a sales person and then you
speak with an engineer and get a whole different story? I've learned to always
speak with an engineer and find the manager of an existing customer.

Sometimes it's good, sometimes not so much.

~~~
thrav
Being on the other side, there are plenty of times that I have to tell the
customer, “this world is only going to happen if you make the proper
investment in setting this up specific to your needs...” and then they
complain when an already overworked employee they threw it over the fence to
can’t make it sing.

Good enterprise software is almost never one size fits all, and there is
responsibility on both sides to end up with something great.

~~~
bhandziuk
Right, enterprise software is usually relying on the end user to program
everything but instead of programming in C#/Javascript they're programming in
Salesforce (or whatever)

~~~
thrav
I wouldn’t say everything. The whole point is not to rebuild security, and
infra, and the data store, etc. etc.

The first start up I worked for built a piece of software that was adopted by
large enterprises in regulated industries with 3 engineers, because they got
to piggyback off of the Salesforce foundation.

It’s just a different flavor of abstraction.

------
have_faith
> Open source companies build trust by sharing the entirety of their codebase
> to the public

This mostly only builds trust with fellow developers. I can see why it would
be seen as trust building, but I don't think it builds as much trust as
developers would like to believe. Not an argument against open source at all,
just interesting to think about how you sell open source as a feature to an
end user.

~~~
xyzzy_plugh
Also trust cuts both ways. Ultimately if you produce bloated, frustrating bug-
ridden software, sharing the source online probably isn't going to help your
case.

There's a significant collection of software that I didn't trust out of the
gate, and I now trust a lot less after reading the source (Apache projects,
I'm looking at you).

------
ChrisMarshallNY
Brand value can be trust, but it can also mean other things, like dynamism or
creativity.

Building a brand is a long, disciplined process.

I'm in the very early stages of building a personal brand. I don't expect it
to have much to show for itself for another year or two.

Part of that, is being careful and thoughtful about what I post in public
forums, whether online, or in-person.

I have made it a point to hold myself accountable for what I post. If you look
at my HN handle, you will see that I link to my corporate Web sites and Stack
Overflow story.

I may come across as pedantic and "stuffy," but I'm done with damaging my
personal brand.

Everything I do is meant as a part of brand-building.

I have had trust as part of my personal brand for a couple of decades. I was a
senior engineering manager for a very conservative Japanese company. You don't
get to stay long in those types of positions without a demonstrable degree of
personal integrity.

------
yodon
Given the data and evidence based posts the OP is known for, this post feels
disappointingly light and anecdotal.

~~~
ttunguz
Thanks for the feedback. What data would help with the argument?

~~~
yodon
> We won’t buy from people or companies we don’t trust. The same is true in
> software.

That reads like a sensible statement, but I'm not sure it's true or if it's
true I'm not sure how the scale factors fit in.

Just raising the obvious counter-example, Facebook is pretty wildly
distrusted, and yet is widely used by people who distrust it. Did they
"purchase" FB? Not literally, but they certainly engage with it in ways
similar to purchasing and pay for it with ad viewing.

As to the data question, I'd think the best approach would involve looking for
explicit measures of trust (eg surveys) and seeing how those map to revenue
growth or subscriber growth for software companies.

The brand strength you called out may be relevant as a proxy for trust, but I
think that's assuming the thesis to be true and then proving it to be true by
saying strong brands have strong sales numbers therefore trust is the key to
sales (without ever proving trust is key to software brand strength).

Another approach might be to look at sales numbers following data leak
incidents, but I think that's more complex because these days those
announcements are so prevalent they may not stay in the news cycle long enough
to matter (which arguably is itself a sign trust is not as key a
differentiator as one would expect).

As one more thought, I'd expect b2b software purchase decisions to have a
steeper dependence on trust than b2c, but that's just a guess.

Your thesis is certainly an important one to explore, and I think all of us
hope it's true because an economic incentive like this is a powerful force
encouraging companies to treat our data in a trustworthy manner.

------
grammarxcore
I'm not sure what the takeaways from this article were. I feel like the
incredibly short article was more a tautological executive summary of code
axioms.

------
gartneranalyst
A Gartner analyst here. AMA.

~~~
jariel
What are the best 'early' or 'pre-steps' a smaller company can do before
they're likely to be on your radar? And what is the best stage at which to
start focusing on your type of orgs?

At what point do such firms start developing 'quadrants' for smaller, niche
services or industries? There are surely a lot of SaaS type platforms out
there that just don't make the cut into your reports, so where is that
threshold?

~~~
gartneranalyst
You should identify a target list of analysts who cover your domain and brief
them on your offering. You are never too early IMO.

We typically do not produce Magic Quadrants for small, niche oriented sectors.
We will use another document type called a Market Guide for such markets.
Market Guides do not rank vendors like a Magic Quadrant.

------
rusticpenn
Google seems to "survive" after becoming so untrustworthy ( in shutting down
tools)

~~~
SQueeeeeL
Yeah, trust is just a way to break into the market. Sorta like the old saying
"it takes a poor genius to become rich and a rich idiot to become poor"

------
freepor
You cannot maximize near term profits and long term customer trust. And the
financing systems of the modern economy are set up for near term profits. Thus
you cannot do right by your customers unless you are financed outside of the
finance industry (bootstrapping, family business, rich dude).

~~~
unlinked_dll
If profit is orthogonal to a core value of the brand, then that value is not
important to the market. That's just knowing your customers.

As well, near term profit and long term brand goals are never decoupled. You
don't one day decide "our brand is X" but "our brand will be X" and you need
to do Y and Z _today_ and every day following to build up to X.

And I firmly reject the idea that near-term profit is disjoint from long-term
consumer trust, at least for professional products and tooling. If they don't
trust you not to screw them today or tomorrow, they won't pay you. I think
this is why Google and Facebook can't make money from anything but
advertising, they have to give away everything else for free or at a loss
because no one trusts them at all.

~~~
learc83
It happens all the time. Tool Company A is known for making quality tools.
Company B buys company A and immediately decides that they can make more money
in the short term by using cheaper components. The cheaper components aren't
immediately obvious--it takes a few hundred hours of wear to be apparent.

It takes even longer for word to spread that Tool Company A is no longer a
quality brand.

Company B sacrificed the long term brand, but they managed to increase short
term profits.

~~~
unlinked_dll
I mean there are a couple ways to look at that. For me it's recognizing that
building trust as a brand is part of creating value. The pump and dump scheme
that you're describing is about exfiltrating that value from the brand.

But that doesn't really work until either the company is in a situation where
you need to pump and dump to exit or it's in late enough stage that the
leaders/owners want to exit/retire. Either way the long term health of the
company and brand don't matter, by that point it doesn't matter to build trust
with customers.

~~~
learc83
That's not what pump and dump means.

>Either way the long term health of the company and brand don't matter

It's does matter because the long term option will often result in more value
overall to the new owners and customers. There is definitely a tension between
short term profit and long term profit. It's well recognized and has been
studied extensively.

------
pluc
Trust and marketing never belong in the same sentence. Marketing is the art of
inconsequential "pushing of the truth" and frivolous claims. It's the art of
shoving a sub-par product in your face over a relevant product.

~~~
gk1
> Marketing is the art of inconsequential "pushing of the truth"

What would you call it when someone, say, the product creator, speaks the
truth about a product to get the word out? That would fall under "marketing."

"Marketing" is as general a term as "programming." There are all sorts of bad
things accomplished with programming, but I think you'd agree that
generalizing all of "programming" as something negative would be ridiculous.

~~~
ravenstine
No, it's not. Marketing as a concept is totally divorced from whether or not
its message is truthful because marketing doesn't measure anything. It's
propaganda, whether or not the audience understands that or whether the
creator is being honest. The audience has to effectively use a side-channel to
figure out if a piece of marketing accurately reflects the product. Often
times it doesn't, or at least not completely, because if you don't lie or
exaggerate to some extent, your product will lose out to the competitor who
makes bolder claims, uses brighter colors, and is purposefully less specific
in their message.

The best that marketing can do to convey trust is to use social proof. After
all, _if everyone is using Brand X, it must be good, right?_ Of course, social
proof can be faked, exaggerated, or bought with a lot of money, as is commonly
done.

~~~
gk1
I think you're talking about "advertising," which is != "marketing."

To continue with my analogy, it's like saying "spam is bad, therefore all
email is bad, and email is created by programming, therefore all programming
is bad."

