4 ms·
A lot of people conflate marketing with promotion (i.e. advertising). It's not. Marketing is about identifying the needs of a market and finding a way to serve
by nprateem 4y ago
A lot of people conflate marketing with promotion (i.e. advertising). It's not.
Marketing is about identifying the needs of a market and finding a way to serve them better than competitors. If you don't understand your market, how can you create a successful product for them? You can't, unless you're just lucky. And in that case, if you fail to understand the sources of your luck a more attuned competitor may steal market share from you anyway.
If you develop the product without understanding marketing you risk wasting time on something people don't want or that is strategically difficult to grow. For example, a hyperlocal events app faces different challenges to a two-sided marketplace like ebay, to a service company, etc. Even backed up by solid marketing it's difficult enough to create products people want. You can't just sprinkle on some magic marketing fairy dust after the product is built and expect to turn it into a hit.
You also need to understand your competition so you can find out how they're failing to meet the needs of niches. Or if they aren't and they're nailing it, come up with a different idea and move on.
If you're an idea guy, the most important thing to learn is to test ideas. That fundamentally involves marketing, perhaps combined with a prototype/MVP for ideas that pass initial filters. Don't fall into the trap of staying in your comfort zone as a developer unless you can find a marketer to work with who'll be the business brains behind your projects.
- ghaff 4y agoI agree with all your overall points. Minor nit though. Advertising is just one form of promotions that can include trial periods, sales, even meetups, blogs, newsletters, and things like that.
- squishy47 4y agoyep. came here to say the last paragraph. There are shit products that sell and great products that don't. gauging user interest is super important before investing time into building something. (there was a post yesterday about tripAdvisor adding a broken link to pages to gauge interest before they invest in building the page, seems fitting here)
- that_guy_iain 4y agoWhile you have a valid point, I disagree with how you said it. Marketing is a term that comes from a going to a literal market to promote goods for sale. A marketing team is different from the product team. A product team aims to understand the market and solve the problems for that market. While the marketing team's job is to let people know that you're solving the problems. Marketing is about promoting. It's about letting people know you exist. Yes, you need to understand the market and solve a real pain but that part is product development. Marketing will worry about product placement, about knowing who the correct audience is, where to reach them, etc.
- nprateem 4y agoMaybe you learnt different things on your MBA than I did.
- that_guy_iain 4y agoMaybe I learned marketing from marketing materials and not from a MBA - a non marketing qualifications.
- taylodl 4y agoYou have two ears for a reason. What the MBA is informing you is marketing is a LOT MORE than promoting. I don't have an MBA, but I've learned that from decades of experience and listening to other people's expertise.
- that_guy_iain 4y agoNo, what the person with a MBA said was that marketing also included product development. The person with this MBA's had no rebuttal to my reply pointing out that product development is not a marketing responsibility what they should build but how to get their solution in front of people who have that pain. It's marketing's responsibility for product placement to explain how the product solves their pain. To make the product understandable and relatable. And no matter how many ears I have the fact they couldn't come up with a rebuttal to what I wrote and instead just talked about their MBA as a reason why they are right is very telling. And for someone who says they've learned from decades of experience and listening to people, you've also failed to rebut what I wrote. Since, there has been zero rebuttals to what I've written a smart person can only assume they have no rebuttals. So maybe you should learn from my experience and expertise and realise that product development does not belong to marketing and finding a problem to solve is not a marketing issue but a product development issue.
- edpichler 4y agoI was needing to read this. I was previously understanding marketing as propaganda. Thanks.