The one, two of product marketing

“What’s your definition of marketing?” someone asked me a few days ago. I mumbled something vague and quickly passed the question on to the next person at the table.

People get hung up on definitions, trying to understand exactly what is sales and what is marketing and where the lexical boundary between the two lies. Much better to stop defining and start doing, I think.

But what does ‘doing marketing’ involve?

For me, it’s about reaching people who need your product, and then making them want it. There are two steps there and they’re both required. If you can reach your audience, but they don’t want your product, you’re doomed. If your audience wants your product, but you can’t reach them, then you’re doomed too.

A few weeks ago I sat in on a presentation given by a Cambridge University academic. Marketing, he said, is all about building a better product. Build a product that’s five, or ten, times better than your competitors and people will bash down your door to buy it. And if that doesn’t happen? Well, in that case the trick is to make your product even more brilliant.

This academic is only thinking about the second link in the chain, and is taking the narrow view that making a superb product is the only way to make your customers want to buy it. But there are other ways too – creating a tribe that people want to belong to, building a product that’s cheaper than your competitor’s or creating something that’s just a little bit better than the rest are all valid paths to take.

It’s less common for software companies to succeed in fulfilling the first step – since it’s so rare they even try – and fail the second, but one notable example is Windows Vista which people refused to buy despite near ubiquitous advertising. Everybody has their pet reasons as to why this was: mine include confused messaging, impossible to understand bundling and bewildering advertising.

So how do you reach your target audience?

There are many ways, but none of them is the single truth. If your target market is highly internally connected, and if your product is worth talking about, then sometimes you can reach a few key people inside the group and they will spread the word for you, much like a well evolved virus can spread like wildfire through a dense population. But don’t forget you need the second link in the chain too, which is ever so easy to do.

But that’s a hard trick to pull off. If your idea spreads too quickly, or too slowly, or is too sticky, or not sticky enough, if your market is too large, or too small, or too interconnected, or not interconnected enough, then it will flash through the population and burn out (the Hampster Dance) or simply fade away (think Snakes on a Plane).

If your market has no internal connections, or if you have a product that people are unlikely to talk about, then you need to reach people on your own, using traditional broadcast marketing such as advertising, product reviews and the more modern tools of blogging, Twitter and Google adwords.

Of course, the most likely scenario is that you need to do both. The characteristics of your product and market are probably such that you can’t just light the kindling and step back to watch as the market catches fire and blazes, but neither will you need to individually light every single twig.

The odds are that getting your fire going will be a long, hard slog requiring careful and regular stoking over many weeks, months and years.

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Comments

[Matt Schofield]

The viral stuff is fun - a new version of something that salesmen and marketeers have always known, that most people ask around disinterested friends what THEY buy and just follow that advice. I certainly bought my builder, my plumber, my university and my main employer that way.

I think there is a trick we are missing here. The best marketing is the kind your opposition will never respond to until it is too late. There is a brilliant book on this (rewritten in various forms, but best in the original) called "Marketing Warfare" (Ries, Trout) (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QHpvvsyVIpAC&dq=marketing+warfare+ries+trout&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=7lHJSeDjL6TEjAezppTXAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=5&ct=result).

The analogy they use is with the schwerpunkt in Blitzkrieg war, a concept which goes back to Clausewitz. The Germans broke the French line in 1940 because the French had committed their troops to a static Maginot defence and were trying to refight the First World War. If you want to read a much better account of why the Allies waited and waited until Hitler was ready to strike, try Churchill's The Gathering Storm http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Jy-ljBbsL9AC&dq=churchill+the+gathering+storm&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=SBKjYszkeR&sig=Hx17d40ny0oorGp95W98Gh0u9sQ&hl=en&ei=TVXJSbvPApDDjAf87P3FAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=3&ct=result.

Scan through it on Google Books. One brilliant example to illustrate their argument. Pepsi launching with a large plastic bottle priced to give twice the volume for the same price that Coke was charging for its iconic glass bottles, a bottle designed in the 1930's that they would shed blood rather than abandon. Pepsi launching with a sweeter drink, knowing that blind tasters would generally choose a sweeter liquid and that Coke would be slow to abandon its "secret formula", and highlighting the preference with "blind tasting" in supermarket aisles. Pepsi launching a product perfect for the new supermarket pile-it-higher, sell-it-cheaper ethos, knowing that people would take home their large PET bottles and put them in refridgerators, while Coke was stuck marketing a product designed perfectly for an earlier era of consumption on premises where the iconic bottle could be seen and appreciated.

Now play that forward against the ASPs launching against Microsoft's dumb solid software CD production lines, that sell us £300 of air which costs them less than £2 to make. ASPs launching product that evolves continuously as we use it, where the value is actually not extracted from the end user as a tax but is charged to people who want to get to know them better. Google viral marketing killed Microsoft because Microsoft could not afford to respond without cratering their core business, retailing air and increasing the price of every desktop shipped. Google was free and evolved fast. Microsoft got stuck for 2-3 years just turning itself and shipping updates for Microsoft platforms that were always getting new viruses. Now that I am on Vista, I look back at that time and wonder how they even survived. I guess the fact that I didn't think there was any real easy to use alternative to upgrading to Vista if I wanted to keep being able to open all the Office stuff I receive from corporate mates, although friends with Google platforms tell me I am wrong.

So I think you need to think a lot more about your competitors and less about your customers. It is having time to exploit a market before competitors respond that gives you the layered advantages of knowing that group of users better.

[Worldwide Product Marketing]

This is a well thought out article. Even the analogy in it were well placed. Good job!

[Bizhelp]

In theory it's easy (marketing) but once you roll your sleeves up an actually start marketing(correctly) you realize that yes it is hard,drudge work,for months,years to come.BUT I love it what about you guys?