I’ve come to believe that marketing is easy.
This perhaps somewhat astonishing idea came to me as I was leafing through some personal archives as I search for just the right items to place on my new portfolio site. Some of my company’s old brochures are in the box, and I remember the struggle we went through at times to find the right words, present the right image, frame the right message.
All of that could have been so such simpler … if we had just built our product with more compelling points of differentiation.
Products with compelling points of differentiation sell themselves. Not that you don’t have to do the marketing, create awareness, sell the idea, and all that. But they write their own story.
A good example is the iPhone. If you’ve seen any of the ads, you know the deal. An iPhone ad never says buy me, or iPhone is better than X phone, or heaven forbid, the either of the words “solution” or “device.” All an iPhone ad does is show you capabilities and possibilities. The rest of the pitch happens inside your own head.
The marketing, in other words, ought to be embedded in the product.
John… this post was a bit like flicking a switch and realising you’d always had a porch light that you’d never used. Sweet, elegant, good example and glowing with the “ring of truth”.
Thank you.
=) Marc
Thanks, Mark!
[…] a bunch of different ways, I’ll know this thing, and then someone bright and sparkly, like John Koetsier at Sparkplug 9, will come along and say it in a way that makes the light-bulb pop […]
“The marketing, in other words, ought to be embedded in the product.”
Great line!
You have my mind racing.
It is as if a kind of “gospel” is built into well designed products and services.
I watch the iPhone ads and inside me something says, “that’s the answer for the question I couldn’t articulate bouncing around in my mind.”
Thanks for sharing John.
Keep creating…a brand worth raving about,
Mike