Ask Slashdot: I Just Need... Marketing? 212
An anonymous reader writes "Over the years, Slashdot has had many stories of non-technical entrepreneurs in need of programmers. Now I found myself in an almost opposite situation: I am a programmer with a fledgling mass-market product that needs marketing. I know Slashdot's general sentiment towards marketing. Without being judgmental one way or the other, I must say that for a product to reach the widest possible audience in a given time period, marketing is a necessity. Short of doing everything myself, I see a couple of options: 1. Hire marketing people, or an outside marketing firm; 2. Take in willing partners who are good at marketing (currently there are no shortage of people who want in). With these options, my major concerns are how to quantify performance, as well as how to avoid getting trapped in a partnership with non-performing partners — I already have a tangible product with a huge amount of time, money, and effort invested. Budget is also limited. (Budget is always limited unless you are a Fortune 500 business, but for now that's more of a secondary concern.) So here is my question to Slashdot: how do you address these concerns, and in a more general sense, how would you handle the situation: technical people with a product in need of marketing?"
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wait? You didn't talk to marketing? (Score:4, Informative)
Original poster here. Yes I did market research and I know there is a demand for the product. But there is a huge difference between market research and actually going out and marketing the thing.
Re:Wait? You didn't talk to marketing? (Score:4, Informative)
Original poster here. Yes I did market research and I know there is a demand for the product. But there is a huge difference between market research and actually going out and marketing the thing.
If that is really the case, and you have quality research, including a complete business plan (market study and analysis, competitors study and analysis etc etc), then you need sales and advertising.
Marketing, real marketing, is the study and strategy part of business.
Lets keep in mind that "market research" is just a tiny part. Having a demand for a product is very different than a product being marketable. It is the difference between "I wish" and "I'm willing to pay for".
That being said, it is entirely possible you have the basics of marketing covered, including the knowledge, and you only want someone else because you want someone that is BETTER and dedicated to it. If that is the case, you should be able to do performance analysis.
I have to tell you, two things you said worry me. First is the "there is a demand for the product". The second is asking how you can measure performance. Those things lead me to believe that you have a flawed understanding of what marketing is, which can lead you to waste money and time while figuring it out.
If I'm correct on this assumption, you should spend some time reading a little bit on what marketing is, how it works, and what I can do to your company/product. That way, you will have better tools to analyse the marketing person/company you will be getting in bed with.
My first marketing book (and still my bedside marketing gospel) is one: http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Warfare-Anniversary-Edition-Annotated/dp/0071460829 [amazon.com]
Re:Wait? You didn't talk to marketing? (Score:4, Informative)
You realize that one of the key purposes of marketing is to determine if a product is even marketable right?
HELL no. In my experiences, marketing people have no idea whether a product is marketable.
That leads me to believe that:
1) You know little about marketing
2) The marketing people you know know little about marketing
While I can't say #1 for certain, based on the little you wrote, I can say that #2 is true most of the time.
Having worked on companies of all sized (ranging from IBM all the way down to my current 7 people company I own), I have to say that it is easier to find good professionals on ANY field than to find competent marketing people. Marketing is not sales, it is not advertising and it is not product comparison. Marketing is strategy, pure and simple. Unfortunately, most marketing schools don't focus enough on strategy, or the mental part of marketing, leading to crappy professionals.
A good real marketing professional is worth his weight in stocks.
Re:Find angel investors. (Score:4, Informative)
There's a huge difference between sales and marketing - engineers commonly don't recognize this.
Sales is all about the tactical - one deal at a time.
For the super simple version, I like to tell people that "Marketing" is creating a need for your product, and "Sales" is filling that need.
Sometimes there's already a need out there (e.g. spreadsheets) and the marketing is more about creating awareness. Other times (e.g. colored sugar water in a fancy bottle) the marketing does a lot more to create the need.
I've watched and experienced many times that for tech people, making a cool, useful product that didn't exist before is much easier than getting people to see it, find it, and buy it.
Re:Marketing Product (Score:5, Informative)
This. The same way that we get pissed off when an idea person wants someone to "just" program for them, techies need to learn that marketing -- good marketing -- is actually hard and requires some skill. Sales and marketing are not just bullshit and pretty pictures and booze and blow and hookers and sheeple.
If marketing were easy, and if Apple's success were due only to marketing (as is so often claimed), then their success would be easy to replicate, right? The fact is, neither of those statements is true.
Good marketing is not something you can just add to a product after the fact. Like good design, it has to be thought of throughout. I highly recommend you spend an hour watching this. [businessofsoftware.org] In that talk, he was specifically addressing programmers.