How Product Managers should think about Marketing

STP, the 4Ps, and the 5Cs = The ABCs of marketing.

As a PM, marketing was always interesting to me. I would write blog posts for our marketing team at PagerDuty often. After attending business school, I learned that marketing is more than just about producing content and that the strategy component of marketing is not only really interesting, but actually really useful for product managers.

STP, the 4Ps, and the 5Cs are like the essentials of marketing. So I’ll cover them quickly so you have a general understanding.

STP = Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning. Who are you going after with you marketing program? If you aren’t targeting anyone, then you are targeting no one. And who you target makes a huge difference in how you position. For our startup SquashPrep, going after teachers versus going after students makes a huge difference in positioning.

4Ps = Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. As PMs, we obviously play a big part in the product “P”. But before your product can hit the shelves, you gotta figure out the other three. Product managers almost always forget about pricing and promotion, and leave it to the last minute. If anything, this stuff should be determined before you write a line of code. Place is where you sell the product. Online, resellers, in app stores, that’s all Place.

5Cs= Company, customer, competition, context, and collaborators. It’s helpful to think of the 5Cs with pretty much any product decision. But of the 5, I think the customers is the most important. As Jeff Bezos says all the time, you need an “obsessive compulsive focus on your customers, not on your competitors.”

Knowing the ABCs of marketing is great start from PMs who want to have a more wholistic perspective on how this very valuable team in your organization actually works.