“The Best Marketing Is A Good Product” Myth
Have you ever heard the phrase, “The best marketing is a great product”?
I have heard this phrase numerous times. In general, it’s good advice.
But it’s a myth.
The best marketing isn’t having a good product. The best marketing is good marketing.
Let’s look at this myth in a little more detail.
Should You Have A Good Product?
For all the budding entrepreneurs out there: Yes. You should make sure you have a good product. It should be the best product you can possibly create. A lot of people try and cut corners, use cheap materials or offer some lifehacker-style solution where they charge $50 for a service and hire it out to Fiverr.
That approach is a mistake, and deep down everyone already knows it. The “hustle” mentality is counter-productive long term. Instead, you should build the best product you can and then worry about charging a premium.
If you don’t do this, you will be beaten by your competition sooner or later.
However that doesn’t mean that having a good product is going to do your marketing for you. Think about Coca-Cola.
Coca-cola isn’t where it is in terms of market share due to being a good product. Sure, it tastes nice, but only when you don’t really think about what it tastes like. The minute you actually start thinking about it is the minute it gets terrifying.
Coca-cola isn’t marketing the best product in the world. They do have a massive market share though. Therefore, we can conclude that something is going on outside of quality product creation.
Marketing Is Marketing, Product Creation Is Product Creation
Marketing is not product creation. Product creation is not marketing.
If you create the best product in the world, it can sit in your garage collecting dust.
You can build a mediocre or simple product that simply solves the needs of your target market, and it’ll ultimately be more successful than the perfect product in the garage.
Think about all the YouTube guitar kids who can play virtuosic solos that take hundreds of hours to master, and compare them with the latest pop sensation that can barely sing, barely wears any clothes and generates revenue like a Golden Goose. (Or better yet, novelty acts.)
Marketing is its own beast, and you need to treat it as such. Otherwise, you’ll be the creator with no sales.
The Good News
The good news is that if you do have a product that solves a need, you’re off to a great head start. One of the reasons I mentioned having a good product above is that, whilst not marketing in and of itself, a good product will act as a success multiplier for your marketing.
That sounds a bit like nerdy computer game jargon, so I’ll restate: The better your product, the more success you’ll likely have with your marketing.
Alright, So What Is Marketing Then?
Marketing in its simplest form is getting your product in front of your customers.
It’s getting your solution in front of the person with the problem.
Marketing can be accomplished in countless ways, but that’s what all its permutations boil down to in the end.
People have problems. You have a solution. The marketing you do is all the things that lead to the customer using your solution to solve their problem.
Your product might be the perfect solution to a specific problem. That doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do any marketing. If it is a perfect solution, then it’ll mean that your marketing will be very successful.
For instance, I could sit in a shed somewhere and develop a skin cream that gets rid of wrinkles.
If I did this, I would still have to market the wrinkle cream.
However, the minute I created a video getting rid of wrinkles with a simple cream, that marketing would be incredibly successful and would go viral – and I’d be pretty happy.
That’s the relationship between a product and its marketing.
So What Do I Do To Market My Product?
Now we’ve broken down marketing into a simple sentence or two, it’s easy to build a marketing plan.
You simply prove that your product solves the problem of a user. Use every channel available to you.
That’s all there is to it.
There are a ton of obfuscations; brand awareness. Multiple exposure theories. Social responsibility buzzwords.
All of those things are complications which you don’t really need to worry about. They’re phantoms created by marketing agencies to justify their slightly ambiguous results and not-at-all ambiguous fees.
Direct response marketing is far more efficient. Direct response marketing involves things like copywriting and other marketing based on calls to action, i.e. you tell the customer to do something, and then they do it.
So solve your customer’s problem.
Use marketing channels to prove that you’ve solved the problem with your product.
Tell the potential customer that they too will solve their problem by using your product.
That’s the basis of any marketing strategy. Obviously, a great product makes the whole thing a lot easier, but this process works with any product, good or bad. (But seriously guys, make a good product and it’ll all be plain-sailing.)