From complexity to clarity: Building fact-based product marketing with DIKW
DIKW framework: Build fact-based marketing tech audiences trust
This article covers seven key areas:
- Why fact-based marketing matters for building trust with technical audiences
- Common positioning pitfalls to avoid (spoiler: both marketers and developers get it wrong)
- Understanding diverse stakeholder perspectives on your product
- The OSP Value Map methodology and how it creates a single source of truth
- Practical steps to create your own value map using the DIKW framework
- Real-world applications for marketing, sales, and product teams
- How to craft effective taglines and positioning statements that actually convert
“Your tech is complex. Your message shouldn’t be.”
Our tagline at Open Strategy Partners (OSP) is about the main marketing challenge faced by B2B tech companies: You’ve built something technically impressive, but how do you communicate its value without drowning in buzzwords or feature lists?
I had the privilege of addressing this challenge at the Women in Tech Global Conference 2025 this May. As the world’s largest virtual-first tech conference — bringing together 100,000+ women in tech, minorities, and allies over three days — it provided an incredible platform to share insights on a problem that affects all of us in tech: the gap between what we build and how we talk about it.
In my session on fact-based product marketing, I shared how OSP helps bridge this gap. The heart of our approach is the Value Map, which applies the DIKW framework — Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom — to transform raw technical features into strategic messaging.
Ready to build fact-based marketing that technical audiences trust?
tl;dr
Looking to escape the buzzword bingo trap and create marketing that resonates with technical audiences? This article reveals how the OSP Value Map methodology applies the DIKW (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom) framework to transform complex features into compelling, fact-based messaging that builds trust and drives adoption.
- Fact-based marketing builds trust: Engineers and developers reject hype — they scrutinize claims. When your marketing aligns with technical truth, you create messaging that resonates throughout the buyer journey.
- The DIKW framework provides structure: Move systematically from raw features (Data) to organized capabilities (Information) to mapped benefits (Knowledge) to strategic messaging (Wisdom).
- Stakeholder alignment is critical: Different roles see your product differently. The Value Map process creates consensus through interviews and workshops, ensuring everyone tells the same story.
- Components build communications: Break down your messaging into reusable pieces — taglines, positioning statements, value cases — that maintain consistency across all touchpoints.
- The result transforms your marketing: Less sales BS, more authentic connections. Faster conversions when prospects see a clear problem-solution fit.
Why fact-based marketing builds trust in tech
Let me be blunt: developers are allergic to marketing. And honestly? They have good reason to be.
Too often, tech marketing falls into predictable traps. There’s the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” approach, where marketers craft top-down messaging without understanding the product. Then there’s buzzword bingo — you know the type: “Our synergistic, AI-powered, blockchain-enabled solution leverages cutting-edge paradigms to disrupt the industry!”
But developers often try to counteract this by going too far in the other direction: feature frenzy. “Here's a thing! Here’s another thing! Here’s Thing 1.7 (not backwards compatible)!” They assume the value is self-evident. It’s not.
At OSP, we counter marketing allergies with what we call authentic communication, built on three tenets: empathy, clarity, and trust. The idea is simple but powerful — write and speak clearly and accurately about tech. We need to understand the technology deeply, use empathy to grasp our audience’s challenges, and build trust by being credible authorities.
This approach might also be termed a kind of “fact-based marketing.” It’s rooted in technological facts, but frames and understands them in line with marketing goals.
Here are six compelling reasons for pursuing fact-based marketing:
- It builds trust with technical audiences: Engineers, developers, and tech buyers reject hype and scrutinize claims. They have finely-tuned BS detectors. Demonstrating clear, accurate value builds long-term credibility — and in tech, credibility is currency.
- It aligns internal stakeholders: A shared factual foundation ensures marketing, sales, and product speak the same language. No more confusion when sales promises something product hasn’t built, or when marketing describes features that don’t quite exist that way.
- It enables clearer, more effective messaging: Messaging grounded in facts — actual features, real challenges, measurable benefits — is easier to understand, more persuasive, and more relevant to specific audiences. It accelerates the buyer’s journey by helping prospects make faster, more confident decisions.
- It accelerates the buyer journey: Clear articulation of what your product does, who it helps, and why it matters reduces friction and speeds up decision-making.
- It reduces waste and inconsistency: Fact-based content avoids rework, misalignment, and vague messaging. You stop reinventing the wheel every time someone needs a new asset. No more conflicting versions of what your product does.
- It supports scale and repeatability: With a single source of truth, you can create content more efficiently, train new staff faster, and launch campaigns consistently. Your messaging scales with your business.
Because here’s the uncomfortable truth: We are not Kevin Costner. If you build it, they might not come… At least not without strong, fact-based communication. Product launches flop when people don’t understand the value of your shiny new thing. Potential adopters need to know “Why is this important?” and “What’s in it for me?”
Understanding stakeholder perspectives
Different people’s experiences with your product may sound completely different from one another.
It’s like the old tale of the blind men and the elephant — each person touches a different part and describes something entirely different. One feels the trunk and says it’s like a snake. Another touches the leg and insists it’s like a tree. A third finds the ear and declares it’s like a fan. They’re all touching the same elephant, but their limited perspectives lead to completely different descriptions.
The same thing happens with your product. Your head of engineering sees robust technical architecture. Your sales team sees solutions to customer pain points. Marketing sees compelling narratives. Leadership sees market differentiation. Everyone’s touching the same product, but describing something different.
As you can see, understanding, then communicating the value of your complex technology can be as hard as building the darn thing! Different stakeholders can have completely different views about your product and tell different stories, maybe even false ones.
To create compelling B2B tech product marketing, first, you need to start with a clear, consensus-based technical foundation. Then, we can talk about their needs and priorities.
When you do it right, you get unified, fact-based positioning based on substance and technical truth that will resonate with your audience. This will help you create clear product messaging, enabling all stakeholders to communicate consistently, accurately, and compellingly.
Everyone will be able to share a holistic view of your product, despite their different positions.
The OSP Value Map: Your foundation for technical truth
A Value Map is the main tool for building this consensus-based technical foundation.
Your Value Map is a living library and canonical inventory of accurate, up-to-date product information stored as interconnected entities such as features, benefits, challenges, and personas.
It is the single source of truth that gives you agreed-upon terms, language, and concepts that feed your overall positioning and strategy. It’s also ready to use for product pages on your website, brochures, sales resources, and more.
The Value Map is un-siloed technical truth available to everyone: accurate descriptions of features and the value they deliver.
Creating your Value Map: From data to wisdom with DIKW
Let’s take a closer look at the DIKW framework (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom), which is essential to the OSP Value Map:
- Data is your feature inventory: The raw facts about the product: technical specs, individual features, and capabilities.
- Information is your organized features and challenges: Structured data is where your features are categorized and linked to their challenges. They show relevance and utility, not just functionality.
- Knowledge is your benefits mapping: This is the applied understanding of how solving challenges delivers specific benefits. It moves from “what” to “why.”
- Wisdom is applying the above to your messaging, content, and positioning: Structured knowledge is translated into consistent and effective messaging.
To start compiling your Value Map, you want to conduct a deep, structured analysis of your product, collecting granular, comprehensive, structured data about its features. You can do this by:
- Conducting interviews or workshops with key stakeholders
- Scraping any existing marketing or technical content
- Examining competitor content for inspiration
You then want to distill and organize this information into logical-functional groups called Feature Areas. These clusters of features get a Feature Area name, tagline, and value case, which is made up of three statements: benefit, challenge, and solution.
Example Feature Area
Let’s take an example from OSP’s client Sulu, an open source CMS. Sulu has the feature “Beautiful admin interface” with the tagline “Don’t waste your admin’s precious time with an awkward UI.”
The value case is made up of the three statements:
- Benefit: Your admins deserve a slick and user-friendly interface.
- Challenge: Many backend administration UIs are built from a minimum of standard elements — just enough to provide bare functionality. As a result, efficiency and job satisfaction suffer.
- Solution: Sulu’s innovative admin interface can be extended to support managing custom entities and business logic in an intuitive manner.
If you have a lot of Feature Areas, which many products will, the next step is to group these Feature Areas into Feature Categories. The Feature Categories get their own tagline and value case.
Feature Category example
Let’s continue with examples from Sulu, with a more encompassing Feature Category called “Interactive digital experiences”. The tagline is “Build compelling, interactive digital experiences with Sulu.”
Again, it has a value case:
- Benefit: Businesses that use Sulu benefit from tailored business logic, content reuse, and ease of access to any Sulu-based data.
- Challenge: Enterprises face a number of challenges like huge information architectures, Web site kits that pretend to deliver Web app functionality, data from multiple sources, large publishing teams, or high data analytics requirements. They need powerful CMS features that can power unique, innovative, and varied digital experiences such as digital signage, interactive in-store displays, or even immersive WebGL worlds.
- Solution: Sulu’s reusable admin interface, custom Symfony business objects and more power customized digital experiences on any channel, with a large set of built-in features for Web publishing.
Once you have the Feature Areas and Categories done, it’s time to create your overall positioning. In the positioning, you’re distilling all of the data points below into overarching statements. You’ll create a tagline, positioning statement, and product value case — for your entire business or product. We’ll give you more tips on how to do that below.
Putting your Value Map to work
The Value Map can then be used for a plethora of communications: product pages, content briefs, sales decks, documentation, go-to-market plans and much more:
- Marketing Content
- Website product pages
- Landing pages for specific verticals or personas
- Content briefs for blog posts, white papers, ebooks
- Email c ampaigns targeting specific pain points or industries
- Social posts anchored in real benefits and challenges
- Videos and explainer scripts (aligned with value cases)
- Sales Enablement
- Sales decks and presentations
- Battle cards (using competitor challenges/benefits)
- Feature–benefit cheat sheets
- Objection handling guides based on real customer challenges
- ROI calculators tied to mapped value cases
- Product and Customer Success
- Product documentation reflecting benefits, not just features
- Onboarding flows tailored to persona pain points
- Support content aligned with challenges and use cases
- Feature announcement content driven by mapped value
- Strategic/Internal Alignment
- Positioning statements that unify departments
- Messaging frameworks for internal and external use
- Persona-driven training materials for marketing and sales teams
- Go-to-market planning assets
Generating all these materials involves applying what we call the Product Communications Framework.
The Product Communications Framework: From components to communications
The Product Communications Framework takes the view that any given communication asset — like product pages or data sheets — should be created based on component parts like taglines, positioning statements, and feature statements. These are themselves based on the factual, technical, and strategic foundation.
We call these smaller “micro-statements”, from which larger assets are made, Product Communication Components:
- Taglines
- Positioning Statements
- Benefit Statements
- Challenge Statements
- Solution Statements
- Feature Statements
- Value Cases
- Call-to-Action
- General Statements (e.g. Audience, Vertical, some other specific focus)
Many of these essential elements are already collected in your Value Map. We can hence extract components from the Value Map and transfer them directly into a content brief.
Here is an example of how we can use these micro statements to build a product page. Each statement has a very specific function to fulfill.
Here’s a closer look at one section of the above page. This is one of the Feature Areas made up of a benefit, challenge, solution, and feature statement.
Crafting taglines and positioning statements that convert
Let’s take a look at two of the most important types of statements: taglines and positioning statements.
Taglines
Taglines are short sentences or fragments, typically found at the top of the page or as section headers, meant to grab attention while introducing content that follows. They’re often the most verbally playful and brand-driven statements. Their characteristics should be:
- Action-oriented
- Brevity and simplicity
- Rhythmic
- Aspirational
- Highlight contrasts
- Demonstrate your brand character
Here are some examples of great taglines:
- Source: “One portal. A world of talent you can trust.”
- Platform.sh: “Deliver your applications faster, at scale.”
- Docker: “Develop faster. Run anywhere.”
- Edit Together: “Edit better, Edit Together.”
Writing compelling taglines is helped a great deal by the Value Map. Without the direction provided by a detailed understanding of your product’s value cases, your tagline might sound good, but not say what’s important.
Once you’ve distilled your product’s features into its core value propositions, you know what you absolutely must communicate in your tagline.
Positioning statements
Brand positioning is the strategic foundation that guides all messaging and marketing efforts — aligning a brand’s promise, benefits, and differentiation to create a clear, consistent, and compelling identity.
Positioning statements need to:
- Keep the key benefits clear
- Create credibility by demonstrating empathy with user pain points
- Highlight outcomes like measurable results
- Use clear and simple language (not jargon!) to ensure accessibility
- Demonstrate a specific value proposition
To capture all the key information, we like to follow a template of the form: “How [your brand], in [product category], helps [your audience] address [challenge(s)] with [benefit] by offering [solution].”
You can see how that applies to our own positioning statement:
- OSP is an open source and B2B tech marketing agency
- [target market and audience]
- We align marketing strategy and content
- [market category and solution]
- with your vision and technical truth
- [one of our USPs and challenge solved]
- to generate leads, win customers, and gain advocates.
- [benefit and “what’s in it for you?”]
Read our full guide to writing compelling positioning statements.
The transformation: What fact-based marketing delivers
Let’s recap. What do you gain by adopting fact-based marketing?
- First, you get consistency through all your marketing and messaging at all journey and funnel stages. You get factual sales materials, free from hyperbole, and technical communications supporting the rest.
- Then, you get fact-based positioning with consistent messaging resonating as clear and honest the further along the journey someone goes.
- Finally, you have clear communication, delivering faster, stronger conversion decisions where prospects see if their problems and your solutions align. You’re setting expectations about the benefits and features prospects will encounter.
OSP’s Value Map and Product Communications Framework are a methodological approach to fact-based marketing. The Value Map provides you with a single source of truth with agreed-upon terms, language, and concepts ready to use for product pages on your website, brochures, sales resources, and more. It gives you un-siloed technical truth available to everyone with accurate descriptions of features and the value they deliver.
Ready to transform your tech communications?
The gap between complex technology and clear communication doesn’t have to exist. By applying the DIKW framework through our structured Value Map process, OSP can help you create messaging that technical audiences trust and business buyers understand.
We can turn your technical features into compelling stories that drive adoption and growth!