Why marketing is NOT a dirty word

For simplicity, I’ll be using the word ‘product’, to represent products, services and companies.

I constantly hear people disparage the act (and sometimes just the thought) of marketing. Here’s why they’re wrong. Marketing is nothing more than communicating a product’s value proposition. That’s it.

My product does X, and it will help you with Y.

A website, a business card, a Twitter bio, a conversation in the elevator — all marketing. Sorry to be the bearer of such awful news.

The Great Product fallacy

In the startup world, there’s a false notion that building a great product should be “enough” to equal commercial success. I know it’s false because of the sheer number of great products that exist that aren’t successful.

I’m talking about extremely well-designed, stable, beautiful, useful, innovative products… that still fail. Here’s the mathematical proof:

Number of great new products > Number of successful new companies

This Great Product fallacy gets reinforced when we see great products succeed, but don’t see how they acquired their customers. I can assure you, 99 times out of 100, some growth strategy was employed and executed.

In mobile, there are maybe a couple hundred apps that have succeeded in a big way (Instagram, Snapchat, Venmo, WhatsApp, etc.), yet there are literally tens of thousands of really great undiscovered products out there. Why haven’t those great products found success? Here are some possible explanations:

1. The product has a market too small to turn it into a commercially viable business
2. The customer base doesn’t know the product exists
3. The customers know the product exists, but don’t know why they need it
4. They tried it, but couldn’t wrap their head around it (which is more about onboarding/UX than marketing… but still important)

If we took more steps, and put more thought into communicating with potential customers - instead of scoffing at the idea of doing so, the business landscape would absolutely be different for many talented entrepreneurs.

Wordplay, so we can sleep better

I recently attended a meetup and was asked if I thought the lines between marketing and business development were blurring, as if marketing was evolving for the better, into business development.

One of my fellow panelists mentioned their company was working hard to rename their marketing department to something that sounded less… marketing-y.

In the tech world, there’s also a huge wave of interest around growth hacking — intelligently building mechanisms into a product that help leverage user actions —to raise awareness amongst non-users.

Everywhere I turn, there seems to be tremendous interest in finding new ways to describe marketing. Which means we’re putting effort into adjusting the way we communicate the idea of communicating about products. What a waste of time and energy.

Keep it real

I wonder if marketing gets a bad wrap because it’s perceived as the act of overstating. In reality, when executed with integrity, it’s just about communicating.

I always advise clients, partners and friends that authenticity is key.

Don’t lie. Don’t misrepresent what your product is capable of.

Instead, reflect a little bit. Find the things that make you, your product, or company, special, then highlight them. Let customers know what you believe in, what’s important, and why they matter to you.

It’s no different than “having conversations”, “creating a feedback loop”, “listening to your users” or any of the other silly verbal tricks we use so we can sleep better knowing we’re not (cue the scary music)… marketing.

Marketing at its best is nothing more than telling people, who you think would enjoy or appreciate your product, that your product exists, and that you’d love to have them as a customer.

If we thought about marketing along those lines, I believe we’d start to see some of those truly great, under-the-radar products rise to the top.

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