SpectatorBytes

This week, I had an interesting conversation around the value of Marketing for consumer products on the Web. In my chat, I was guiding a company in which I am involved to rethink their marketing spend. The young company believed that spending on Marketing was critical to support their products in the highly competitive categories in which it participates. My experience has taught me Marketing is not as effective on the Web as it is in the real world.
The Consumer Web is a highly Darwinian environment. Most of the time, only products that have managed to entice consumers tend to thrive on the Web. Products and services, which don’t manage to entice consumers, will tend to remain sub-scale regardless the amount of marketing around them.

Traditional business thinking suggests that aggressive marketing can create product awareness and ultimately drive adoption.  However, the nature of the consumer Web makes it difficult for this concept to hold true. Unlike in offline environments, consumers have the ability to evaluate and test all products available for them in a particular category. There is no major cost to doing so. If a product resonates with a set of early adopters, it is very easy for these early adopters to share their assessment of a particular product. If the assessment is positive, these consumers/customers become your more effective marketing team. They also help further shape (or fine-tune) the product through their feedback. The relationship between these customers and a company’s product team is critical for a product to gain additional momentum. Maniacal focus on product development rather than on marketing strategies is what drives product success on the Web.

Focusing on product development rather than marketing helps a company avoid the natural tension that has traditionally existed between these two functions. Product folks tend to blame marketers when their products are not adopted, and marketers tend to blame it on the product itself. On the Web, product adoption needs to be owned and controlled by the product teams.

Companies should still work to seed their product among their potential set of early adopters. They can do this by:
- Carefully design the registration process to create immediate engagement and adoption. Your website design is critical to capture early adopters.
- Building a vast distribution network. Make sure that the product is easily accessible to users (via search, social media platforms, relevant sites, etc.)
- Work with a savvy PR agency to design a highly targeted strategy to attract potential early adopters.
- Establish relevant collaborations for non-traditional marketing (e.g., special events, in-context exposure) once the product has gained a decent level of scale. CNN and Facebook is a good recent example.

Keep in mind that if the product does not resonate with consumers, not even these web-tailored efforts will work.

Companies need to increasingly be genuine to attract consumers and customers. Skepticism reigns wild on the Web. Traditional marketing is not that genuine and that is likely to hurt you more than help you.

Has your experienced with marketing been different?