…“product is marketing”.
[Ed. note: In this post I’ll use “product” to represent “product or service”].
With Forrester Research Social Media analyst Jeremiah Owyang hosting a lively discussion (37 comments and counting) on “A Definition of Marketing”, it seems apropos to dive into what has been happening with marketing.
The majority of marketing simply follows mediocre product definition and/or development.
In some cases we get good products followed by good marketing.
But, with the Internet to provide zero barrier-to-trial access to your product, or at least to discovery and discussion of your product, we’re seeing cases where the product is almost entirely also the marketing.
Here are some who have done no, or very little, traditional marketing/advertising (thus, no Apple on this list, as they spent $383.7M in the US alone in 2006*...see a discussion of their defiance of conventional marketing wisdom in this earlier post):
- Google: Even their unsuccessful products are marketing.
- Facebook: Helped by news of MS investment, but huge prior.
- digg: And other Web 2.0 winners like del.icio.us, Flickr, etc.
- Wii: Spectacular zig while MS/Sony duke it out on the zag.
- Virgin America: Lots of early access to bloggers.
- Tesla Roadster: What Zero Motorcycle could have been.
- Asus Eee PC: Inexpensive, small notebook gets big attention.
- Slingbox: Right time. Right niche. Right product.
Disconnection between marketing and product definition has never been less tolerable.
So, if this is how marketing has evolved, what lies ahead?
The natural step in having marketing make its way deeper and deeper into the early part of the product cycle, is for it to go all the way to the beginning. When Social Media evolves to becoming Social Product, end users actually build your product with you, and by that I mean much more than etching their name on it, or deciding whether it's white, black or silver.
From conversation comes product. A little something like this...
* AdAge, 2007
3 comments:
Mark, Great stuff. Let me add my perspective. Hope you don't mind.
I've been thinking about your challenge as well, but came to a different, perhaps a wee bit less revolutionary conclusion. Two thoughts:
1) Semantics "Marketing". What's in a name Do we neuter the definition to "marketing communication", "field marketing", etc? I.e. those 'pre sales' activities that take place after the offering (product/ solution/ service mix) has been defined?
2) Linearity. Why do we keep on trying to define "process" as a linear string of events?
To me "MARKETing" and its associated activities needs to be seen as an ecosystem. With lots of interdependent (sub)functions that all take place concurrently.
Reality is that few companies today sell what they originally intended to produce. So the romantic definition of marketing like in "a process managing market intelligence -> R&D -> Product development -> brand/Field marketing" is being challenged.
Maybe B2C/FMGC environments act that way. But what about all the rest?
So if we can't go by linearity what than makes the ecosystem work? IMHO its critical mass. Critical mass that turns this "activity-chaos" into something logical to understand (afterwards). Academics try to describe a successful product launch as the result of a (linearly) managed process. IMHO there is no such thing. Looking backwards you perhaps see a lineair string of activities but at the time the were taking place things were more complex. I personaly think this has always been the case.
To me many of these discussions loose relevancy as soon as you start thinking with a customer centric mindset. Market intelligence gathering (R&D, research etc) and classic (outbound) marketing are in essence more closely related than most of us think. Both are dialogs with (future) customers. The internet and social media are nonetheless enablers of these conversations. Maybe that is what we are struggling with?
Maybe we are trying to figure out how these customer dialogs provide data that influences at the same time product development activity as well as "sales" activities..
Many companies (including myself :-) ) still struggle with the customer centric mindset. I don't think social media sets the world upside down.
It forces us to accept conventional wisdom. Customers are always in control. The internet/social media only strengthens that realization.
Koen,
I'm definitely oversimplifying both the semantics of different kinds of marketing (product, corporate, field, etc.) as well as the linearity (it's very rare that something happens definitively before or after something, instead of all at once).
And you're also right that customers being in control is not a new phenomenon, but simply amplified by the advent of Internet/SMM.
The reason for the over-simplification was to highlight the fact that there has never been a better time to move "marketing" all the way to the front of the process: digg meets product development.
Mike--Your post reminds me of a conference I almost attended recently, "Customer Service is the New Marketing," but swap in product for customer service. To me, they're all connected: Successful marketing can only follow great customer experiences with a brand. But media company brands -- Google, Facebook, Digg -- have the advantage that they are their own media. That's cheating!
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