Build Marketing into Product Development
A version of this article originally appeared on Wall Street Journal.
Most people who are not in the marketing profession (and, frighteningly, some people within marketing) think that the job of the marketer starts after the product ships. They are under the impression that marketing is just all the ads, gimmicks, twists and messaging that get sprinkled on as extras.
This couldn’t be less true.
Marketing (contrary to popular belief) is not about making people want things; rather, it is about making things people want. All the advertising and celebrity endorsements in the world couldn’t sell a product that nobody wanted in the first place.
This effect works in reverse too. If you create a product that people really want or that fills an existing need more effectively than what’s out there, the product will in many ways market itself.
Setting your business up for this kind of success requires asking one fundamental question before you begin building a new product or service: What do people want?
That question seems so painfully obvious that people don’t pay too much attention to making sure they answer it completely and just go ahead and build something. However, the question is not nearly simple as it seems — that one question is actually a rabbit-hole of questions.
First you have to figure out what people actually want. This is often different from what they say they want. Also, different people want different things. What group of people is your product meant to target? What kind of needs does this customer have? Is this need already filled? Is there room for improvement?
What you’ll often realize after chasing this question is that the product you were planning on building before was probably the wrong one. Unless you have great intuition, whatever you would have built would only have been what you assumed people wanted. It was only once you (and/or your team) really sat down and thought through the problem that you could discover what people actually want.
Economists always talk about the major forces of supply and demand perfectly dictating the market; but unless you’re talking about commodities, things that customers demand are actually in horribly short supply. What ends up happening is that people compromise their real demands for the best substitute being supplied.
That’s because so many businesses fail to ask the question “what do people want?” before they start building their products. They ship products that might tangentially fill the needs of their audience, but that’s just a happy coincidence.
Incorporating this lesson into your business means not starting anything new until asking and answering the question of what your customers want. Ensuring this happens requires changing the way that you approach building and developing new products.
Instead of the product development team handing off something to the marketing team and saying, “Go sell this,” the marketing team should explore customer demand from the beginning and work with the product team and say, “Go build this.”
These changes will certainly help you build better products going forward, but what about the products you’ve already built? Can you apply the same process to improve them?
Of course, but you need to be willing to change things. Even something that might be working for you quite well. The thing is that whatever is making your product work is probably the “happy coincidence” I mentioned earlier.
By identifying what your customers really want you’ll start seeing your product as a combination of two things: things that resonate with what your audience wants (the happy coincidence part) and things that are either simply extraneous and detract from the core appeal. Understanding what people truly want will give you the judgment to strip away all the unnecessary parts and focus on building out the useful pieces.
Beyond just helping you make great products, constantly forcing yourself to ask and answer the question of what your customer wants will train you to start noticing trends and becoming familiar with the key forces that drive these consumers.
Once your organization begins picking up on signs like these, you can start predicting what your customer might want next. The only thing that will delight your audience more than giving them what they want is giving them something they didn’t know they wanted yet — like what happened with the launch of the iPhone.
I hope I’ve convinced you that starting with the question of what people want is actually the ultimate marketing strategy. When companies build products this way, they need very little additional marketing because the marketing is not something they sprinkle on at the last second. The marketing is literally built into the product from the start.
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