republished from Bostinnovation
Sometimes I feel bad for marketing folk.
I mean… Sailors sail. Builders build. Bricklayers lay. And the world is glad. But marketers who busy themselves marketing can destroy value as readily as they create it.
Examples abound. Say you’re an enlightened entrepreneur, assembling a world class team to create the Next Big Thing. You bring in Johnny Sellsalot as your marketing guy, because Johnny Sellsalot can hustle, baby. Johnny gets shit done. He knows where to buy a list, where to get cheap design from MassArt kids, how to make and mail stuff. Johnny can work a room. He knows trade show girls. Guys who do flash, cheap. He’s been to DEMO, like, 3 times.
So Johnny goes to work. He’s smart enough to put together a marketing plan that coordinates the 50 things he knows need to get done to make this thing HUGE, baby. Pronto! And all of those tactical timelines reach a crescendo on a date about three-fourths of the way through a PowerPoint slide where all the letters are in 8-point font, except for 5. Those 5 are in 32-point font, and they are red. And they are L-A-U-N-C-H.
This gets the team excited, and focused. “Only 3 sprints until Launch, baby!” “We need those water bottles here by Launch, man!” “You better get that shit cleaned up by launch, man! Fo Sho Mo Fo!!”
Here’s the thing, folks. In many cases – not all, but many – Launch is for amateurs. There is no launch. Launch is a tale told by an idiot. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
Focus on building a product – and a brand – that earns passionate advocates. Then outsource your marketing to them.
Look… some products need a Launch. Some brands, at some point, need a PR partner to bring scale their outreach, to get the word out on a road-tested offering. But for a lot of businesses, it’s better to get there as part of a product-driven process. You should at least consider the virtues of letting your product trickle out when you think it’s good enough to get people excited, then listening hard for excitement. If you hear some, figure out where it’s coming from, and do more of that. Find out what keeps people from being excited, and fix it.
Tell your story in a way that puts a single, simple expression of your emotional value proposition at the center. Tell that story in a consistent way, at every point of contact with the marketplace. Engage the people who respond to that story, to bend your message, and your product, toward the truth.
That’s Marketing, people. With a capital “M.” And it’s how the big boys roll until they know they have the formula right.
