That thing you (forget to) do part 2: Product marketing

Recently, I was invited by the incubator JFDI.Asia to deliver a talk entitled “That Thing You (Forget to) Do” (inspired loosely from Tom Hanks’ movie “That Thing You Do”) on best practices of product development, management & marketing. Following up from part one, this article focuses on two fundamental aspects of product marketing: distribution and public relations.

Update on Post (3 May 2012): Video of the talk in JFDI Asia – credits to JFDI for recording it

How start-ups should view product marketing

There are two important questions to answer, whether you are a founder or an employee of a start-up. What’s the mission and vision of the start-up? How do we communicate the product to the customers so that they know that we are solving their problem or fulfilling a latent or present need in their daily lives? The questions are fundamental because it focused on the why and not the how of products.

So, in order for a product to go to market, it needs to overcome two barriers:

How will your customers hear about your product?

This is the awareness problem in product marketing. To solve this problem, you can either engage mainstream or social media, build a story around your start-up and then get the message out in the market. A lot of times, most people conflate this with the distribution, which is in fact the next question:

How do your customers access or buy your product?

This is the distribution problem in product marketing which the team within the start-up have more control. It involves the team working out what sales channels and distribution centers your product should go on. For example, the iTunes app store or Android market is a distribution channel for mobile app developers to sell their apps to customers.

The same can be said of software as a service (SaaS) platforms where a team selling web services can harness as a possible distribution point for their web products. Another aspect of the distribution problem is the strategic partnerships your startup build with a large multi-national company which are usually not within your control and depends on how much the big company really needs you.

Product Marketing: PR and Awareness

The first rule to doing product marketing is that you should never associate public relations with vanity. Whether it is a social or mainstream media site, the objective is to associate the message you want to propagate about your business to the potential customers. Everything else is immaterial.