Good Product vs. Good Marketing

The ultimate goal of a company is to deliver a product or service to its consumers. Having a good product is a given. Consumers expect your product or service to be good. But having a good product is almost certainly not enough to ensure success. As a general rule, sales and marketing success is a function of how your product or service is perceived by customers. It does not matter what you think about your product or service. It ONLY matters what customers think about it.

 

If you want consumers to actually notice your product, engage with it, buy it and recommend it to their friends, it is no longer enough to allow the quality of the product to speak for itself. You have got to do more than that to get consumers to notice your brand, engage with it and adopt it as part of their persona in today’s frantically overcrowded marketplace

 

It is not enough to have a great product and leave it at that. Even good products need excellent marketing, especially in these competitive times. A mediocre product can succeed with good marketing, but a good product does not really have a chance without some form of marketing to let people know it is available. You must note that having a better product or service than your competitor does not mean that more people will discover it. However, if you work to improve your marketing, you will substantially increase the amount of customers and revenue for the company. The ultimate test: Are customers buying? Having a good product or service combined with bad marketing is the most common scenario for a lot of companies that exist today. Working to improve your marketing will yield the fastest, most dramatic business and sales results for the organization.

 

Even with a fantastic product or service that promises a win/win presentation, one will need to creatively keep the mission and brand in the minds of an increasingly larger audience. Marketing provides you with even more traction and buzz if you have a good product. There are good products that never made it because nobody got to hear about them and there are quite a few great products that would fly off the shelves if people knew they were available.

 

Good marketing wins! No one will know you have a great product if you do not talk about it. Now, once the marketing is right, you will need to rely on the quality of the product to retain customers. However it does not end here because you must continue building the brand if you would like it to remain relevant.

 

On the other hand, no amount of great marketing is going to make up for a lousy product. Consumers will buy this product based on the great marketing campaign, but will soon find out how poor quality it is, and word will get out, diminishing the effectiveness of that stellar marketing.

So a good product is definitely a substitute for success, but good marketing is the important factor that makes you the cherry on top of the cake.