Permissionless Co-Marketing: When One of Us Shines, We All Shine!

It’s likely you haven’t heard of Permissionless Co-Marketing. It’s Marketing’s kindest secret weapon – and it’s everywhere!  

Amanda Natividad, VP of Marketing for SparkToro, sums it up in her excellent Twitter thread 

“Permissionless Co-Marketing is aligning yourself with other brands by promoting them in your work.  

The payoff? Earning goodwill and setting the foundation for potential collaboration.” 

It might seem counter-intuitive to boost other brands. Why give others free press? Whilst that might be the case if you are Pepsi or McDonald’s – you don’t want people spending their spare cash on anything but Big Macs – the argument falls flat when your product works as part of a complex ecosystem of other brands.  

To use Payara Server, for example, you will need an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) tool to write your code. So why wouldn’t we shout out and celebrate the top IDEs for our Java Industry? It genuinely helps our followers by providing them with the latest information and opens pathways for collaboration.  

Open source is a match made in heaven with permissionless co-marketing. Java frameworks such as Jakarta EE and MicroProfile are essential to our work, so a significant part of our marketing involves championing the Eclipse Foundation, the organisation that acts as their steward. 

Permissionless Co-Marketing may come as second nature to us, but it’s a new concept. We talked to Jadon Ortlepp, our Digital Marketing Coordinator and the driving force behind our events and collaborations, to find out more:

Can you discuss some of the ways that Payara practices permissionless co-marketing?  

Even though it’s a very new term, we realised it is something that has long been core to the way Payara engages with its community. We have always sought to collaborate with other business, sometimes even direct competitors. From sharing and commenting on social media, creating co-written articles, co-speaking at webinars and conferences, all the way to being founding members of open source Java specifications Jakarta EE, MicroProfile and Java learning platform Foojay. The goal is to reach excellence by involving other important stakeholders and community, which is the heartbeat of open source and our business.  

Why does permissionless co-marketing work specifically for Payara as a business?  

Payara has always operated within the world of open source and middleware, where integrating with a wide variety of tools and use cases is vital. So, from a business perspective it has always made sense to collaborate and uplift others in our shared ecosystem. Especially when we know that our users will benefit from the synergy of using both. 

We exist in a very particular but important niche of open source Java middleware, with a very broad range of users. We have students who are coding for the first time, building their app projects on Payara. And we have government institutions and some of the largest companies in the world running production-critical applications. As such it is very important (and quite a challenge) to convey how we work alongside other tools in our category and to align ourselves both technically and socially, in a way that appeals and engages that wide audience spectrum. 

Do you think the move to ‘online-only’ following the pandemic has changed permissionless marketing at all?

Even though we believe in the value of getting out there and being face to face with our community, switching to an online dominant strategy challenged us to get creative on how we could produce interesting content and connect with our community without leaving them feeling “Zoom burn-out”. It taught us how to really listen to our users, and find out which issues were most important to them and how to deliver that message to them in a way that engaged, informed and entertained.

Just a few examples of our collaborative events with other brands – XGeeks, Azul, Hazelcast and even our direct competitors, IBM!

Permissionless Co-Marketing, in conclusion, is a way to move out of the dog-eat-dog mindset and realise that in reality, if you want the best for users, you want them to be aware of all tmarket trends and innovations.

We want developers to love our product, but also to celebrate when others do well in their related field! For the brands and individuals we champion at Payara, the key is to be united by a passion for Java coding, particularly in an Enterprise space. It might sound a cliché but We do rise by lifting others.

Want to be part of engaging, informing and entertaining our users? Keep an eye on our open opportunities. Find them here:

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