Marketing The (Emerging) Unknown

Marketing in the technology space today is beginning to see a rarity become a norm – the act of proactively marketing an unknown (or emerging) technology. Almost anyone today can define an emerging technology as artificial intelligence, machine learning, virtual reality, mixed reality etc. Some can argue that these technologies are already here, and so product marketing managers need to catch up with the technology and start devising+marketing use-case scenarios based on what is already built. But I tend to differ with this pivot – to me, product marketing managers today have a bigger responsibility to not only understand the potential of the technology and figure how to market it, but also to preemptively understand their customers and markets in a deeper-than-ever before context and bring those insights into the development of these emerging technologies.

Call this unsolicited advice, but here are the 6 steps I recommend to product marketing managers and product managers alike in marketing tomorrow’s technology today:

1.   Understand the problems of tomorrow, today…I mean, really!

Do you know the problems of today? Great! What about understanding how today's problems can evolve tomorrow? Do you understand their impact/detriment to your customers? Do your customers know they are problems, or is it just you?

2.   Prioritize the problems that need to be solved...from your customers’ perspective, please!

Do you know which problems need solving sooner? Do you know which problems are low-hanging fruit with high impact? Do you prioritize apples-to-apples? Are you so obsessed with a problem that you can't objectively assess it?

3.   Find any other potential problems that your customers aren’t aware of

Customer is king. True – but the king also has advisers because he doesn’t know everything that is wrong or can go wrong. Do you shy away from educating your customers? Do you just hope they tell you what should be done, or are you brave enough to announce a problem and be the one to fix it?

4.   Draw up ideal, perfect-world use-case scenarios that would solve these problems

It’s Holiday Season! Write up your wish-list of use case scenarios that are beneficial, delightful, easy, and sustainable for your customers. Have you thought of everything yet? Or are you still operating within your biases and constraints?

5.   Understand the technology and how it can breathe life to these scenarios

Do you understand the technology or are you just fully dependent on your product manager to tell you how stuff works? Do you understand the potential and constraints of the technology? Do you have a passion for the technology and believe all what it can be? Can you communicate this passion and potential of the market to your product manager, and vice versa? Can you advise on how and why you think this new technology can solve the problems you have defined? Can it be a product or it is still just an idea/concept?

6.   Build-Communicate-Pilot-Measure-Repeat

Does the pilot build match your use-case scenarios? Do you have the right measures and metrics in the right life-cycle points to learn from the pilot? Are you piloting the right customers and market segment? Did you message and communicate the value prop of the solution accurately, appropriately, concisely, purposefully? Are you willing to do all that, all over again to get to a better product and marketing plan?

These are 6 steps that can multiply to 6 more sub-steps each and so on if done correctly. Gone are the days when we could claim that new technology will just market itself. Just ask the first mp3 player, the first printer, the first social network, or the first anything else.