Identifying your target segment is one of the most important steps in building an effective marketing strategy. Itโs not just who youโre building for, but what part of your product theyโll actually value most.
Three years ago, I launched this newsletter by comparing five tech trends to five ski analogies. Keeping the tradition alive, hereโs another winter story.
Meet the same mountain: ๐จ๐ญ Matterhorn to the Swiss, ๐ฎ๐น Cervino to the Italians.
One mountain. Two distinct audiences. Two value propositions.
Matterhorn (โMatteโ = meadow, โHornโ = peak in German) dominates the Zermatt skyline and adorns everything from Toblerone bars to tourism campaigns. To the Swiss, its shape is iconic and source of pride. A clear, differentiated value prop.
Cervino, from the pre-Latin root karv (rock), competes in a crowded field. Think: Monte Bianco (Europeโs highest peak), Tre Cime di Lavaredo with the rugged peaks or the queen of the Dolomites, Marmolada. Beautiful? Absolutely. But in Italy, Cervino is just one of many.
So if youโre a marketer chasing product-market fit, the lesson is simple:
Make sure youโre marketing your Matterhorn to the Swiss, not the Italians.
Find the segment for whom your product is unforgettable.
The one who sees it as the only possible choice.
Just like Instagram did.
Instagram began in San Francisco as Burbn, a mobile check-in app created by Kevin Systrom rom and Mike Krieger. As the co-founders watched how users engaged with the product, one feature clearly rose above the rest: photo sharing. Everything else โ location check-ins, gamified rewards โ felt redundant next to Foursquare. After peaking at just 100 users, they made a bold decision to pivot. They stripped away all but the photo-sharing functionality, refined it with filters, and rebranded the app as Instagram: a name combining instant camera and telegram. [Source]Today, Instagram boasts more than 3 billion users. [Source]
Photo sharing with filters became to Instagramโs audience what the iconic, pyramid-shape of Matterhorn is to the Swiss: the one feature that made the product unforgettable.
Choosing the right target segment is critical, yet itโs only one of the 18 elements in a comprehensive go-to-market framework. If you want a practical structure for turning complex tech into adoption and revenue โ with examples from companies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Groq and Y Combinator โ get my book ๐ ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ฃ๐น๐ฎ๐ป ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ ๐ง๐ฒ๐ฐ๐ต ๐ฆ๐๐ฎ๐ฟ๐๐๐ฝ๐ โฌ๏ธ
In mathematics, axioms are self-evident principles. Theyโre the foundation on which more complex theorems are built. Take calculus, my favorite branch of math. It starts with a handful of assumptions: space and time are continuous, limits exist, and change can be quantified. If you know how fast something is changing, you can figure out how much itโs changed โ and vice versa. From there, you unlock entire worlds: rates of growth, accumulation of value, and optimization. Sounds a lot like marketing, doesnโt it? ๐
In marketing, axioms serve the same role. They help you recalibrate when markets shift, competitors surprise you, or new technologies (like gen AI) change the game.
The Three Axioms of Marketing
Over the years, Iโve returned to these three core axioms again and again, applying them through every tech wave from mobile to AI while working across startups and Fortune 100 companies in both Europe and Silicon Valley.
Axiom 1 โ Scientific precision
For every product there exists exactly one clear positioning statement that links its unique capability to a concrete customer need.
The most effective marketers approach their product’s positioning statement as a discovery process, not guesswork. Positioning requires rigorous market analysis, a deep understanding of buyer personas, and an honest comparison to alternatives. When done correctly, positioning defines the North Star for the business and keeps Marketing, Sales and Product in sync and united.
To see scientific precision in action, letโs look at a fresh positioning example from the autonomous ride-hailing market. Waymo โs trajectory shows how clear market definition and targeted messaging can carve out a profitable niche even in a highly competitive space.
Example of a positioning statement inspired by Waymo (San Francisco, August 2025)
In 2025, Business Insider and Reddit discussions revealed that Waymo rides cost about $5โ6 more than Uber or Lyft, yet many riders valued the extra comfort, reliability, and privacy enough to pay the premium.
Without precision here, marketing risks scattering its efforts, diluting the message, and missing the target entirely.
Axiom 2 โ Emotional storytelling
In every purchasing decision, emotion precedes reason. Marketing must first evoke feeling so that logic can later validate the choice.
Baba Shiv, a revered Marketing Professor at Stanford University Graduate School of Business, once stated, “Nearly 95% of our decisions in life are rooted in emotionโnot logic.” You might wonder if this applies to business-to-business transactions, like enterprise software sales. The answer is a definite “Yes!
In the mid-2000s, Cisco ran its โSelf-Defending Networkโ campaign to position its IT security solutions as proactive, intelligent defenders of an organizationโs assets. Rather than focusing solely on firewalls, intrusion prevention, or encryption standards, Cisco told stories of real people whose work and reputations were safeguarded because the network stopped threats before they could cause harm.
Cisco’s The Power of The Network Campaign
If you’re an enterprise sales executive, you probably realize that customers often decide in favor or against your product early in the sales cycle. What follows is essentially an opportunity for the customer to validate their initial decision. This phase involves testing your product, examining ROI calculators, or seeking peer reviews to gain confidence in the choice they’ve already made.
In summary, customers make decisions emotionally and then rationalize them.
Axiom 3 โ Relentless consistency
Repeated delivery of a coherent message compounds its impact over time, while inconsistency diminishes effectiveness toward zero.
Consistency turns your positioning into a memory imprint. Each content interaction, ad view, and social media conversation must reinforce the same promise.
This is about disciplined alignment: sales decks matching web copy, product announcements echoing the same value proposition, and customer success stories reinforcing the same themes.
Over months and years, consistency builds trust and recognition in ways no single campaign can match. Break the thread too often, and you start again from zero.
Vanta โs years-long commitment to podcast advertising shows how repetition in the right channels compounds over time. Starting in niche security shows like This Week in Startups and CISO-focused podcasts, and expanding to mainstream business podcasts such as Acquired, The Daily, (my personal favorite: The AI Daily Brief by Nathaniel Whittemore), and The Diary of a CEO, theyโve kept the core message intact. The result: thousands of sales conversations where prospects bring up hearing about Vanta โall the time.โ Thatโs consistency turning positioning into muscle memory.
In their CMO Scott Holden‘s own words: “Vanta gets a lot of attention for our billboards, but podcasts are a massive lever for us too. We’ve been advertising in them since 2018. (…) All those demo requests that sales loves begin higher up the funnel.”
Vanta advertised for years on podcasts for their target audience: CISOs who’s spend 100s of thousands of dollars on their security software
From Calculus to Product Launches
These axioms have guided me across decades of tech shifts:
2000s โ Mobile Internet. At Nokia, I built software tapping directly into telecom APIs, turning raw network data into useful services I then helped take to market for clients like Vodafone, Telenor and TIM.
2010s โ Cloud Computing. At Cisco and Riverbed Technology I distilled the value of cloud computing before it became the backbone of digital transformations at Fortune 500 enterprises.
2020s โ Data Analytics and Gen AI. At Google, I crafted portfolio-wide narratives for data and AI products and enabled 13,000 sellers to tell those stories effectively.
2025 โ Edge and Agentic AI. At Synadia a cloud-native startup, I repositioned middleware into a full-stack edge AI platform: a key enabler for agentic AI at the edge in retail, automotive and manufacturing.
The Marketing Axioms in the AI Era
Marketing a category-defining product (gen AI, self-driving cars, or the next leap in biotech) is like solving a math problem no one has worked out before.
Thereโs no answer key. But the path forward still starts with fundamentals.
In AI-powered marketing today, that might mean taking a single high-performing message and using AI to instantly create dozens of localized, role-specific, or vertical-tailored variations. The goal is to preserve the original emotional heartbeat and positioning clarity.
Final thought: In both math and marketing, axioms donโt give you the full solution. They give you the foundation that makes finding it possible.
Turning Innovation Into Revenue
If you enjoyed this post and would like to continue the journey into the three axioms of marketing, I have exciting news: 10 years after publishing my Marketing Plan for Tech Startups template (which reached more than 100k readers) Iโm turning it into a full book:
Iโm a Marketing Executive, an astute influencer, panelist, and public speaker with recent appearances on Harvard Business Review (HBR). I live and work in San Francisco.
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