Infoslogan
Choose your own adventure:
skip ahead to learn what an infoslogan is
read on for an example of when to use one
Eventually, you may split your single product into a suite of multiple products - almost always 3, in my experience((If you don't have a product yet, make one. Even if you think of yourself as a services provider. Make things.)).
I've been through this exercise multiple times in the past year with clients - each a B2B tech firm combining targeted positioning and emerging technology to solve a business problem in a new way for the same audience.
So this is the pattern: start with one, your flagship product, sell it for at least a year or two, then balkanize the one into three.
Some basic principles:
This is the process of retiring one product and creating three new ones
New products often begin as "features" of the flagship product
When some customers are more interested in a feature of your product than its core functionality, that's a good time to balkanize it((No one in the digital world says "balkanize"; I'm just a history geek who drank Bosnian Slivovitz (apricot brandy) with an Albanian warzone-journalist in late 1991; I got a graphic lesson on history repeating itself in the Balkans and so I look for opportunities to use the word :) )).
To be clear: 3-tiered pricing is not the same as a 3-tiered product line, each at a different price. Don't confuse tiered product pricing with having multiple products.
A second-order consequence of having multiple products is you have to do more branding and marketing homework((On the opposite end of the spectrum, 37Signals went from managing 5 brands to one. They started with a product called Basecamp and made new products that were separate, like Highrise, but later sold off the other products or merged them all into one - thereby merging their corporate branding and product branding into one entity: Basecamp. Definitely worth it if you have a bestseller on your hands; but, hey, they are at it again, creating a new product brand))
Don't stint on the homework - offer a little bit more information than your customers want, so they are reassured that there's deep thinking behind the product.
As you unveil your new products, also rewrite and redesign your website, creating a new company tagline that reflects your new status as a provider of multiple products
Name your products and, sometimes, put a little trademark symbol after them™.
If you read this far, you deserve a free brand messaging hack: bolster the brand identity of each new product by making sure you give it what I call an "infoslogan". An infoslogan is a concise, utilitarian description product description that feels and looks like a normal slogan.
Enjoy your weekend,
Rowan