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Let’s talk about Law #9, The Law of the Opposite from the book "The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing" by Trout and Ries and how GWAVA is using it to compete with a new product.

I normally don't talk about how I am currently doing marketing strategy. Usually I tell about past success, but this time I thought you might be interested in a real world scenario that shows how decisions are made for one product to compete against another. And it almost never has to do with the features and functionality.

GWAVA, as I’ve identified in previous posts, is in the traditional position of being the Gorilla in the GroupWise market. It has been the first in the mind of customers for many different categories. This includes Anti-Virus, Anti-Spam, Disaster Recovery and Backup.

But now, over the past month, GWAVA has released a new product where it isn’t first to market. It also isn’t the Gorilla. This is in the GroupWise Archiving space and the product is Retain for GroupWise.

At this point I would normally not let the general public in on my marketing secrets because it gives me a competitive advantage, but in this case, let’s talk about what GWAVA is going to do to compete in the is market.

First, you need to identify the competition. In this case, not necessarily from a feature standpoint, but from a positioning standpoint.

There are two other main vendors in the GroupWise Archiving space. Each of them have carved out a their own niche and have approached the market in different ways.

First, there is Discovery from Nexic. (www.nexic.com/discovery) They were first to market. Having developed their product while I was still at Novell in 2001 and 2002.

Second there is GWArchive from The Messaging Architects. (www.gwtools.com/en/gwarchive)

These two companies have been competing for the past few years with very different strategies.

Rather than go into details here on Novell's blog, where Novell is sensitive to all their partners, I invite you to see how real world positioning and marketing strategies go into decision making for a new product. I also tell my competition what they can do to be more effective at competing against GWAVA.

You can read the rest of the post at http://gwbliss.blogspot.com

Disclaimer: As with everything else at Cool Solutions, this content is definitely not supported by Novell (so don't even think of calling Support if you try something and it blows up).

It was contributed by a community member and is published "as is." It seems to have worked for at least one person, and might work for you. But please be sure to test, test, test before you do anything drastic with it.