Five Principles For A Holistic Marketing and Growth Approach In Product Development
At Porsche Digital, the Marketing & Growth team has become an integral part of the product development process from day one, complement between marketing and a fast-paced growth hacking mindset. Helen gives insights into our holistic marketing approach and how we aim to drive innovation with cross-functional collaboration.
Following the concept of “testing and growth” as an essential prerequisite for the development of our products, our marketing team evolved into a dedicated Marketing & Growth team with a clear goal:
To integrate marketing facets into product development from day one and complement with a fast-paced growth hacking mindset.
Holistic marketing: how we drive innovations at Porsche Digital
As a “growth hacking” team, we require a broad repertoire of necessary skills. The following five competencies are essential to develop new products and brands innovatively:
1. Make marketing part of the process from the very beginning!
At Porsche Digital, we enforce a holistic approach across all project phases. Growth & Marketing is thus involved in product development right from the start. This cross-functionality helps all of our teams to immediately acquire in-depth product knowledge and enables us to adapt innovations to customer needs at an early stage, always keeping them in focus and offering the customers relevant added value. We incorporate considerations regarding the target group and corresponding distribution channels into product development as soon as possible.
To approach product innovation in a holistic and systematic way, we use different tools like the Product Field, a sense-making framework for product innovation. If you want to know more about it: My colleague Tobias already described in an earlier post how it helps us enhance product innovation. In our experience, the Product Field subsequently also facilitates the branding of our projects, including naming, mission, target group, etc. which is a precondition for any successful marketing campaign.
2. Be hands-on!
As we want to work fast and efficiently, teams must be able to function independently. That’s why we try to build up a wide range of skills and abilities also in our marketing team, including essentials like a basic understanding of different marketing tools and topics but also the use of design programs, copywriting, and analytics, to name a few. This helps us to take care of upcoming tasks directly and to keep track of the development process.
Growth Marketing starts with very early learnings at the beginning of product development. At that phase, we do everything in-house instead of working with agencies to get the most insights from ad planning, placement, target group definition, campaign goal, and concept but also the implementation of assets and copy text, as well as analysis of the results.
3. Be inventive: try new things!
Using a process-based methodology, we continuously carry out tests and analyze performance to maximize marketing quality. This includes desirability tests, target group analysis, and tests regarding price sensitivity and purchasing power through social media campaigns (traffic, conversion) as well as landing page tests, fake doors, email marketing including feedback requests, and more. Based on these experiments, we can directly estimate, for instance, which channels work best to market the product.
Constant testing not only allows us to thoroughly evaluate products throughout the project development but also guarantees an efficient use of resources. We want to be able to take quick action and have therefore adopted an agile testing-mindset, while at the same time striving for maximum output for the respective project phase.
4. Be driven by data!
Significant marketing measures do not rely on gut feelings but on facts. There are three guiding principles in this regard: analytical research, targeted adjustments, and speed.
We use different tools such as the Facebook Business Manager, Google Analytics, HubSpot, and HotJar, all of which enable us to get insights about target groups, their usage behavior, or willingness to buy and to track the quality of our campaigns and customers approach. We take these insights into the product teams to weave them into the process of product development and continuously discuss learnings.
5. Cross-collaborate!
I have said it before but most importantly, each project is a cross-disciplinary effort involving multiple experts and specialists, all of which work towards one common goal. By combining our expertise across the entire spectrum of product development, we are able to optimize the product continuously, which includes developing and testing growth loops. For us, this is what makes our concept of integrated marketing and a holistic product innovation approach successful.
Scaling: From idea to roll-out
At Porsche Digital small projects are gradually transformed into global campaigns. To successfully drive innovation forward, we must identify opportunities, adapt quickly to lessons learned and ensure a scalable business model. Our “growth marketing approach” allows us to act flexibly, quickly and innovatively.
Helen Single is Marketing & Growth Manager at Porsche Digital.
About this publication: Where innovation meets tradition. There’s more to Porsche than sports cars — we’re tackling new challenges, develop digital products and think digital with a focus on the customer. On our Medium blog, we tell these stories. It’s about our #nextvisions, smart technologies and the people that drive our digital journey.
