Creating Products that sell themselves

Make no mistake, this is the only product marketing guide you'll ever need to read.

If you're an executive, an entrepreneur or founder who cares about bottom-line growth you need to read this.

If you're looking for cute, flashy product concepts of the ilk that dominate corporate management consultancy discussions or universities, this guide is not for you.

Before We Begin

Prevailing wisdom says that good products will sell themselves, right?

Not exactly. "Sellable" products sell themselves.

Yet I've even experienced instances were "sellable" products need an additional push in order to generate true growth.

So what constitutes a sellable product and how do you ensure yours becomes one?

• Sometimes with great difficulty.
• Sometimes with a lot of modification and testing.
• Sometimes by just re-positioning.

The old-school business world will say something like this...

‘Marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks.”

Fred Wilson (cofounder of Union Square Ventures)

Fred is confused and that's ok. He means, "promotion", yet he perfectly encapsulates the popular misconception people have with marketing. They think it's advertising, or promotions or marketing communications. It isn't.

Product is, and should always be, a core part of the marketing discipline. After all, Product is one of the 4 P’s (product, place, promotion, and price). As markets become increasingly competitive and the barriers to entry lower further, product marketing is playing an increasingly important role in business success.

How can Fortnite become one of the biggest games in the world in under 12 months - raking in billions of dollars of sales? It wasn't from generating brand awareness via advertising promotions. It was all about creating addictive game-play and a clever up-sell product pricing strategy.

Marketing's role in the product department has been too separate for too long. Tech companies filled their product departments with technical engineers. Traditional businesses let an advertising agency addiction take hold which permeated marketing departments creating a legion of narrow-skilled staff who couldn't do much else than discuss the next brand campaign.

Great marketing is more than just communications. promotion or even technical product operations.

If your product marketing is on-point, you’d be surprised how little else you need to do.

Contents of This Guide

In this 7000 word guide we explain in detail:

• What is product marketing and product marketing strategy
• How the product marketing strategic process works
• Understanding product types - tangibility, good types etc
• How product life cycle affects your approach
• Product architecture influences
• How to manipulate your market instead of your product
• What is Product-Market Fit
• How you achieve Product-Market-Fit
• How you measure Product-Market-Fit
• Creating valuable products - understanding product benefits and costs
• Product layers
• Product positioning
• Product packaging and bundling
• Product sampling
• Product substitute threats
• Unique services product marketing considerations
• Shortcomings, risks and Pitfalls

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Below is a sample from this last section for free. Comment below or message me personally if you wish to receive the full guide.

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Shortcomings, Risk and Pitfalls

Build it and they will come – this doesn’t hold true in competitive markets, especially if there is plentiful competition and lots of available product substitutes. Unless you're lucky enough to launch a product into a market where there is plentiful demand and no competition, if you build something, they will not come. Prevailing product substitutes can often kill a new product release if they haven't been considered in conjunction with a competitor analysis. All products need promotions when they are launched in one form or another. If your initial customers aren't spreading awareness via word of mouth by default, you’ll also require an effective sales generation marketing system.

Even great products won't sell themselves – A great product sells itself, right? This is not true. Brian Balfour says that in his experience, your product must pass an expectation threshold before word of mouth (WOM) will occur. The product doesn’t just have to be good, it must be really good.

“There are three common thoughts about Word of Mouth that are incorrect in my opinion: 1 - Word of Mouth just happens 2 - You don't have control over Word of Mouth or are unable to influence it 3 - To create Word of Mouth, you just need to build a great product.“

He goes on to explain how he views word of mouth as a simple positive feedback loop which is the characteristic of most effective growth marketing initiatives.

1.     A new user/customer starts using the product. 2.  That product greatly exceeds expectations. 3.  As a result, that person tells others. 4.  Loop repeats. The key in this loop is step 2 - the product greatly exceeds expectations. In other words, there is a large positive delta between your product experience, and the alternative.“

In addition to the expectation threshold, we’ve noticed that there also can’t be an inherent disincentive for the customer to spread the word. Some examples we’ve experienced during our time marketing hundreds of brands include:

1. A cult/unique fashion brand where the customers didn’t want anyone else to know where they buy their clothes from
2. Effective Marketing Services - clients won’t recommend the provider to competitors or other people because they don’t want to share the secret to their success.
3. Business lawyers/accountants - often divulging your firm can provide leverage to adversaries and competitors.
4. Growth hacking - growth hackers don’t want to share with other people their favourite tools or techniques as it will diminish their skill advantage and encourage anti-spam measures to be deployed by platforms.

We called this phenomenon, ‘fishing spot’ syndrome. If you have a good fishing spot, you're not going to go around telling everyone where it is. As soon as you do, the floodgates open and everyone starts fishing there. So, you have an incentive to keep your mouth shut.

Bad Products Still Sell – How many times have you heard marketing and sales blame the product department for poor sales results. While this can be true, we’ve observed, first hand, companies with terrible products that have sold them successfully. However, they all had one thing in common, a high performing sales team and the product was high in credence good characteristics. Stratton Oakmont, Jordan Belfort’s firm is a good example of how this can work. So if you have a mediocre or downright bad product, you’ll have to promote and sell it better than the competition. The downside risk to this approach is longevity. Bad products nearly always have a customer churn problem, meaning long-term growth is stymied. This is because, customers will eventually realize how bad the product is, stop using it, buying it and recommending it. Thus, it's an expensive way to grow a business.

The Functional Benefit / Monetary Cost Trap – Customer's purchase based on more than just product quality and price. They purchase perceived value. Value is the sum of benefits minus costs. Functional benefits are just one of the 3 categories of benefits and monetary cost just 1 of 4 categories of cost. Multiple marketing studies have proven that there is a positive, direct relationship between price, and perceptions of quality. One must be aware that decreasing the price does not always lead to an increase in demand. Some product types will even defy the laws of economics. In fact, increasing the price can have the opposite effect. Veblen goods are known for their characteristic nature to increase in demand as the price increases. Some marketers can be tempted to assume that lowering the price will increase demand and therefore sales. Similarly, technical product managers and engineers can wrongly assume that the only benefits customers derive from products are functional in nature. They will completely ignore emotional and self-expressive benefits which can form some of the core reasons for purchase.

Market Validation Trap - Market research can dramatically reduce the risk associated with nearly all product decisions, but you also need to be aware of the many mistakes that can befall inexperienced marketers. Even professional research teams working for large brands get it wrong. Google the infamous New Coke release as just one example. Ultimately, market research should underpin the validity of all product marketing decisions such as, value perceptions, positioning, product development etc. Without research, all product marketing decisions will stem from an internal perspective, which is often very different from the customer’s perspective. A mix of descriptive data, primary research, secondary research and customer anecdotes should be considered. Be aware of obvious forms of bias affecting the results and other common research pitfalls. Even a small, properly structured research initiative can prevent the loss of significant amounts of wasted time and resources.

Featuritis” The Product Feature Trap - often this occurs as a result of product team procrastination, poor leadership or the misinterpretation of customer feedback (see above). Creating too many features can lead to a reduction of focus by trying to be too much to everyone. It also causes your product to encroach on other markets where there may be an already established and highly effective number of specialist competitors who service that market better. We call this the Swizz army knife effect. Sure I could fiddle around with a screwdriver the size of my pinky finger, but I’m quickly going to want to search for my screwdriver set.

Adding additional features can also lead to confusion and negatively detract from the product’s perceived value. If you can’t answer and prove how that feature is valued by the customer, don’t add it. Did Gillette need to keep adding another blade to their razor? Probably not. Don’t be a Gillette razor. In fact, deleting features can have a positive effect. Look at how Google’s homepage has been intentionally left bare since it’s inception. Compare this to Yahoo (especially their early homepage designs).  

Big Brand vs Small Brand Trap – the marketing approach used by an established brand should be completely different to a newer, smaller brand. Ex-Advertising agency staff often make this mistake when quitting agency life and launching their own enterprise. They will use a big brand, heavy advertising and design focus which they believe will result in sales. Unfortunately, they weren't exposed to all other other critical sales, marketing and product areas necessary for revenue generation during their careers, often leading to a string of failed businesses.

Gary V's advice is equally misinterpreted by his many followers. He routinely tells these fans to create lots of content and push it out via social media (specifically mentioning Instagram and Facebook). This approach works when have a famous personal brand with millions of followers to leverage for reach. Unfortunately, it's much less effective when you're just starting out as a budding entrepreneur. Early on you'll have minimal brand credibility, low awareness and a measly following to exploit. Few people realize how many face-to-face speaking events Gary has to attend at a grass-roots level before his following really exploded. Ironically, he created his early loyal following by not investing in "content" or social media.

Brand vs Product complexity– the murky relationship between the brand and the product can complicate decision-making for customers and send erroneous feedback signals to marketers. A great, sellable product can be neutralized by an undesirable associated brand. The Trump Hotel chain’s vacancy problems after he got elected, is just one example. Another example is when politicians who are personally popular in their electorate are aligned with a party that is unpopular. Good marketers will be conscious of the degree to which the brand and other products affect the performance of the product in question.