{"id":1636,"date":"2014-07-18T11:00:26","date_gmt":"2014-07-18T05:30:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/?p=1636"},"modified":"2025-09-25T16:40:23","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T11:10:23","slug":"marketable-items-let-you-have-your-content-and-eat-it-too","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/18\/marketable-items-let-you-have-your-content-and-eat-it-too\/","title":{"rendered":"Marketable Items Let You Have Your Content And Eat It Too"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In his blog post titled\u00a0<a title=\"Permanent Link to Wasted Words \u2013 Why Marketing Content Longer than 3 to 5 Items Does Not Work\" href=\"http:\/\/blogs.gartner.com\/hank-barnes\/2014\/04\/15\/wasted-words-why-marketing-content-longer-than-3-to-5-items-does-not-work\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"bookmark noopener noreferrer\">Wasted Words \u2013 Why Marketing Content Longer than 3 to 5 Items Does Not Work<\/a>, Gartner Research Director Hank Barnes makes a strong case to technology vendors for simplifying their story and emphasizing only two or three things that matter most in their marketing collateral.<\/p>\n<p>He goes on to explain how most people he talks to agree that it is a good thing but, in the same breath, laments about regularly seeing exactly the opposite behavior in practice:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Feature Lists with dozens of features<\/li>\n<li>\u201cCompany Differentiation\u201d Powerpoint slides listing 7 to 10 items, and<\/li>\n<li>Benefits pages with too many bullet points to count<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>We call this &#8220;content size conundrum&#8221; and come across it regularly while providing GTM solutions to IT companies.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/cdn.business2community.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Memory.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"200\" height=\"200\" \/>According to Barnes, &#8220;all that extra stuff might just be wasted words&#8221;. To support his contention, he quotes from psychological studies that highlight the limited capacity of the human mind to retain new things.<\/p>\n<p>Per one such study cited in the B2C blog post <a href=\"http:\/\/www.business2community.com\/strategy\/sell-complexity-beyond-customers-capacity-understand-0843240#!DNEuN\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">How to Sell Complexity Beyond the Customer\u2019s Capacity to Understand<\/a>, \u201cour limited short-term working memory (is) &#8230; capable of remembering only 3-4 items\u00a0of new information at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>As a marketer who is especially passionate about consumer behavior, I readily accept all this psychobabble.<\/p>\n<p>But it&#8217;s not going to solve the problem because it ignores the ground reality of the content development in a typical IT company. With my ringside view into how content is actually developed in IT, I venture the following root causes for marketing collateral overcrowding:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Overarching belief that &#8220;more the merrier&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>Fond hope that, if they put in 10 points, the prospect will at least read 3-5<\/li>\n<li>Misguided notion that it should be left to the prospect to select what&#8217;s relevant and ignore the rest<\/li>\n<li>Nagging feeling that if they take a list of 10 points and remove seven of them, they&#8217;re doing injustice to their product \/ service<\/li>\n<li>Risk of alienating team members whose points are skipped.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As a result, it&#8217;s not so easy for content writers to take a scalpel to long feature lists, differentiator slides or benefits pages.<\/p>\n<p>That said, in an increasingly crowded market, prospects are simply not going to take the trouble to find the most relevant piece of marketing collateral from a content maze, so marketers can&#8217;t reconcile themselves with the status quo. Change is a must. And it has to be led from the top.<\/p>\n<p>To drive change, CMOs need to secure the buy-in of their C-suite and sales leaders, who&#8217;re respectively the budget approvers and internal customers of the content they&#8217;re creating. What&#8217;s the chance that the aforementioned cognitive science mumbo jumbo will work with them?<\/p>\n<p>We thought so too.<\/p>\n<p>Our <em><strong>Marketable Items<\/strong><\/em> offer a pragmatic way to overcome marketing collateral overcrowding and develop more effective content.<\/p>\n<p>Marketable Items package product features and service capabilities into compelling reasons to buy that resonate strongly with the target market\u2019s pain areas and hot topics.<\/p>\n<p>Each product (or service) will have multiple Marketable Items. Each Marketable Item we create will restrict itself to 3-5 points that matter most for the given target audience. But, collectively, the set of all Marketable Items created for a given product (or service) will convey the whole enchilada of the vendor&#8217;s capabilities and credentials. Please find examples of Marketable Items in the following exhibit.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Marketable_Items.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone wp-image-3789\" src=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Marketable_Items.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"281\" srcset=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Marketable_Items.jpg 824w, https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Marketable_Items-200x140.jpg 200w, https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/01\/Marketable_Items-768x539.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>By following this ingenious approach, <strong><a href=\"http:\/\/www.gtm360.com\/Offering.php\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Marketable Items<\/a> <\/strong>break the content size conundrum. Please contact us to know more about how to create Marketable Items for your product or service.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In his blog post titled\u00a0Wasted Words \u2013 Why Marketing Content Longer than 3 to 5 Items Does Not Work, Gartner Research Director Hank Barnes makes a strong case to technology vendors for simplifying their story and emphasizing only two or three things that matter most in their marketing collateral. He goes on to explain how &#8230; <a title=\"Marketable Items Let You Have Your Content And Eat It Too\" class=\"read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/2014\/07\/18\/marketable-items-let-you-have-your-content-and-eat-it-too\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Marketable Items Let You Have Your Content And Eat It Too\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7601,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,4,27,8,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b1-integrated-marketing","category-digital-marketing","category-gtm360-sm","category-it-marketing","category-mandatory-category"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1636"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13774,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1636\/revisions\/13774"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7601"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gtm360.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}