Or more importantly, what is my company? In order to solve our customers problem we're cutting across a couple of well defined categories in high tech.
Which causes angst.
On the one hand, it is extremely difficult to create a new market category. You have to do an awful lot of hand waving and the highly paid analysts give you dagger looks (after all, that's their job you know). But if you use an existing category, you get dragged down into a rathole and spend all your time explaining why you're so different.
My answer. Forget the category and focus on what you do to help your customers.
Back in the early 90's we developed a network appliance. Problem was there wasn't any such beast in the market and no one knew what we were talking about. I didn't want to call it a server, because in those days, servers were expensive and required lots of technical people to get one running. So I called it a "workgroup server, an appliance". No one knew what that meant, but kind of understood the category.
So switch gears and use analogies to avoid the rat hole.
As we explained to the UK journalists, this was an appliance. When you're in your kitchen and all you want is toast, you don't turn on the cooker to make toast. You plug in your toaster, an appliance, which does one thing very, very well. They got it. In fact we actually did a toaster ad compaign to get the idea across.
Just cut to the chase and explain how you get the job done. Use terms and stories they can relate to and you will have happy customers. Everyone else will come around on their own.
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