PM Weekly - Pretotype Your Marketing
by Leonardo Zangrando, @ lionzan
Pretotyping means to validate market interest and actual use of an innovation early on with the minimum investment of time and money.
What is an innovation then? A product or service, for sure. Does this imply that we are going to market the innovation using traditional marketing techniques? Possibly, but we might be wrong.
A product (or service) is not just the thing itself. A product without its market is worth nothing. So the way it reaches the market is key. Product and market go hand in hand. Why keep marketing separate from the product, from the innovation? Why attach it to the product at a later stage, after the product is complete?
Product and Market go hand in hand
Pretotyping is about experimenting with the market as soon as possible, way before the product is real. Faking it in front of the market to gauge reactions. Will they want it? Will they buy it? Will they buy it again?
You have to reach the market early on, the real market for your product. You have to develop your initial customer base even before you have a product. Somehow you have to market them the innovation. How would you reach and develop your initial 10 or 100 customers? Sure, you might use traditional marketing techniques to reach your target customer. Or you might experiment. Try new approaches.
Innovate in marketing?
What would this innovation in marketing look like? It’s about doing things differently. When pretotyping we face the challenge to reach our target market without a substantial marketing budget. We want to limit our spend and learn the most, i.e. increase our return on pretotyping investment. So we are incentivised to find something. We are looking for cost effective marketing solutions.
As pretotypers we might well decide to test different solutions, looking for those which work best with the innovation at hand. Run experiments on marketing innovation to go hand in hand with your product innovation!
One promising direction is to build marketing inside the product from day one, well before developing the product itself. This is the realm of growth hacking - the good one - as described by Ryan Holiday. Marketing is not attached to the innovation at a later stage, it becomes part of the product!
Marketing is part of the product!
If you liked this post, tell the world!
Click the green heart below and tweet about it!
