I read "Marketing from A to Z" Philip Kotler. This is my essay and teaser for you to read this GOLD BOOK
🌟Sales start only when you have a product.
Marketing starts before this product is produced.
Marketing is the homework that a company does to figure out what people need and what they should offer.
🌟As a rule, Marketing is organized as a department. This is both good and bad. Good because it allows to bring together competent professionals who are able to understand and satisfy customers. It's bad, because employees in other departments do not consider marketing their task.
🌟HOW NOT TO DO: “We don't have time to waste on marketing. We have not completed product development yet”.
🌟It can be a good idea to develop a brand in other areas, because you don’t need to spend time building a new brand. But be careful, because hardly somebody wants a “Coca Cola” car.
🌟Realizing that some car models will be in special demand among women, Mercedes engineers glued the nails when testing the opening of doors, using the button panel and etc.
🌟In the big ocean of competition you have a choice: to have a breakfast or to be a somebody’s breakfast.
🌟If you are creating a marketing plan, do it in collaboration with other departments. And you will see that they are more involved in the implementation of the plan, some of the steps from which they proposed themselves.
🌟Marketing is a race without a finish.
🌟When “online” appeared on the Internet, offline sales were afraid that their business go to an end. But good managers began to create sites to lead both - offline & online. Now the time of #ChatGPT, and instead of fear, we need to be ready for change. Refresh or get lost!
🌟Good design means that the product is: easy to unpack; easy to assemble; easy to master; easy to use; easy to fix; easy to dispose of at the end of its useful life.
🌟How is a brand created? It is a mistake to think that this is a matter of advertising. Advertising only draws attention to the brand, arouses interest in it, talks about it - that's all.
🌟Instead of seeing every person as a consumer, we should see every consumer as a person.
🌟Planning can bring more value not with a finished plan, but with the planning process itself.
Your likes mean world for me!
Thanks for sharing and reminding me of the below lesson.
Marketing is the homework that a company does to figure out what people need and what they should offer.
Being a product person, I got tempted to build a product first, but focused on building bare minimum. But didn't not find enough customers. Reached out to at least 150 people on LinkedIn, yet found only few responses. Even the responses I got weren't all that encouraging, so ended up with no sign ups. Again being a product person, the unfinished product led me to continue to tweak the product, each release feeling unsure if that is what the customer wants.
Essentially, I have to learn how to do this home work. Asking potential customers seem to be the easy path, but getting response seem to be the hardest.
A lot more to learn and do..
thank you for your comment. So didn't you start to create your product? Did you stop because didn't get responses in LinkedIn?
I have the MVP altered so many times that I am now not so confident in the shape it is in. Feels like it needs more work. Also, for the product to work beautifully, it is a bit technical heavy (needs a lot of integrations and stuff).
So, planning on relaunching it as a productized service with some BI embed. So, we can figure out integrations later.
But this discovery of need thingy cant be any harder. For someone who didn't have as many failures at full time work, this sucks. But learning!
tell us more about your product
thanks for asking!
The product is https://goalign.io/
The idea of the product was to create a Performance Tracking System using OKRs and KPIs for business and use that data to provide performance updates, reports and prediction. You see, a product for 'small data' of sorts. The product offered a KPI hierarchy/ tree view so you can view the whole company, OKR management which is linked to KPIs and finally an simple way to track KPIs/ Metrics.
We knew that tracking KPI manually is a time consuming, but we didn't want to get going with integrations until we find product validation and know that integrations are huge undertaking and is going to be specific to each business.
Right now, we are working on relaunching the product as a OKR software that is simple and straight-forward and removed all other features. We see the other OKR software have become too complicated and not so easy to manage. So, trying to offer something simple.
This message emphasises the necessity of marketing in identifying client demands, as well as the dangers of ignoring it. It also emphasises the importance of cross-departmental coordination in marketing activities and reacting to changes in the business landscape. It serves as a useful reminder of the complex nature of marketing and its continuing importance in the commercial world.
exactly