Positing Harbr, the Data Exchange Platform (with “a little” help from April Dunford)
Harbr employees had difficulty explaining what the company does. It was referred to as a data exchange (including the UX), but that description failed to inspire the ICP, who sought to sell data and create new revenue streams. Alternatively, Harbr was presented as Shopify for data (or Spotify for data, as evangelized by the Head of Customer Support), but that carried a bunch of unhelpful assumptions (such as billing functionality that Harbr didn’t have) and wasn’t all that clear for people outside of B2B tech or commerce.
To market test the best descriptor for Harbr, I developed 5 Google ad tests with corresponding landing pages, based on descriptors gathered throughout the business and aligned with the sales and product teams, as well as the leadership.
Ad Groups:
- Private Data Marketplace Builder, CTR: 1.25% (771 / 61,870), Conversions to demo: 23
2. Data Productization, CTR: 1.44% (282 / 19,584), Conversions to demo: 3
3. Data Exchange, CTR: 1.25% (288 / 23,045), Conversions to demo: 4
4. Data Monetization, CTR: 2.06% (54 / 2,616), Conversions to demo: 0
5. Data Commercialization, CTR: 0.57% (139 / 24,479), Conversions to demo: 0
“Data Marketplace” as the best market descriptor for Harbr was also supported by keyword analytics of the recorded sales conversations (Gong), where “data exchange” was mentioned only by Harbr employees, while prospects primarily mentioned “data marketplace”.
The best-known data marketplace and most frequently mentioned competitor was Snowflake. The initial differentiation attempt was to position Snowflake as a public marketplace, while Harbr was a private one (justifying the time and effort needed for the setup, compared to Snowflake’s near-instant listing creation). After numerous internal discussions and interviews with clients, I discovered that a much better differentiator is Harbr’s focus and enablement of high-margin data products, that required close collaboration with data purchasers, full volume data trials, and white glove service, compared to off-the-shelf data products on Snowflake and other public marketplaces.
A workshop with April Dunford brought the team heads and the leadership on the same page in terms of the key differentiators (2nd being the full customization of the marketplace), and April suggested that “data marketplaces” brings up unhelpful associations and that Harbr is differentiated enough to have it’s own category, data commerce platform. After consideration, the leadership agreed, and I’ve set out a strategy and created content for building on the term “data marketplace” as the most relevant market segment, but introducing and owning the term “data commerce” as a solution for high-value data products.
Implementing the new pitch and positioning was not without it’s challenges, which I’ve shared in a PMA meeting:
Brand archetype, Harbr
In addition, Harbr had a fairly corporate feel in its communications (both language and visually), thanks to its roots in the financial sector. It didn’t inspire the ideal customers, who were intrapreneurs and visionaries, pushing through operational and legal hurdles in order to monetize data. Harbr needed to be bold and inspiring.
I gathered a committee of marketing and design teams in order to create a brand proposal that could inform new tone of voice and visual brand guidelines. By bringing in brand archetypes for the committee to explore and choose from, I set a clear and achievable goal: a brand MVP that would be tested for a year only on newly created content and then could be fully developed by the agency after the testing period. Two clear favorites emerged from the brand archetype exercise, and after further discussions and workshops, the committee jointly outlined the customized “Visionary Rebel” brand, what it stands for, and examples of messaging along with the visual identity. I’ve strongly steered for exact examples of the brand execution, knowing that while conceptually and at a high level the chosen brand MVP is very likely to get wider buy-in, the devil is in the detail, and the challenge will be to bring everyone on to the same on what “Visionary Rebel” is and isn’t. The brand MVP was enthusiastically accepted by the leadership team and went through further refinement and execution examples until it was built into new brand guidelines.
