No amount of marketing can sell a product no one wants
—unknown.
In my second year in the university, my Marketing instructor threw this question to the class — ”Assume you are the marketing manager for a particular product. You have done everything— segmentation, targeting, positioning, promotion, in short everything yet, your product is not selling. What do you do?”
The class gave varied and seemingly smart answers that were wrong nonetheless.
So what is the correct answer? Simple — Look at your product. A bad product cannot sell. Without a good product, no marketing, no matter how brilliant, will work. As Bill Bernbach says “The magic is in the product,” not in the marketer’s genius. Or as he put it another way, “marketing doesn’t create a product advantage. It can only convey it … No matter how skillful you are, you can’t invent a product advantage that doesn’t exist.”
Businesses make real money only on repeat sales. While good marketing can make a prospect hopeful enough to try a product, it can’t make that customer delighted enough to buy it again. Only you and your product can do that.
What this means is that it’s your mission to come up with a product/service so inherently superior that, as soon as it’s effectively explained, demonstrated, or sampled, your prospects have no conclusion to draw except “I want it!”
Create “Wow!” products like this, add great customer service, and something magical happens. Your customers become your auxiliary sales force – a large, unpaid, ever-growing army of raving fans who extol your product to others, causing your market and profits to grow far more effectively than any marketing guru can.
This is where real marketing magic is born – in the product itself.
