It’s become slightly trendy of late to decree that we live in a post-marketing era. Investor Fred Wilson remarked lately that “marketing is for companies with sucky products” and that idea has some intuitive appeal to it. After all, aren’t good products likely to generate word-of-mouth and thus free promotion in this age of social media?
But the real world is filled with counter-examples to the idea that products sell themselves. Washington Post reported Gene Weingarten provided one of the most poignant examples of late when he had world-famous violin soloist Joshua Bell perform disguised as a busker in a Washington DC Metro station to see if anybody would notice.
Stripped of the endorsement of the world famous concert halls where he plays for more than $100 per seat, Bell barely attracted an audience. Out of the thousands who passed by, only a handful stopped to listen and just one person recognized him and his total collection for his 42 minute concert was $32.73.
We can think of other examples:
- Could you spot a painting from a great artist if it was hanging at the neighborhood diner, rather than the Metropolitan Museum of Art?
- I fell asleep watching Citizen Kane. Would I ever have bothered to remember it if it wasn’t widely acclaimed to be the greatest movie of all time?
- How do you feel about the quality of the university that you attended? Let’s assume you think it’s excellent. Now, would you rather have gone to Harvard?If you agree that you’d rather go to Harvard, then you ought to ask whether your answer, rather shocking when you consider the risk of giving up an excellent experience, is due to any certain knowledge of Harvard’s quality or rather, the influence of marketing.
- Products judged by their specifications:These products own characteristics are “self-sufficient.” Foods sometimes fall into this category because we have a pretty good idea what spaghetti & meatballs ought to taste like. If a restaurant has good spaghetti, it shouldn’t need to market itself because the taste profile will instantly match our mental model of a good solution pretty well. If it has bad spaghetti, well that’s Olive Garden.
- Products judged by their immediate outcomes:Business strategist Clay Christensen has popularized the notion that customers typically “hire” products to do a specific job — they don’t purchase the product because of its inherent characteristics. To illustrate, Christensen tells the story of a food fast company who sought to improve the taste of its milkshake to appeal to more customers. But better taste, it turned out, didn’t influence sales because the job which consumers imagined for milkshakes wasn’t to delight their taste buds, it was to stem the boredom of a long commute. Thus non-taste attributes like convenience and thickness were more important.While it takes some effort to tease out what job a product is being asked to perform, the performance of this type of product can at least be assessed immediately.
- Products judged by long-term outcomes:Many products require a sustained period of use, a supporting ecosystem and social approval before they pay dividends for the individual user. Take Microsoft Excel as an example. I recall that when I was a wee teen, I opened the program, found a blank worksheet and wondered what the fuss was all about. I suspect that about 90% of Microsoft Office users still fall into the same category. But for those who work in an environment where they regularly engage in data-driven conversations with their peers, have abundance data to work with and are afforded opportunities for repeated trial-and-error, Microsoft Excel has an invaluable tool in the long-term.
While this may simplify the problem somewhat, I’d suggest that “marketing is for sucky products” is true when it’s known that products can be judged according to their specifications. But indeterminable ex ante (before the consumer trial) when products can be judged according to their immediate outcomes. And false when it comes to products whose outcomes can only be assessed after some period of time and investment.
For example, consider Xobni, a program that enhances Microsoft Outlook e-mail. Every consumer knows what e-mail is as a product, but there are pretty distinct “jobs” that consumers put it towards. Some consumers are using e-mail to keep in touch with a select few family & friends, others are using it for business but even those scenarios vary considerable. The mid-level manager in a company likely uses e-mail quite differently than its outbound sales force does. Due to the initial press, Xobni received a great number of downloads (including myself) but a supermajority of these were uninstalled within days (including my own). As a result, Xobni has struggled to define its market niche despite $30 million in funding.
The Xobni story isn’t all that rare. It nearly happened to Twitter.
Circa 2009, the Internet was full of stories about how users were unsure what to do with Twitter even though they had heard about it. I published a blog post offering some suggestions to help overcome Twitter’s adoption issues and, since then, Twitter has recovered quite well. The answer for them wasn’t to dramatically improve the product but to market it. Most improvements in Twitter user experience came through the adoption of the platform by celebrities and leading brands and by the development of third-party software like TweetDeck to enable individuals to personalize their Twitter experience to suit the “job” they want out of it.
