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Product Development IS Marketing, And Vice Versa
John Battelle of SearchBlog | August 30th, 2008 - 07:54 PM
(15) found this useful. Do you? 
“Marketing is not only much broader than selling; it is not a specialized activity at all. It encompasses the entire business.” – Peter Drucker
Over the past several posts I’ve been talking about the role of search, conversation, and media in your business. While not explicit, each of these posts was about one thing: Marketing.
Marketing is one of the most misunderstood practices in business today. For most of us, marketing is about convincing potential customers that our product or service is worth their money. And while that’s certainly partly true, it never struck me as the whole narrative.
Where does marketing really begin? As management guru Peter Drucker stated it, “Marketing is the whole business seen from the customer’s point of view.” Put another way, every single interaction the customer has with your business can and should be seen as marketing.
I’ve argued elsewhere that a truly successful business is one that is an ongoing conversation. Those conversations are marketing – if you add value and connect to your customer, you’re succeeding. If you don’t, you fail.
It’s easy to know if you’re succeeding while having those conversations – we’re all pretty good at sensing when customers are happy as we directly interact with them. But we often forget a crucial ongoing conversation that usually occurs beyond our personal presence: The conversation between the customer and our products.
Case in point: I’ve worked closely with a well known software firm that spends millions on marketing programs that do a very good job of convincing consumers to buy their products. Once those products are in the hands of customers, however, that marketing spend ends. But the conversation has just begun – the customer not only installs the software, he or she then interacts with the product again and again, often multiple times a day. And sometimes the customer sees an error message.
And while the software company doesn’t see it that way, that error message is marketing. Unfortunately, that message is written by a programmer, and it fails to do anything but irritate the customer.
But wait, you might argue, marketing isn’t involved in the creation of a product! Marketing is all about selling the product once it’s made! Sadly, this is how marketing is usually defined. But it shouldn’t be. When you are developing your product, you are, in essence, developing a marketing program. If you view your product as an extension of your marketing efforts, chances are your business will be far more successful.
In short, marketing and product development are not separate functions. They should be part of the very same thing. Imagine an error message that said: “Oops, our software just got confused. We’re a bit embarrassed, but here’s a link to a forum where other customers with exactly the same problem can talk about the error. We make sure that our representatives are always there to answer questions as well, so there’s a pretty good chance we can find a fix quickly. Please come by to tell us about what happened. If you do, we’ll give you a discount on our next upgrade, and you’ll be helping us develop an even better product over time. Thanks!”
Now that’s what I call a conversation: marketing that integrates product development with customer service. I can’t wait till it happens.
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Discussion Boards
Canada pursues coffee marketing ideas.: An article from: Tea & Coffee Trade Journal | Internet Marketing Marketing Strategies Marketing Resources | Marketing Idea | August 31st, 2008 at 7:00 am
[…] Product Development IS Marketing, And Vice VersaMarketing is one of the most misunderstood practices in business today. For most of us, marketing is about convincing potential customers that our product or service is worth their money. And while that s certainly party true, … […]
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shawn | August 31st, 2008 at 8:44 am
Marketing can get quite confusing, but it surely worth a marketers time and humble effort in putting forth your best foot possible in legitimately converting the consumer into a retained customer of longevity…:-)
http://www.ShawnDrewry.com
http://www.myspace.com/social_ceo_affiliate
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Joel Cohen | August 31st, 2008 at 1:05 pm
Marketing a restaurant is not running an advertising program. At http://www.RestaurantMarketing.com we advocate that marketing is the total experience as seen by the guest that starts as early as viewing the signage from the street.
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Norbert Mayer-Wittmann | August 31st, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Interesting piece…. One question that comes up is the role of the web site — is it to “represent the business” or the “medium for messaging” (I presume you’re arguing more of the latter)… and here is where the Wisdom of the Language kicks in (again): not at the old-fashioned “C:\” prompt but now at the new-media “http://” prompt (or similar instantiations of the same address [i.e., “to twitter”, “to digg”, etc.]). I expect the number of “ranking” systems will actually take off in short order — for example, restaurants listed at pizza.com could be rated by time delivered at http://delivered.at or by geographic location at http://deliveries.in (or other aspects of “quality of service” will involve similar micro-transaction information tools/service). All such messaging will become increasingly open & transparent — and those companies that try to collect/gather/capture “proprietary” data will simply be left behind.
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BringBuyers.com | September 1st, 2008 at 4:30 pm
John, it is unfortunate that many people, even so called marketing experts focus on the promotion/marcom part of marketing. They forget the product, place, price, and people components.
Absolutely, product development is marketing!
The smart marketer should knows that. Developing a product with DNA/traits that appeal to the buyer speeds up the buying process.
http://www.BringBuyers.com
Small Business Internet Marketing
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renaissance chambara | Ged Carroll - Links of the day | September 1st, 2008 at 5:02 pm
[…] Product Development IS Marketing, And Vice Versa | American Express OPEN Blog […]
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Peter Tennis | October 3rd, 2008 at 11:08 am
Isn’t it funny how we never listen to our father? Drucker is considered the father of modern management, yet how many times do we pay attention to what he taught by implementing it? True, most marketing departments are promotion departments, and most CMOs are productive creative experts (hence the short tenure). When will the CEO begin to see his/her own role as CMO? Maybe then we can shift to a more holistic view of our organizations and realize that we are not “all in sales” - we are all in marketing! Thanks for the great post.
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John Battelle of SearchBlog | October 31st, 2008 at 11:13 am
Thanks for the comments, folks. I can’t wait till I get the time to really dig into this in my next book.
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eesteban kolsky | November 1st, 2008 at 10:56 pm
John,
You say “I cannot wait until this happens”, but this is happening (to a lesser degree in instances) today. Not sure if you know or not John Ragsdale from the SSPA (he used to be with Forrester) - I’d be glad to introduce you if you want. He talks about this in his blog as well as his SSPA presentations (just saw another one last week).
In short, communities if all the crazy among smaller software companies, which started doing it for costs reasons and ended up loving what I called Community Service (as opposed to customer service). I have a blog entry coming up next week - finishing research - on this. Also wrote about it for Gartner about 4-5 yrs ago, called Collaborative Service before - but it was just an idea since we did not have the tools then.
Anyways, if you want to talk to John about it, he is a good guy to know with lots of data and case studies to help you. Worse case, you meet someone else
Esteban
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