MARKETING! Even God needs it.

Flowers need to attract bees for pollination. Bees come for nectar. But how do flowers tell the bees that it has good nectar? They market themselves through large petals. The primary role of petals is to attract bees and insects via their flamboyant color and pleasant fragrance.?

Interesting to see Mother Nature doing marketing!

But sometimes, marketing is seen as evil and unnecessary in the startup world. There is a school of? perception that just creating an awesome product, with product market fit, is enough for a start-up to succeed.?

Both online and offline literature sprawls with such quotes:

Literature also often states that numerous companies like Google, PayPal, Zara, Apple, WhatsApp, Rolls Royce, Dropbox, etc. became leaders without marketing.

Even if we read literature authored by gigantic entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Brin/Page, we tend to get the same perception of great product triumph without the need for marketing.

In this article we shall try to delve into the practical reality of the fact. Let’s start with some companies which are often claimed to be successful just by great products and no marketing.

Google

Google search engine was indeed kick-ass and is believed to have spread organically. But it is seldom highlighted that it had made a deal with Netscape to be the exclusive search engine for their internet browser. Netscape, the biggest internet browser company of its time, grew fast bringing users to Google.

This key association (or business development) was a vital marketing strategy for Google.

On similar lines, even today, Google is in deal with Apple to be the default search engine on its devices. Google allegedly pays Apple a whooping $12-$15 billion, annually,?for it to remain the no.1 search engine, despite having a great product.

PayPal

PayPal, an iconic company with an awesome product, grew really fast as users madly referred the product to others. Ideal word-of-mouth growth! But PayPal used to pay 10$ to a user for every new referral. Great product did matter but users were not referring because of that alone.

Paytm had an awesome product but it used to give cashbacks to customers for using it. This is literally the reverse flow of money: from the company to the customer. On similar lines, ecommerce players have historically sold products much below the cost price. When Uber launched in India, they were providing AC cars at a price much lesser than that of an auto-rickshaw.?

Paying to the customer or heavy discounting is a marketing trick that many companies had to use to grow very fast despite great? products.

Zara

Zara, the clothing giant, is so successful a company that it made its founder among the richest five people on this planet at one point of time. It grew organically, without any marketing, as it offered an awesome clothing line-up at affordable prices.?

But in my opinion, they do a lot of marketing!?

They open their retail shops at the most prime locations. These high-footfall locations drive customers to the shops. The large amount of money which they spent for these locations is ideologically a marketing cost.?

If they open the retail shops, with the same product, at a low cost location with little footfall, they will have to advertise or market in more obvious ways to inform and attract customers.

This is an old time marketing strategy of retail shop businesses (including restaurants). Apple takes this to the next level by further designing the stores so aesthetically that no one passing by can resist getting in. These designer shops also earn a lot of PR for Apple. Marketing strategy!

Tesla

Tesla has zero marketing budget. But Tesla gets tons of free PR due to its super celebrity founder, even on a small announcement. Otherwise, the same amount of PR would cost a lot. Having such a founder to whom the market is dying to hear is the marketing strategy of Tesla (even if unintentionally).?

Ferrero Rocher, Rolls Royce

Companies like Ferrero Rocher (yummy!) and Rolls Royce are not? doing? marketing but are still successful. True! But they did marketing early on. Once they got the market share, the greatness of their products was enough. Years later, we tend to forget that the companies did market.?

Also being an extremely luxury product, they rightly advertised only in niche high-end media which did not create a lot of buzz in the larger masses giving a sense of no-marketing.

But, a strategy of no-marketing at a later stage may be dangerous. Old Monk (no marketing) was the leader in the Indian liquor market. In the last decade, it has declined as new players have marketed strongly. Nykaa did the same to Lakme (cosmetics).

Lynda.com, Natural Ice-creams

Surely, many amazing companies (like Lynda and Natural ice-creams) never thought of marketing but simply grew by virtue of great products which generated word-of-mouth. But then, growth has been slow compared to the fast paced start-ups of today.?

Lynda.com was founded in 1995 but acquired by LinkedIn 20 years later. Natural Ice-Creams (amazing ice-creams!) is at a revenue of 300cr rupees post 34 years of existence.?

Scott Cook, founder of Intuit, has been a great advocate of the idea that an awesome product can grow just by word-of-mouth. But he also states that word-of-mouth can often be slow. For faster growth, he used magazine ads in the initial stage of the company itself with success.

Dropbox

Dropbox provided free storage on referrals. This sky-rocketed referrals and thus sign ups. Dropbox basically used growth hacking.?

Growth hacking, in the startup world, is a? way to market the product where engineers, marketers, data analysts and designers work in collaboration in a highly agile manner. They conduct numerous quick experiments with innovative ideas and product features to scale faster at low cost.

YouTube created a system so that one could embed a YouTube video on one’s website. This made YouTube the default choice for video hosting. Twitter studied user journey and changed the whole design based on the learnings. Ixigo (an Indian travel portal) introduced many free features in the product to solve pain points and built top of the funnel, e.g. a feature to find the running status of trains. Examples are endless.

When we read this, it seems like a fairy tale where companies using growth hacking get overnight success. Not true. For example, Dropbox? tried many ideas for a long time and then only one clicked. Also, this idea was refined and iterated many times.?

Growth hacking may give growth at low cost so there is a tendency to think that growth came without any marketing. Not fair!

Firstly, because if growth hacking is being tried, it means the company is trying to spread the product rather than just creating it, just that it is looking for a low cost smart marketing solution. Secondly, if not huge money, huge effort does go into this.

WhatsApp

WhatsApp literally grew very fast without any marketing. They had an awesome product which provided free mobile chat between two people when customers had to pay for each SMS.?

Imagine, on paper, if you just convince a pair of lovers in a college to use WhatsApp, it may be enough to explode the market. These two may convince their other friends to use WhatsApp to save their own money. Convincing will be easy as friends also save money. The chain may keep growing from here. Here the word-of-mouth exploded due to the Network Effect.?

Network effect favored even companies like Facebook, Zoom. But one needs to realize that there are very few? businesses which can ride on strong Network effects.? Other successful companies like Amazon, Google, Uber, Apple, etc. could not grow the same way.

Dollar-Shave-Club

Having no budget, Dollar-Shave-Club founder created a YouTube video which went viral and led to lots of paying customers. Practically, no marketing! But the problem is, it’s very hard to create such massively viral videos, even the best of the creative people have a tiny success rate.?

In fact, if the same founder starts a new company, will he bank just on his ability to create a viral video to market the product??

Media

Being rare, companies like WhatsApp and Dollar-Shave-Club make a unique wow growth story for the audience. The way the media works, they report such stories way out of proportion as readers want to hear uniqueness, not the status quo of the same old marketing grill to grow. This gives a perception to a normal reader that cases like these are the norm where product alone triumphs.

Advertising vs Marketing

Advertising is just one of the many marketing approaches (refer image). Other marketing approaches include activities mentioned in the image or any other strategy deployed to aware or convince the customer to buy the product.

But, in normal communications, often the words, marketing and advertising, are used interchangeably. Due to this, when a company is not advertising, one may loosely get a perception that it is not marketing. In many above examples, that seems to be the case.

Most B2B companies, new-age or traditional, like Salesforce, Zoho, Adobe, Tata Steel, Birla Cement, etc. have been using modes of marketing other than traditional advertising, ever since. Even B2C companies are using more and more of other modes in combination with targeted online advertising. Thinking that they are not marketing as they are not advertising much is misguiding.

At the same time, in later phases of growth, many new-age B2C companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Paytm, Big Basket did use traditional advertising (including TV ads) for massive and fast growth in the same manner as FMCG companies do.

A lot of companies do grow without advertising but very few grow without marketing.?

Even God needs Marketing

Buddhism, considered to be a very fine religion by most scholars, was confined only to northern India till king Ashoka started spreading it. Owing to his marketing efforts in Asia, Buddhism has been popular in most parts of Asia. The same religion has never been prominent in Europe as no one spread it there.?

What about politics?? Even the great Abraham Lincoln had to campaign aggressively for becoming President.

Marketing Basics

On a very crude level, typical flow of selling a product is as in image.

Note, it is true that if a product is not good, customers may finally drop after step 5 and the company may die eventually. But also note that till the customer buys the product first time (in step 4), he actually is being influenced only by sales and marketing. He tastes the quality only after buying.

So, when a company is in its initial stage of expansion, it needs to market itself. But once it has captured the market, the product may speak for itself and marketing can be reduced/removed.

Good Products DESERVE Marketing

On traveling Europe extensively, one can easily find out that there are many cities (Zagreb, Warsaw, Verona etc.) which are less visited than Rome, Paris, Barcelona, Athens, etc. despite being equally or even more beautiful. Marketing!

Computer mouse was made by Xerox. But Xerox did not market it. Had Apple and Microsoft not marketed the mouse, it would have not reached the customers. Also, the companies which ripped the benefit of the product were not its creator but its marketers.

Sosyo and Chambal are cola based cold drinks popular in some pockets of Gujarat and Rajasthan. As a user, I found the taste good. But why don’t they sell the same as Coke and Pepsi even in those regions?

There are tons of awesome products which never get their due because they are not marketed well.?

Literature from gigantic entrepreneurs like Gates, Jobs, etc.?

Say you want to go for vacation to Rome (or maybe to Verona, now!). So, you have to meet Rome but you must choose a mode of transport. Mode of transport is unavoidable. Similarly, when a? product has to meet? consumers, the marketing and sales activities are modes of transport, mostly unavoidable. (refer image)

Now, after the trip, if a passionate traveler has to talk about his experience, what will he say? Majority of his talk will be on how great Rome was, very little or no talk on the mode of transport. He was passionate about Rome, not the mode of transport, right?

Similarly and for the same reason, when passionate entrepreneurs open up, most of the time they will talk and write about the product, how great it was, how it delighted the customers and so on. This gives the perception to listeners that product alone was important.

Conclusion

A traveler can think of the transport as a necessary evil or as a beautiful thing which connects him to the destination. However, both, a wise traveler and a wise entrepreneur, try to minimize the cost and time of this mode of transport.

Entrepreneurs must create awesome products but they also need to start thinking of marketing as they start creating the product.?Many times, marketing can even be embedded in the product design.

Kindly share your thoughts!