Experiences on Marketing a Verification Library

Inspired by JL Gray of the blog "Cool Verification" who stated, in this post:

"I'd much rather see the marketing guys write a separate blog on their experiences marketing a verification library."

Here goes!

The primary challenge with marketing anything is to crisply answer the audience's selfish-but-totally-fair question of, "what's in it for me?"  Elaborating further, this sentiment is, "how will this widget / tool / thinghy help make my life easier, delight my customer, or please my management".  The key is that in EDA you have to typically have to answer this question for the end user, the end user's manager, the R&D executive, and the ever elusive purchasing manager / CFO.

My first experience with the "marketing a verification library" task was with the e Reuse Methodology (eRM), and it continues today it with OVM + OVM plug&play with eRM and SystemC language libraries.  The key first step to marketing eRM/OVM is to make the strategic decision to unconditionally bundle eRM/OVM free as part of the methodology included in the Incisive download package.

The reasoning behind this: by promoting a standardized methodology, we aim to improve the efficiency & quality of the customers’ verification, which we found ultimately encourages greater tool adoption when coupled with our consultative approach to application engineering support.  (And since this is all free to use or not, the "economic buyer" types largely remove themselves from the picture.)  In short, making the "marketing a verification library" task successful, like marketing anything else, is all about a strategy that sets-up a win-win situation for the vendor, the customer, and even the customers' customers (as is often the case with eRM/OVM to enable unrestricted IP sharing).
 
But what about the "real" marketing part, a/k/a the promotional aspect of all this?  Turning to the customer's R&D ladder: in the fullness of time, my personal view w.r.t. to answering the "what's in it for me" question above has evolved.  In the past, I would create very different collateral sets for each rung of the R&D ladder, where the benefits and feature descriptions were dramatically segmented for end users, managers, and executives.

For example, my end user into presentation would almost immediately jump to code examples.  While this was effective, over time I began to shift my thinking, observing that at a macro level, all levels of the R&D ladder tended to share the same high level hopes & dreams for the benefits of a given technology.  Of course each person would experience and leverage said benefits differently depending on their particular role and its place in the development cycle.  Consequently, I learned to lead all the presentations with the same high level benefits review, then tailor the subsequent feature descriptions for each level (where in the executive case, you can just keep the 3-5 slide overview and totally skip any follow-on details.)
 
Finally, a cornerstone of any promotional effort is to publicize the success that users have been enjoying with the product/methodology/library.  Despite the numerous success reports I receive from AEs every day, for various reasons customers have been increasingly shy about publicly acknowledging their success in "official" success stories (shameless plug: like this one with Specman and Enterprise Manager with STMicro, and these stories on OVM with Oki Semiconductor and KPIT), but leveraging the "win-win" best practice we increasingly have been able to get the customer in the spotlight via contributed articles.

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