I believe Product Marketing (PMM) is primarily about creating and delivering the story an organization tells the market about itself and especially its products. Markets are driven by dialogue and PMM has a weighty responsibility: Product Marketing conceives the narrative and keeps the conversation flowing naturally throughout the year.
While PMM is necessarily focused externally on the market, successful teams tackle work inside the organization with vigor. Aligning stakeholders on messaging, coordinating launches across Sales and Marketing and gracefully handling engineering surprises all mean that the very best PMM have eyes both in the front and the back of their heads.
The concept of markets as a dialogue started for me upon reading The Cluetrain Manifesto. The idea is simple and struck home for me: imagine that you’re sitting across from your customer at a table. How would you speak to them? What would you say? The premise is that our ability to reach niche audiences with customized messages based on previously unheard of amount of customer insight on screens that follow you into the bathroom means the industrial era practices of blind mass marketing are broken. A prime example is the press release.
So you’re back at the small café table with your customer or prospect for a friendly chat. Light jazz music is playing in the background and steam is rolling pleasantly off of your cappuccinos. Now consider that you start the conversation on a new topic by shouting at the top of your lungs speaking in grandiose terms about this hot new something they need to buy right now. Pretty ridiculous, right? Cluetrain Manifesto argues that most press releases are the functional equivalent and I would agree. REVOLUTIONARY NEW FIZZBANG 7.5 USHERS IN ERA OF TURBO COLON-CLEANSING.
Chock full of hyperbole and hackneyed business-speak, press releases are effectively a tone-deaf monologue at a podium where the speaker walks off afterward without taking questions.
Press releases still have a role. I don’t love them, but what if they were delivered as a story that you might be telling your customer across the table over coffee? Check out how Google announces hitting a key milestone in rolling out wifi to Indian rail stations. It gets the point across with stories rather than superlatives. It is vastly more… human.
Let’s take this a step further. What if you assumed that the initial conversation over coffee was followed up by subsequent emails and perhaps a phone call, like any other relationship would? Further, if the customer can try your product and determine how great it is for themselves, is there really a need to shout at them and exaggerate the benefits? The inverse of outdated industrial era marketing practices is the farmer’s market. When I visit the local Sunday farmer’s market in Santa Monica, I can try the oranges that are cut by the grower for me to sample. I can ask the baker when the bread was made and how. The fig farmer tells me how the drought has impacted fruit quality and flavor. They are selling to me, but it’s enjoyable and expected. And what’s more, I can see all of them the following week if I’d like to. Is it unreasonable to think that this same approach can work for software and in particular, security?
Applying this back to product marketing, I believe the highest impact approach to PMM is to create a tight, compelling narrative for the next 12 months as if you were talking about your products to an earnest customer at the farmer’s market or with the aforementioned friend over coffee. Ideally a friend who isn’t well versed in your industry. How do you set up the story? These are likely the points you make prior to your initial launch through blogs, analyst briefings and other low key means of initiating the market dialogue while beginning to test your broader story. The key points you make to drive home your message are the launches themselves—each one a step in further developing the narrative and punctuated by a statement to the market, an event, etc.