I’ve been trying to keep up to date about what everyone in the publishing industry is talking about…
So… here is a quick link to a good little article about how you need to let the product market itself and let your readers be your sales team.
I’ve seen this strategy work great in a lot of companies, including my current one, and I highly recommend it.
Great Product is the New Marketing
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I’d think you could draw a graph with marketing on one axis and greatness on the other. You could then draw a Z curve of “equi-sales”, that is X amount of marketing and Y amount of greatness would result in Z amount of sales. Following me so far?
Now I submit that these curves will be heavily skewed towards marketing. In other words, great products do not sell themselves. In particular a good product with great marketing will probably sell much better than a great product with good marketing.
A good indicator is that the marketing department is compensated higher than product development 🙂
How would you argue then for a great product going viral? Was it the product or the marketing?
Being a sales person myself I will agree that the sales guys usually get paid way more than the producers (which is kind of unfortunate), but I think that just comes down to supply and demand. If more people were willing to sell and less people were willing to produce then sales people wouldn’t be paid as much.
This can go many directions…
When we look at the world as a whole we actually are seeing this supply and demand shift. China manufactures products and those producers are paid very well (adjusted for local standards of living) and the retail sales people here are paid rather poorly. (Think walmart or target employees)
So it really depends on what product you are selling. I personally think that once globalization has played out everything will level out. More people will start to buy local from local producers, with the exception of some high tech products. This will help local producers get paid more then those that market products.
Gosh, you got my brain thinking now Jacob so I got to go write a full post on this!
Cheers,
Jeremy
I think the “everybody is talking about it” effect is large. If a marketeer or more precisely a group of people in key (social) positions can get it started, the virulence is much larger than what the product can create on its own. A virus may be super infectious, but it also needs to meet a lot of people to spread itself and it can not do this on its own.
There’s a critical point or a tipping point. Marketing is needed to reach that point.
All good points except my last sentence would still be…
“Great product is needed to reach that point”
In other words, everyone won’t talk about it unless its a great product.