Which is more important, products or marketing?

[Justloadit]

Yes but how does a customer become aware of your good product?

[adrianh]

Marketing is 99% of sales. Mircosoft, Apple and hordes of other companies sell stuff long before they are ready. We simply accept it because we trust the brand. Homechoice, Verimark and many other companies simply market the hell out of the garbage that they sell. Those companies do well because people are SHEEP who are willing to buy any crap if it is pushed up their noses all the time.

Remember that people are willing to spend R8 on a bottle of water that is supposidly from some well in some nonexistant mountain range. Talk about sheep, people just accept the marketing schplurb and hand over the cash.

Don't kid yourselves, we are all sheep following marketers around. We buy into fashion, be it clothing or cars, we buy whatever rubbish Pick and Pay sells because their marketig says its good and on sale.

Kids want Blackberry phones because thier friends have Blackberry phones, not because they are good phones, because marketing turned them into status symbols. Women buy Prada, Gucci and all sorts of other stuff due to marketing...no other reason.

All it takes to kill a product is one incident that creates enough negative marketing (publicity)

Although I despise advertising and marketing I can clearly see how effective it is.

[Blurock]

Yes but how does a customer become aware of your good product?

Spot on! Or what would you sell if you do not have a product? I think BusNavig8 has summed it up neatly - you can not separate the two. See #29

[Kgashane]

From where I stand, neither the product or the marketing is more important.

I mean, without the product, what do you have to market? Conversely,
without marketing, how will potential customers or clients know about
your product?

Conclusion: both the product and the marketing are equally important.

Albert Mpuru

[adrianh]

I disagree.

The term "Selling ice to an Eskimo" comes to mind"

Stupid people will buy anything when it is marketed well.

You buy household insurance based on marketing NOTHING ELSE.

The point is that the mere illusion of a product sells the product, not the product itself. Buying a house off-plan is buying an illusion (an idea)

Why do certain people drive certain cars, marketing (even if those cars are crap)

Why do you go to a new restaurant, marketing (you've never tasted the food nor seen the menu yet you are led to believe that it is good)

Remember that marketing isn't this big machine driven by big companies, it is a process of training people to WANT your product/brand/service. That thraining can be via many mechanisms including recomendation from friends.

[BusNavig8]

I agree totally with the last post. Marketing is everything. My problem often is though especially as a small business is you market so well and then you run around trying to source the product at the right price in the right time!

[adrianh]

I have a similar problem. My products sell themselves and I simply cannot keep up with demand. Becuase our manufacturing is too slow we end up taking deposits to cover expenses. What then happens is that those deposits cover past expenses but the final payment cannot be collected fast enough to bring the income in line with direct costs incurred to create that product. What we have done to try and combat the problem is to tone down the sales of low income items and to drive the development of efficient manufacturing processes of very high value items.

I have a couple of mantra's that I now live by that helps the process;

Follow the money
I carefully weigh up our oppertunities in terms of time vs our income. If the time that we spend doesn't add value to the creation of a high value income stream then the the oppertunity is handed off to somebody else.

Focus (based on something Steve Jobs said)
Focus does not mean saying YES to the things that you can do, it means saying NO to 1000's or brilliant ideas.
I used to make this mistake all the time. I would take on any job that I knew that I could do because it would generate some income. What I learned is to have a very narrow high value focus and to drive that product. Yes one can drive other products that fall within the scope and rollout plan but the general idea is not to waste energy on doing lots of things badly but rather to focus on doing a handful of thing brilliantly.

And the last mantra (Something that occured to me a couple of daus ago) - Fold big numbers into small numbers.

What I mean is this; lets say I need to get in R80,000 this month. I can think of it as R20K per week or R2K a day. But lets say I manufacture a product that I sell for R10K. When I fold the big number into small numbers I am no longer faced with having to make R80K, I am now faced with having to produce 8 products. A lot of people would say so what, but it is easier for me to work with small numbers. All I now need to do is to establish what it would take to create 8 products, which seems a lot more manageable. By analogy; one could eat 1 elephant or 1000kg of meat. You could have 10 elephants or 1 herd of elephants. You could have 10 herds of elephants or one farm. Mentally this folding process makes it manageable in terms of figures. The bank has 100 branches and they want to add anothrr branch. The fact that the new branch has lots of its own features is relevant only within a particular frame of reference. I think this that this is what is meant by being able to see the big and the small picture simultaneously, if one is unable to scale your frame of reference to the data, then you need to scale the data to your frame of reference.

[Blurock]

My products sell themselves and I simply cannot keep up with demand.

Your products obviously sell due to word of mouth referrals, which is the best marketing in the world!

Adrian, you have a very good grasp of the importance of cash flow in the business. Cash flow is to a business what petrol is to a car.

[ians]

coca cola comes to mind, they still advertise everywhere, Some say, the product should be banned it is apparently so bad for you, i have heard that if you put a coin in a glass of coke it will be gone in the morning, but it taste so gooooood.

[adrianh]

@Blurock - cashflow (aka quick turnaround - product delivery) is the bane of my life...

...but... there is another side to it.

My financier / mentor gives us enough support to keep us right on the edge as opposed to giving us what we think we need to solve the problem. The effect is that we are totally focused on efficiency. Each step in the process of becoming more efficient is evolutionary and that learning is then carried over to other products and processes.

Here is an example. I got a contract to make 1:35 scale models of a particular armoured vehicle for a large company in Pretoria. We got 3 view drawings and I got a friend to draw a 3D model of the vehicle. I got the drawings back but it was quite apparent that though the drawings looked nice they were not suitable for machining (undercuts because he drew a perfect replica of the plans and 3D parts passing through one another). Ok, so I tossed that 3D model and redid it keeping machining issues in mind. Now I ended up with a 3D model that I could machine. The problem with a 3D model that needs to be machined top, left, right, front and rear with undercuts caused by surfaces being at diffent planes is that you need at least a 6 axis mill to get in everywhere (I've ony got a 4 axis machine) Ok, so now I decide to chop the model up into its various surface planes and then to make each surface 1mm think and also make it that the different parts mate together at intersection isocurves. Cool, so now I have all the parts that need to be machined. I got a bright idea to turn each of those parts into a positive mold by splitting the part through its splitline and then seperating the part into 2 half moulds. The problem now is that one needs to take a silicone cast off that mould and then take a silicone cast off the silicone cast (yes I know its confusing) ...this mould of a mould nonsense was rolling aroung in my brain at 1am ths morning on my way to sleep. This moring I wake up and have a brainwave (to directly machine the negative master mould of each mould half. The implication is that I can now directly cast silicone moulds off this to be used to create the 2 silicone mould halves to make the part. A quick 30 minute change to all the drawings and it is all done.

Ok, I know that it is a complicated long winded story but the learning is profound. When I do another model from a plan I would do it in the appropriate scale keeping machining issues in mind and also create 1 mm thick wall with mating surfaces in appropriate planes and at appropriate angles. I will then take those parts and turn them into negative moulds to directly create the silicone mould halves.

The point that I am making is that I would never have gone through this learning process unless I was forced to be efficient as possible. Each step came in its own time and at its own pace. One might say, oh but that's obvious, hmmm...maybe once the entire process is condensed into step 1 and then step 2 as opposed to the entire drawn out learning process.

What is the bottom line: anything and everything in life is an evolving circular process in which the outputs should feed into the inputs so as to improve the next iteration of the process (like a fuzzy logic neural network). Maybe that is why some of us find it hard to let go of something once other people think the product is finished because we always see ways of doing it better. It took me a very long time to learn that one needs to call it version 1 and let it go, then put all the learnings into the next version. That way the product gets out the door and the next product is better.

Where does this leave product vs marketing. Both are processes that should work and evolve hand in hand. There is no point in marketing unless you are able to deliver and no point in producing stock unless you are able to market the product.

...but as usual there is something more important than product and marketing and that is market research - There is no point in producing and marketing something that nobody wants