I recently read a LinkedIn post advising founders that it would be a mistake to involve a marketer in their company before they have found product-market fit.
I understand the sentiment. We've worked with a number of companies that are struggling due to a lack of product-market fit. And when they expect their marketing department to fix their issues by simply "doing more marketing," it's an untenable situation.
But it's a bigger mistake to think that you can find product-market fit without a marketer.
Companies often fail to recognize that if the product doesn't resonate with the market, no amount of “increased awareness” will make a difference. (They have the misconception that marketing = promotion.)
Product-market fit is a two-way street — there’s a symbiotic relationship between what you offer and the needs of the market. Success is not just about how well your product meets existing demands. It’s also about how those demands shape your product's evolution.
And who better to lead this process than a marketer? Your expertise lies not only in communicating value but in uncovering and adapting to the nuanced desires of the market. The role of a marketer transcends promotion — it's about steering the product development in a direction that resonates deeply with potential customers.
Who Owns the Customer?
In many organizations, the question of who "owns" the customer can lead to siloed thinking. It won't be surprising to hear that I believe marketing should be seen as the primary source of truth when it comes to customer understanding. Limiting marketing's role to just traditional promotion or lead generation overlooks the value marketers bring when they understand what customers genuinely need and desire.
A good marketer spends a lot of time doing the job of a journalist. You're diving deep into the customer's world -- uncovering stories, motivations, and unarticulated needs through interviews, observation, and casual engagement. You're asking probing questions, listening intently, and synthesizing the kind of insights that data analysis alone cannot provide.
With a journalistic approach, you can bring real customer stories to the table, providing a human context to the work. These stories should then inform product development, ensuring that new features or products are not just based on abstract market analysis but are rooted in the actual problems that customers want solved.
Marketers need to be the voice of the customer within their organizations. They are able to articulate not just what customers say they want but also reveal deeper insights into their behaviors, frustrations, and aspirations.
And marketers are uniquely positioned within an organization. Because their incentives are better aligned than sales or product folks to be able to look at the customer's needs without bias, they are able to approach this work with the long-term view necessary to guide innovation within economic realities.
To limit the role of marketing to mere promotion is to overlook the profound impact marketers can have on product-market fit.