What comes first, product or marketing?

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Permalink Reply by Richard Michem on September 9, 2008 at 1:54pm

Are you talking about a magazine, marketing, to a potential readers, or marketing to an advertiser?

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Permalink Reply by Peter Hobday on September 9, 2008 at 3:04pm

Richard - I am asking about launch marketing in general. If you are launching, what is the first step - do you produce the marketing or produce the product?

With magazines, a team will often go with an idea and produce a product. Then they put it out. That is the same with many products - they evolve and are then marketed. Like cars. They suddenly appear and either sell or don't.

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Permalink Reply by Glenn Laudenslager on December 10, 2008 at 10:57pm

Marketing needs to have a seat at the table during product launch planning. In fact, there is no discipline that comes first, it all needs to come together at the same time to set yourself up for success -- marketing, content, IT, database pros, operations, and everyone else.

You only get the chance to launch once -- so if you just go ahead with a launch and think you can worry about marketing later, you're blowing a chance to create buzz, get customers excited, and find ways to generate better revenue and relationships. If you're launching products and you don't have marketing and those other groups at the table, you should think again.

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Permalink Reply by Kerry Smith on December 13, 2008 at 9:03am

You can't really create a marketing strategy without a product. That said, once the magazine, event, or whatever is conceived (but not yet created), the marketing team should be brought in to create a marketing strategy concurrent with product development. That way, everyone is in sync and you have the best opportunity to launch in a coordinated way. To Glenn's point, you only have once chance to launch.

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