If your company is small, your product not quite there and your customer base embryonic, and you think your problem is your marketing budget, you are most likely wrong.
Marketing costs money and since cave man days, marketers have been squeezed to perform tactical miracles with whatever was left post product development. Marketers have squirmed and cracked under this pressure for generations.
Thankfully, it’s a new world today and much more interesting. Marketing leadership is not tied inextricably to dollars and programs. And money is not the exclusive currency of success or failure.
This is not to say that brilliant push advertising can’t work in some instances, but certainly no startup can do a raise to get visibility on the traditional tech advertising venues dominated by Apple, Microsoft and now Google. The class gap has become a chasm and it’s just not going to happen. Don’t even bother to think about this. Check, move on and be happy that this is gone.
Marketing chutzpah is no longer about squeezing a dollar out of a dime, perfectly executed traditional venues, or gimmicky schmaltz. It’s about building a product that has articulable value and a distribution strategy that is part of the product itself. And the honesty and smarts to build a community and social presence that has dynamics and viral oomph.
I hear whining and condemnation coming from my smart friends in advertising and traditional big brands, crying foul and calling me the faddish futurist. I’m being practical about pushing the concept of marketing into product development and holding firm to the belief that marketing is about finding a market, not about budgets and campaigns that sit as an line item on a spreadsheet.
My point of view is that today, without a social component, a two-way conversation with your customer or your community, you simply can’t succeed. Large company or small. It just can’t happen.
The larger brands have the leverage of the base. They have their own set of demons to deal with. But the startup has well…only the value of its product and its personality to capture their version of Seth Godin’s ‘sneezers’ who will start the drum circle going from the one to the many and from those many to many more.
The truism is that unless your customers and channel are your voluntary enthusiasts and marketers, you won’t move from company push to market pull without a thunderbolt of luck.
The change that the social web has brought for the marketer is empowering. The age-old discrete building blocks of Product then Marketing Plan then Distribution Strategy then Rollout are rolled into one. For business, especially e-businesses, how you sell, price, market and distribute the product are all part of the same paradigm. One box. The more you create separate buckets, the more you are stacking the odds against success. And yes, this means that the marketing manager had better be the marketing product manager and channel thinker as well. And that marketing tactics as an afterthought to product development is as useless as product development without an eye towards true customer value.
I don’t usually rant, but I’m impatient at the flood of reactions from traditional media types that the basic components of our markets haven’t changed. They really have and the big brands with big dollars don’t have a lock on the consumer’s attention any longer.
