MEng lecturer Martina Lauchengco publishes new book LOVED

LOVED: How to Rethink Marketing for Tech Products helps readers understand the fundamental purpose behind why marketing matters for every product and what is essential to do well.

Most tech companies get product marketing wrong. LOVED is the next in the bestselling Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) series, and it explains how companies such as Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, and Salesforce use product marketing to transform their businesses.

Even the best products can lose out in the market. Why? They are beaten by products with better product marketing. Excellent product marketing accomplishes far more than segmenting customers, positioning your product, developing product collateral, and supporting sales teams. It teaches you how to get your product to market in the most efficient way possible. It has an impact on how the rest of the world perceives your product and category. It motivates others to tell the tale of your product.

With LOVED, author and UC Berkeley MEng lecturer Martina Lauchengco invites readers to rethink their ideas of product marketing and turn to a more “dynamic, customer and market-centric” version that enables a product to reach its full market potential.

“Product marketing has an impact on how the rest of the world perceives your product and category. It motivates others to tell the tale of your product.”

A book about marketing for non-marketers

One reason why people might want to read LOVED is that the book is about marketing, but it is written for non-marketers. It focuses on helping readers understand the fundamentals and importance of marketing. Most people don’t understand what go-to-market means. LOVED is written to explain how companies utilize product marketing, marketing, and sales disciplines to help readers gain a better understanding of how they operate together.

How Berkeley MEng students contributed to the book

LOVED features some of the market tests Martina’s UC Berkeley graduate students ran for their final class project.

One of the student projects featured in LOVED focused on a product consisting of online bootcamps to get people job-ready for careers in technology. For their market test, participants were asked to select from five different dollar amounts and assign each to a different company competing in the same space. They then compared these answers to how participants had answered questions about how important brand name was in making decisions. Their market implication was that people like to think they aren’t affected by brand reputation. However, when forced to make choices compared to similar products, they are willing to pay more for the brand they know, even relative to what they feel that brand is worth in a different context.

From the author herself, “writing LOVED was one of the hardest professional challenges I’ve tackled in my career. Having content worthy of a book and crafting it into a book worthy of reading are two very different things.

The process of rewriting and honing what I wanted to say so that it was readable and my larger points were clear was the real work. In my final rewrite, I cut eight chapters and 9000 words, but I think the book is much better for it.

In a business book, you don’t get a prize for being long. What people want is valuable lessons and inspiration and that every page delivers on their investment in time.”

Are you interested in purchasing LOVED? Click on this link: https://tinyurl.com/LOVEDProductMarketing

Martina Lauchengco received her BA in Political Science and MA in Organizational Behavior from Stanford University. Martina is the product marketing partner at Silicon Valley Product Group (SVPG) and a partner at Costanoa Ventures, a boutique early-stage venture capital firm. Martina worked at Microsoft and Netscape, two of the most formative tech companies of all time, before advising startups and Fortune 500 companies. She has been a lecturer for the Masters of Engineering program at UC Berkeley for almost 11 years and an ardent advocate of the importance of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Connect with Martina Lauchengco.

Edited by Veronica Roseborough and Nick Yang.