IronKey Makes Fort Knox of Flash Drives

IronKey is a startup that sells what it calls the "world's most secure flash drive." This is a company that understands how to market with "simple but extraordinary" in mind. I was talking to a friend earlier today and mentioned how very few marketers know how to be simple but extraordinary. Steve Jobs? Yup, he fits the bill.

IronKey's website is elegant and simple. You could see the attention to detail. They're proof positive of the common saying that companies that need to actually sell via the site have much better sites than their traditional B2B counterparts.

At first glance, the thumb drives seem pretty expensive. But, if you compare them to weaker secure USB thumb drives (such as Cruzer), it's fairly priced. Judging by their leadership roster and product messaging, my guess is that they will gradually focus on government and enterprise customers.

One slightly odd thing I noticed --

The three types of products and three buyer personas on their Products Section are randomly listed. I wonder why they did this. Maybe it's not so random? I suppose one reason would be to deliberately (mis)lead the "individual" to the IronKey Basic knowing that they will price/feature compare IronKey Basic to IronKey Personal and buy the Personal version. Both Basic and Personal are the same price except Personal offers more features including the additional revenue generating "Internet Protection" service. It's a sort of auto-migrate technique right off the bat whereby you offer a non-choice to enhance the value perception of a fatter offering.

Well, I don't think the world really needs this device. People still carry laptops that are getting smaller and lighter every day. People will rarely if ever backup to a thumb drive. So, it means people still use thumb drives to quickly move files from one PC to another PC or they use it to give a bunch of files to someone. Actually, I would use it for this last case (physically handing digital files to someone) but the company's own FAQ says the device doesn't protect against infected machines (e.g. syware or Trojans).

However, given that it's a tiny bit more expensive than regular "secure" thumb drives, it's still definitely worth buying if you need Fort Knox-type security and don't mind going through the extra steps. I guess that's the whole point. Great product packaging scheme, good messaging, and super site!

P.S. - This has got to be one of the world's longest descriptions ever --> "IronKey, designed to be the world's most secure USB flash drive, locks down your sensitive files and passwords with some of today's most advanced security technologies, including hardware encryption for safeguarding your data and advanced Internet protection software and services for securing your passwords and web browsing." It's in tiny print though ... phew.

UPDATE: Apparently, the verbose description in small type has something to do with their search engine optimization efforts. I don't understand what it could be since their metatagging is fairly straightforward and it looks unnecessary but we'll just have to take their word for it. Must be some advanced method since SEO techniques are constantly changing ...

- John 

Comments

[Dave IronKey]

John,

Thanks for your great comments. We appreciate your insights, and we are glad that our attention to detail was apparent. The long description in small type was mostly for the benefit of search engines.

Dave