Marketing is probably more important than the product itself

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27265202

by falak-sher • 5 years ago

14 12 5 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

casralad• 5 years ago

Marketing is more important than the product because without good marketing, you'll have no customers.

Logistics and supply chain is more important than marketing because without product to ship, you'll go broke before you can bill your customers.

Server ops is more important than logistics and supply chain because if your servers are always down, no one can buy your product.

It's like saying that the engine of your car is more important than the transmission. You need both.

Apple in the late 90s had the same marketing they always had, and they were dying. Google in the late 90s had no marketing, and a product so good it made all other search engines obsolete overnight.

iamjonjackson2• 5 years ago

Agreed. Both!

codegeek2• 5 years ago

Marketing = Get customers

Product/Service = Sustain Customers.

Both are important but marketing is where you start. You can fix a shitty product with great marketing but if you don't fix your marketing, even a great product will fail.

iamjonjackson2• 5 years ago

I'd say "distribution" is the key term here. Marketing may be a part of that, but not necessarily the only method of distribution.

tofukid2• 5 years ago

Apple doesn’t need to market iPhones. Sriracha sauce doesn’t run ads, they make a good sauce. They didn’t even have a website until 2014. Trader Joe’s doesn’t need to write blog posts to convince people to shop there. Everyone uses Figma because it’s great, so everyone recommends it.

When you use a great product, you tell others. Then they tell someone. And so on. Your product develops a reputation. “The taco stand down the street has killer tacos” or “People like me use products like this.”

If nobody wants to recommend your product to others, if nobody wants to rave about your services, then your product isn’t remarkable. Great products market themselves.

yesenadam• 5 years ago

Thank you. I was trying to think of the best response to the comment containing the line

You can fix a shitty product with great marketing but if you don't fix your marketing, even a great product will fail.

but you said it better than I possibly could.

codegeek2• 5 years ago

"Apple doesn’t need to market iPhones."

I disagree. May be they don't need to do ads for discovery anymore. But don't forget the legendary Steve Jobs Demonstration for Iphone initially and tons of iPhone ads that are on TV. Sure, now most people now know what Iphone is but you always need to market for sustainability. Talk to me when Apple stops doing any ads about iPhones.

tofukid2• 5 years ago

Of course marketing encompasses more than advertising, but there are countless examples of companies that don't do marketing. Less so with major corporations, but more so with small businesses. There are countless restaurants and services in my city that do not market themselves except through customers recommending them to others.

Some major companies off the top of my head that didn't advertise:

- Craigslist

- In-n-out

- Zara

- Sriracha

- Whatsapp

- Snapshat

- Reddit

- YCombinator

- Google (search engine)

aristofun• 5 years ago

Obviously.

How many shitty products are dominating the world, just look around.

And how many awesome startups with great products died.

Product just needs to be “good enough” to not break the market fit of a company.

All the rest depends on marketing/sales.

That’s the brutal truth.

Before you start using Apple as counter example — check how much they spend on marketing.

And how cool they organized iPhone distribution and sales even before iPhone matured to be really good product.

OnlyMateo• 5 years ago

It's about balance. If you dive into real success projects you'll see hand in hand marketing and product improvement especially storytelling based on product development like in Tesla case.

jaabathebutt• 5 years ago

OnePlus managed to pull this with their Hasselblad collaboration this year. They got the audience so hyped up and the product was well...good. But it did not live up to the hype at all.

aronswartz• 5 years ago

Marketing is overrated. Good products market themselves. Fuck marketing and people who working in marketing honestly.

Marketing is probably more important than the product itself

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