Positioning and the rule of "three"

This is an excerpt from my upcoming Developer Marketing and Developer Relations book. Be sure to subscribe to this newsletter and be notified when pre-sales are available.

Spend any time with marketing people and you’ll quickly see how much they adapt to “three bullet” thinking. Broad statements are usually followed by three bullet points that support the statement. It’s not a hard and fast rule, but there is some science and a lot of history behind it.

Somewhere around the middle of the 300s BCE, the Greek philosopher Aristotle devised a rhetorical framework that shapes (among many things) marketing messaging to this day. He posited that the best, most effective persuasive messaging contained three elements:

• Ethos, an appeal to credibility and authority
• Pathos, an emotional connection
• Logos, logic and reasoning

A little more recently, in 1956, a cognitive psychologist named George Miller authored a seminal paper entitled, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two: Some Limits on Our Capacity for Processing Information.”  Whether we consciously know it or not, all marketing people have internalized his work and use it daily. In the paper, he made a few observations:

• People can hold at most seven (give or take two) chunks of information in their short-term memory
• Information is best when it is chunked into smaller pieces (this is why telephone numbers often have “breaks” in them and credit card numbers are grouped into four chunks of three to four numbers)
• The more items you add, the more cognitive load increases

Over time, marketers have adopted this work and it has become the de facto model, whether or not we know of its origins. We think in small, digestible chunks of information so as not to overload our prospects’ cognitive load. We try to provide logical breaking points in our messaging. In so doing, we have effectively standardized on a positioning framework that looks something like this, with one primary positioning statement and three supporting points:

Positioning Statement

- Supporting point 1
- Supporting point 2
- Supporting point 3

You see this everywhere you go in marketing collateral. But with developer marketing, we take Miller’s work and suffuse it with Aristotle’s rhetorical framework, and our positioning frameworks often look like this:

Positioning statement

- An emotional point about why you will love this product
- A logical point about what unique capabilities this product has for you
- A credible point that explains why you can depend on this product

This is the positioning framework I created as the first Director of Marketing for Amazon Web Services:

Amazon Web Services gives you a cost-effective and dependable Cloud Computing Platform that makes it easy to provision infrastructure so you can build anything quickly.

- Flexible: Easy to use and get started.
- Cost-effective: No contracts, pay as you go, transparent pricing.
- Dependable: Scalability and reliability from the company who knows how to run infrastructure at web scale.

In my experience, most developer-focused products evolve their positioning into some form of the following:

Positioning that identifies the uniqueness of a product in a market

• A supporting point about productivity improvements or ease of use (appeal to the emotion of the buyer)
• A supporting point that dives into what’s unique about the product and what that enables (appeal to logic)
• A supporting point about dependability or scalability, or both (appeal to credibility)

When I went through my Greek philosopher phase in my early 30s, I was shocked and humbled to learn that Aristotle was a far better Product Marketing Manager than me.

Subscribe to notifications about my upcoming Developer Marketing and Developer Relations book.