0. Decision makers are motivated by two emotions above all — fear and greed. In the case of enterprise IT, that equates roughly to saying they want to buy stuff that:

• Is safe.
• Will confer benefits.

1. For a marketing message to succeed, whatever its goals are, the “confer benefits” part of the story needs to be:

• Compelling
• Believed

2. The “safe” part needs to be believed too. Rational belief in the safety of doing business with you is good. Blind faith is even better, but usually is enjoyed only by the most established of vendors.

In some cases, that may be the greatest competitive strength they have.

3. To be believed, enterprise IT messaging generally needs to be:

• Credible
• Clear

A certain amount of exaggeration is expected, and easily shrugged off. It’s also possible to get away with a certain amount of vagueness, whether in a fear/safety story or when pitching something as new/innovative/exciting. But don’t overdo either.

One common way to overdo your exaggeration — make an obviously false claim of uniqueness.

4. Please note: Deficiencies in the consistency of your messages can undermine credibility and clarity alike.

5. Messaging can become distorted in many ways, both accidental and deliberate. For example:

• Your salespeople get a few hours of sales training per month. Then you send them out on sales calls. Do you really think every nuance of every message will be delivered perfectly every time?
• That’s largely accidental. But rival salespeople will distort your messages on purpose.
• So will rival marketers when talking with press, analysts, and other influencers.
• Even influencers who believe your story will abbreviate and distort it when passing it onward. Many lack the detailed domain knowledge to fully understand it and put it in context anyway.

Message transmission is lossy, or worse.

6. So how do you combat message loss? My top tactics are:

• Break your story into clear, simple parts.
• Make sure your story has ENOUGH parts.

If enough parts get through accurately, then perhaps the target will correctly reassemble the overall message.

7. As one would hope, the layered messaging model performs well by these criteria:

• Its whole point is to help you credibly assert benefits.
• It calls for you to make numerous different claims …
• … each of which can be individually simple.
• It enforces consistency among the different parts of your story.

8. To also help punch messages through the noise, I commonly emphasize that vendors should use multiple proof points.

Any one proof point can be dismissed or discounted. An impressive-sounding reference account could have gotten your product for free, or might have a CIO who’s buddies with your founder. A single impressive feature can be sort-of matched by a competitor’s kludgy alternative. But if you say that 10 Fortune 100 enterprises are using your product, that’s hard to ignore. Ditto if you can recite multiple impressive features the competition can’t match.

Yes, I believe you should use customers as proof points even when you’re not allowed to use their names. A blog is a great vehicle for doing that.

Related links

• One consistency rule that’s often forgotten — don’t declare a position today you can’t walk back from.
• Even your pricing algorithm should be a simple function — specifically minimum() — of individually simple elements.

• A low-quantity list price.
• A standard volume discount (typically 50%ish, assuming negligible cost of goods sold).
• The real negotiated price.

But the whole process has to start with some concept of a single-unit price.

What kind of price? Well, for appliances, you usually should just charge a one-time fee for whatever is in the carton, plus annual maintenance; most alternatives are gimmicks. But for packaged software, there are numerous choices. The easy part is timing:

• All software can be charged for on an annual license.
• Some can be sold on a perpetual license as well. (Exceptions include: Open source, SaaS, and perhaps other software whose main competition is reasonably-priced subscriptions.)
• Annual maintenance is usually 20-22% of the perpetual license fee.
• When there are both perpetual and annual options, the annual fee is usually 40-60% of the perpetual one.

Tougher is deciding what kind of “unit” you should price by. My standard advice has become:

• There should be 2 or more simple pricing algorithms, so that …
  
• … the price for any given customer is the lowest of those choices.

Generally one pricing algorithm will be suited for most of your customers, while the others will be meant for minority or edge cases.

By “simple pricing approaches” I primarily mean the usual-suspect proxies for valuable work done, such as:

• So much per unit of computing capacity (server, core, virtual machine, etc.).
• So much per user (named, simultaneous log-on, whatever).
• So much per unit of data (amount of raw data,  capacity of RAM, volume streaming through).

Alternatively, some pricing schemes focus more on development effort averted — e.g., ETL vendors may charge according to the number of different databases you connect to.

For example:

• You could price business intelligence software:
  • Per server core to most of your customers.
  • Per virtual machine to those who virtualize it.
• You could price sophisticated analytic software:
  • Per named user to most of your customers.
  • Per server, for those few organizations who want widespread/occasional access to it.
  • Premium (i.e. expensively) either way.
• You could price database software:
  • Per terabyte stored …
  • … but with a per-server cap that keeps you competitive with appliances even when a database is highly compressible.
• You could price ETL software:
  • Per database connection …
  • … with a per-server cap …
  • … and a per-megabyte option that probably only makes sense for a few awkwardly sharded cloud deployments.

Virtues of such approaches include:

• Simplicity. Your salesman on the account should be able to quickly determine which pricing approach will apply. The prospect should be comfortable that there won’t be hard-to-foresee “gotcha” charges.
• Fairness and match to use case. For any particular prospect, there probably will be a pricing scheme that fits well.
• Competitive flexibility. Nothing in this strategy puts much of a floor or ceiling on your pricing. You can do whatever you think is economically best.

My advice is similar for SaaS (Software as a Service), for similar reasons, with variations such as:

• There’s no natural concept of a perpetual license.
• There may be more choices (with appropriate quantity discounts) for length of term.
• Pricing could be by unit-of-work — e.g. transactions or other operations.

In most cases, there’s a whole other dimension of pricing complexity — you want to carve your offering into tiers, e.g.:

• Paid product/free trial version.
• Base product/chargeable options.
• Full feature set/limited features for casual users.
• Good support/best support.

I’m not going to address those in detail now, but I’ll leave you with one cardinal rule:

Don’t provide anybody with software that gives them a bad experience.

Even your crippleware should be good.

Related links

• Pricing choices by many specific vendors

I think positioning boils down to:

• Product category, even though product categorizations are never precise.
• Orientation, along multiple attributes.* Hence positionings are more complex than vendors commonly realize.
• (Optionally, but it’s a common option) Target customer group.

When positioning is framed that way, we can say that the primary goals of messaging are to communicate, emphasize or try to change aspects of your positioning.

*I used to say “dimensions” instead of “attributes” — but most likely the attributes aren’t all orthogonal to each other and also aren’t all measured on a continuous scale.

The modern concept of “positioning” was formulated and popularized by Jack Trout, starting in the 1960s, and can be stated as (filling) a “location in the customer’s mind”. In practice, a Trout positioning combines a product category with a single-attribute orientation such as “safe”, “powerful”, or “fun”. But I think that’s too simple for B2B or technology contexts.

I like the Geoffrey Moore formulation better, in which he offers a positioning template:

For (target customers)
Who (have the following problem)
Our product is a (describe the product or solution)
That provides (cite the breakthrough capability).
Unlike (reference competition)
Our product/solution (describe the key point of competitive differentiation)

But while those are all good questions — compare them to my own strategy worksheet — Moore’s version is flawed too; in conflating positioning and messaging, he oversimplifies them both. 

What people — evidently including Trout and Moore — often overlook is that every product in a category is positioned along the same set of attributes, starting with those found on evaluation checklists. If any (sufficiently visible) competitor in a category claims to be strong in an attribute, then every other product in the category will be rated according to that attribute too.

For example, every analytic RDBMS is positioned by prospects and influencers, whether or not the vendor wishes it to be, according to whether it’s MPP (and in what sense), what kinds of concurrent workloads it handles, which SQL it does or doesn’t execute, how well it compresses, whether it has a true-columnar option and so on and so forth. Further and more important, each analytic RDBMS is positioned along summary attributes such as “enterprise-proven”, “handles large databases”, “ease of administration” and the like. B2B technology products are positioned not only by their strengths, but by their competitive weaknesses as well.

Specific principles I rely on when working with clients include:

• Your uniqueness claims should actually be true. If you say “Our big differentiation is D”, and your audience doesn’t think D is differentiating — then where are you positioned?
• Position in terms of summary attributes. People sometimes buy DBMS because they’re fast. They rarely buy them, however, because there’s a good optimizer; rather, a good optimizer is evidence that a DBMS is well-engineered and fast.
• Category names shouldn’t make a misleading first impression. By “misleading” I don’t necessarily mean “dishonest”; I’m just referring to what people’s natural assumptions and expectations will be. For example:
  • “Metadata” means several different things; hence it confuses people; hence vendors have learned not to use it in category names.
  • “Relational” evokes RDBMS so strongly that any other use of the word should probably be avoided.
• Leave a path to walk back. “Our X is amazingly good for segment Y” lets you later say “Now it’s great for Z as well.” But “We’re entirely focused on segment Y” — while it can be a powerful story — puts you in a trap you may not escape later on.

Above all — don’t bother saying things nobody will care about. That principle — which gets violated many times each day — is central to messaging and positioning alike.

1. I will not fund any entrepreneur who uses the word “disruptive”, unless she has actually read at least one book by Clayton Christensen.
2. I will not fund any entrepreneur who mentions “market projections” in other than ironic terms. Nobody who talks of market projections with a straight face should be trusted.
3. I will not fund any software entrepreneur who is unfamiliar with “The Mythical Man-Month”.
4. I will not fund any software whose primary feature is that it is implemented in the “cloud” or via “SaaS”. A me-too product on a different platform is still a me-too product.
5. I will not fund any pitch that emphasizes the word “elastic”. Elastic is an important feature of underwear and pajamas, but even in those domains it does not provide differentiation.
6. I will hire a 16 year old intern of moderately above-average intelligence. I will not sign or propose any contract that intern finds difficult to understand.
7. I will hire a second intern of moderately below-average intelligence. I will not fund any product whose documentation that intern finds difficult to understand. Exceptions may be made for products sold to orienteering athletes, crossword puzzle solvers, or engineers.
8. When a board on which I sit approves revenue targets for the year, I will further stipulate that the year-ending sales pipeline must comprise more than a Chinese hair salon, an Italian pushcart vendor, the CEO’s brother-in-law and a bankrupt bait shop in Nome.
9. I will only hire a CEO who can explain the technology at his previous company. A CEO who doesn’t know what his products do can’t sell or market them either.
10. I will only hire a CEO who can also walk me through a sales cycle at her previous company. A CEO who doesn’t know how a customer buys may well have trouble producing revenue.
11. I will support any plan that I agree is good for a company I have invested in, nor matter how modest or how bold. I will participate in any funding round that I think is profitable for my limited partners.
12. I will remember that a board of directors has a fiduciary responsibility to all shareholders, and not just to the preferred ones.

Please offer your suggestions below. An associate will get back to you with our decision.

Related links

• The original “When I am an Evil Overlord” list
• A rival list
• The most comprehensive such list I know of (with additional sections for heroes, sidekicks, beautiful daughters, etc.)

1. Pitch at a suitable level of detail.
2. Treat your top influencers as individuals.
3. For every news item, ask yourself — who cares?
4. Don’t pigeonhole your company or product.
5. Use a proofreader or copy editor.
6. Use short(er) sentences.
7. Blog.

I shall explain.  

1. Marketing pitches can be on at least three levels:

• Industry/sector. “There’s something big going on, and I’m here to tell you about it.” Such pitches sometimes work well in webinars and other lead-generation events. But they usually fail in PR.
• Company. “We’re an awesomely well-suited company to do X.” These pitches have their place, for example:
  • When pitching investors or prospective employees.
  • When telling a focus and commitment story.
  • In stealth mode, when you don’t have anything else to say …
  • … but not at first product launch, when you finally do.
• Product. This is usually the right way to go.

A common error is to make your product pitch in such general terms that it’s really a sector pitch in disguise.

2. There are many kinds of influencer, who often need to be handled in different ways. Some of the differences can be handled just by asking how they like to work (for example, I have a whole how to pitch me post). Beyond that, the right person to lead an important relationship is:

• Usually somebody who can truly speak for your company, and specifically:
  • Has the knowledge and ability to respond to pushback.
  • Knows the influencer well enough to argue back in turn.
• Occasionally an in-house press or analyst relations staffer.
• Almost never an outside PR person.

As one tech journalist put it:

If you are a small startup with innovative technology, put as little as possible between your own people who can talk with passion about the stuff, and whoever you’re trying to get coverage from.

1 of my top 20 vendor relationships — Teradata — is led by an in-house “relations” specialist. 0 of them are led by outside PR.

3. Enhancing your product is good. But if all you’re doing is playing catch-up in areas that you lag competitors, you have two main choices for marketing the enhancements:

• Assume nobody other than your current users cares.
• Emphasize your leading features, and only then add “Now with fewer drawbacks!”

And nobody — except perhaps in the affected regions — cares that you opened a sales office in Lake Wobegon, added a distributor in Grand Fenwick, or have a CEO named Elbonian Entrepreneur of the Year.

4. Focus is good. But if you claim extreme focus, there will still be a record of those claims when you later want to branch out, which can and will be used against you in sales and marketing situations.

5. A significant fraction of all marketing collateral is written by committees, by non-native English speakers, by engineers, or in a hurry. In all those cases, outside proofreading or even copy editing could be useful.

Lack of budget is no excuse; such services can be amazingly cheap.

6. In particular, sentence bloat is endemic, which is why my comments on press release drafts often say “Sentence from hell!” As I write this:

• The first sentence of the top press release on IBM.com contains 54 words; the first 3 combined contain 131.
• The analogous figures for Kognitio are 40 and 128.

Strunk and White weep.

7. Every vendor should have a blog. Period. There are no exceptions to that rule, because blogs serve one universal need — saying things that are inconvenient to express in other formats. Examples of things easier to do in a blog than elsewhere include:

• Tell customer success stories when you aren’t allowed to say the name of the customer(s).
• Explain specific technical points.
• Answer commonly raised sales objections. (But don’t be defensive when you do!)

Vendor blog dos and don’ts include:

• Do have multiple blog authors. One person never keeps up; besides, different posts should likely be written with different emphases.
• Don’t worry about frequency. Write when you have something to say.
• Don’t worry about driving/building traffic. If everybody who reads a post is somebody to whom you personally emailed a link, the blog is still extremely worthwhile.
• Don’t worry much about look and feel. A fairly generic WordPress blog is fine.
• Do include a link back to your main website. It’s amazing how many vendors forget to do that.

Related links:

• Our overview of marcom essentials
• Our comprehensive post on PR theory and tips
• Our IT vendor strategy and execution worksheets
• Tips (and a rant) on your initial meeting with a PR target

Most commonly, my answer is a variant on:

• Of course you need basic website content. For starters, your website should at least feature:
  • Answers of one paragraph or less to the top four strategic worksheet questions.
  • A several-paragraph description of your product/technology.
  • Management bios, contact information, and other obvious stuff.
• You also need a fairly technical company white paper. At some point in your sales cycle, there will be a technical evaluation. A white paper can answer a lot of early questions. What’s more, many of your early sales will be driven by people who think new technology is cool. Make it easy and appealing for them to learn about your cool new tech.
• Many people like videos. Whether it’s a link to a conference presentation or a white board talk or whatever, it’s good to have some kind of video. Some people, however — I’m one of them — don’t like videos, so don’t do anything essential in your videos you don’t also convey in writing.
• I further favor having a low-post-count blog. Notes on that include:
  • Almost nobody has the time to do a lot of blogging.
  • Even so, a blog is the most flexible and best way to communicate things that seem harder to say in other formats.
  • In particular, this can be a “poor man’s” way to make up for what is surely a distressing lack of resources in pre-sales support personnel, other collateral, and so on.
  • The goal isn’t to build a consistent readership. (You’re not going to invest enough effort for that.) The goal is to put up a few posts, then call influencers’ and prospects’ attention to them by email.

Beyond that, I’d say:

• Of course you want to generate leads. I don’t have strong opinions as to whether to make some of the items mentioned above require registration. But beware of the absurdly extreme position that says marketing serves solely to feed the sales pipeline.
• Supervise your PR very closely. Do much of it yourself. Indeed, strongly consider doing without a PR firm altogether.

Where, by way of contrast, do I favor being frugal?

• If you look at the PR-related links just above, I’m skeptical of investing a lot of money in PR. PR campaigns rarely provide high, positive value on your investment in them. Often, the “value” they provide is downright negative.
• Websites do not have to be lengthy or glitzy.
• Business-oriented white papers are an early-stage luxury. Non-technical businesspeople are interested in being “educated” by IBM, of which they’ve actually heard. But they aren’t as likely to read a paper from ZNewTek.
• Lead generation programs are expensive. In a direct-sales business that requires overcoming multiple sales objections, it’s easy to over-invest in leads.

Some of my reasoning behind these views includes:

1. Basically, the end goals of marketing communication are:

• Encourage customer organizations to give you money.
• Encourage engineers and other desirable employees to work for you.
• Encourage investors to give you money as well.

In various combinations, those audiences all need to be persuaded that:

• You have and will continue to have desirable product offerings …
• … and in fact customers will buy those offerings in enough quantity for your business to be healthy.
• (Highly desirable even if not totally necessary). Your product has a “cool” aspect. Engineers care about that directly, and the rest of your story is easier to sell if there’s a cool hook on which to hang it.

My suggestions touch those bases.

2. Credibility is everything. (If you can fake that, you’ve got it made!) There should be enough detail behind your stories for them to seem real. You shouldn’t oversell. Excessive marketing glitz can feel like overselling. So can overwrought PR.

3. A basic paradox of marketing communications is that they both:

• Need to be (sufficiently) concise, so as not to bore or scare your prospects before they’re ever engaged.
• Need to be (sufficiently) detailed, so as to be credible.

The answer is NOT the old sexist joke about “Short enough to be interesting but long enough to cover the interesting bits.” Rather, right from the getgo, your marketing communications should have both concise and detailed parts.

4. You shouldn’t address all audiences. You don’t want to sell to a prospect who’s unlikely to buy. That goes for influencers too.

My best example this week (it’s only Tuesday morning) is an email from Vitria, which reads in part:

The world’s first Operational Intelligence (OI) app …

While it seems like everyone is jumping on the big data bandwagon, only OI can claim to be purposely built for tackling big data in motion …

That’s utter nonsense. We’ve had a CEP/stream processing industry for years. We’ve had stock-quote and network-monitoring systems for decades. Maybe Vitria has a good story, but the core claims in their email are obviously false. If you think I’m overreacting, it’s only because so many other companies also pitch blatantly untrue claims.

So do I want to talk with them? Well, their email suggests that if I do, they’re likely to start out by emphatically saying untrue things. Blech. I think most serious reporters, bloggers and analysts would feel much as I do on the matter. Even the ones who do take a briefing are likely to go in with a more negative attitude than they might if the pitch email had been more closely based on reality.

And if I do ever talk with Vitria anyway, they’ll need to start by climbing out of a credibility hole.

• Actual or potential investors.
• Influencers.

More rarely mentioned is a fourth audience — actual or potential employees.  That’s a pity, in that marketing to them is a Really Big Deal. This should be obvious as soon as you consider:

• Recruiting is a hugely important form of sales.
• Where there are sales, there also is (or should be) marketing.

Each of these four “audiences” actually has many subgroups — see, for example, our taxonomy of influencers, or the new-vs.-repeat comments in our execution worksheet. But for simplicity I’m pretending today that they’re one audience each.

In the case of potential hires, this really sank in for me as I picked up more stealth-mode clients, with whom I’d have discussions like:

• “Why launch through TechCrunch? How will a post there help you get more customers, leads, or technical respect?”
• “It probably won’t — but it will help us attract engineers.”

In the case of existing technical staff, I hear more and more that senior management cares a lot about how external coverage affects their engineers. That, I was told, is what lay at the heart of my Greenplum debacle. More positively, it’s sometimes why companies go out of their way to brief me, even in sectors where I rarely influence customer buying decisions. In essence, companies market to key employees by marketing on their behalf.

I also think that academic papers and open source contributions can be viewed through a similar prism. Among other virtues, they show off smart staff and the impressive projects they’re working on, which is good for recruitment and morale alike.

Of course, it’s not just about engineers. Organizations need to encourage and recruit all kinds of employees. This is a key role of leadership. At sufficiently large enterprises, is may be a specialized human resource function as well.

And finally, you need to market to your associates just as you do to other audiences, so that they may:

• Act in accordance with your messages (i.e., prioritize making them be true!), in matters such as service delivery, development or business ethics.
• Communicate your messages to outsiders in a not-too-inaccurate fashion.

If employees (current and future) aren’t your single most important marketing target, then at least they’re close to the top.

There are three kinds of benefits performance can offer:

• It can allow you to do things more simply and/or cost-effectively (e.g., with less hardware or less tuning).
• It can allow you to do things better. Examples include:
  • Faster-loading web pages for your customers.
  • Faster-responding queries for your business analysts.
  • Better prices on your algorithmic trading.
  • Better analytic results, perhaps from:
    • Using more data.
    • Running more queries.
• It can allow you to do something that would be impractical otherwise (usually because of expense).

These benefits are easily confused. When a prospect says “I can’t do X with existing technology”, what she really means is often “I can’t afford to do X well enough to matter.” When a vendor says “We make it cheap and easy to do Y”, what prospects hear is commonly “Great! Now we’ll be able to do Y within our resources and budget.”

Given the breadth of the subject, it’s hard to generalize comprehensively about the marketing of performance claims. But my observations include: 

1. For “cheaper” to be a strong message, you have to be significantly cheaper in TCO (Total Cost of Ownership), not just in system acquisition/floor space/power costs. But raw performance is often not the biggest driver of cost, given:

• The cost and risk of technology adoption in immature markets, when experience and expertise are hard to come by.
• The cost and risk of technology adoption in mature markets, when expectations and switching costs may both be high.

2. Hardware/software purchase/license cost is a directly important performance consideration mainly to two classes of users:

• Those who want to do a lot more of something than they have been doing to date, and quail at the expense unless they change vehicles. But that’s in the “better/more” category of my taxonomy, not the “simpler/cheaper” one.
• Those who want to do something they couldn’t afford before. That goes in the “impractical” section.

I have real trouble thinking of a pure “we out-benchmark the other guys and so we’re cheaper” story that ever has won.

3. But “simpler” is a benefit that should not be overlooked. It speaks to all of operational cost, operational risk, and resource availability. Analytic RDBMS vendors brag about how little tuning their systems require. In both the Hadoop and NoSQL/NewSQL markets, ease of scaled-out cluster management is a major criterion.

4. An important sub-case of “better” is “do lots more”. Scenarios I run across frequently include (and these overlap a lot):

• We want to analyze a lot more data!
• We want to do a lot more analysis on our data.
• We’re hitting a wall with Oracle Standard Edition, and Oracle Enterprise Edition/Exadata cost much more than we want to pay.

5. If you think your story TRULY is “Our performance is so great it makes the otherwise impossible possible,” you’re kidding yourself. First, you have competitors, who also make it possible. Second, if what you’re newly making possible is all that bloody important, then probably people have already been making do to get it done as best they can, even in an inferior way.

Yes, I know there are a few exceptions. I invite you to mention them in the comment thread.

If you want to say “It can’t be done without us” as part of your marketing flair, be my guest. But please remember that what you’re saying isn’t actually true.

6. Overall, the most fruitful performance-related business-benefit positioning usually straddles “better” and “impractical without us.” For the richer or more sophisticated buyers, you’re “better”. For the laggards, you’re taking them by the hand and leading them to the Promised Land.

7. Actually, the middle layer of the layered messaging model may be more important than the top one. Your “metric” kinds of benefits may be clearer than your business benefit stories.

8. Anyhow, it’s hard to market on performance only, since performance stories are often hard to differentiate from each other. So the rest of your technical benefits may be what sets you apart from your close competitors. As just two examples:

• Multiple generations of data management technologies have been differentiated in large part by their associated development tools. Examples include prerelational DBMS in the early 1980s, relational DBMS in the later 1980s, and CEP/streaming tools in the present era.
• Memory-centric business intelligence tools are rarely differentiated from each other on performance grounds.

When I put it like that, it sounds straight out of Seth Godin. But Haidt says it in a different — and to me more compelling — way (emphasis mine):

Self-interest, political scientists have found, is a surprisingly weak predictor of people’s views on specific issues. Parents of children in public school are not more supportive of government aid to schools than other citizens. People without health insurance are not more likely to favor government-provided health insurance than are people who are fully insured.

Despite what you might have learned in Economics 101, people aren’t always selfish. In politics, they’re more often groupish. When people feel that a group they value — be it racial, religious, regional or ideological — is under attack, they rally to its defense, even at some cost to themselves. We evolved to be tribal, and politics is a competition among coalitions of tribes.

The key to understanding tribal behavior is not money, it’s sacredness. The great trick that humans developed at some point in the last few hundred thousand years is the ability to circle around a tree, rock, ancestor, flag, book or god, and then treat that thing as sacred. People who worship the same idol can trust one another, work as a team and prevail over less cohesive groups. So if you want to understand politics, and especially our divisive culture wars, you must follow the sacredness.

A good way to follow the sacredness is to listen to the stories that each tribe tells about itself and the larger nation.

Haidt then goes on to cite detailed explications of the core stories of the US Left and the US Right, and to back up his claims with a couple of examples from very recent politics:

It’s one thing for the government to insist that people have a right to buy a product that their employer abhors. But it’s a rather direct act of sacrilege (for many Christians) for the government to force religious institutions to pay for that product. The outraged reaction galvanized the Christian right and gave a lift to Rick Santorum’s campaign.

It’s one thing for a state government to make abortions harder to get (as with a waiting period). But it’s a rather direct act of sacrilege (for nearly all liberals as well as libertarians) for a state to force a doctor to insert a probe into a woman’s vagina. The outraged reaction galvanized the secular left and gave a lift to President Obama.

It would be interesting to try a similar contrast of stories for central IT vs. web-company hackers, or for relational hardliners vs. NoSQL fans. They might come out just as different-sounding as the liberal-vs.-conservative comparison in Haidt’s article.