Marketing is the other half

     Like peanut butter and jelly, marketing goes hand in hand with whatever business you're selling. In today's information age, marketing has been hyper-charged by constant connectivity. Users are on their smartphones all day while being exposed to advertisements. Even if one wants to listen to his favorite podcast, he can't finish the episode without going through embedded advertisements throughout.

You could have one of the best products in the world, an iphone, and it will not sell at all if no one knows about it. Sure, word of mouth is a powerful thing, but how can one buy a product if he is not aware of its existence? Great product helps with the price per unit and conversion, marketing helps with the exposure.

price (great product) x conversion rate (great product and marketing) x impression (views on the product, marketing) = revenue

or simply

product x marketing = revenue

And great marketing is to maximize impression with the same budget. You want both great marketing and great products. As much as marketing is important, one cannot downplay the inherent role a great product plays in marketing.

Take Elon Musks companies for example. He is known for not spending a dollar on his companies for advertising. He just makes great products and they sell because they are great.

The very best sports cars don't do TV advertisements. "Our customers don't spend time watching football on the weekends".

Recently I had a first hand experience with this. I made an MBTI guessing app, and the community loved it so much that everyone was eager to share the product. In 2 weeks the website grew to 10k users, and currently it sits around 19k users. It was like a breath of fresh air in a stale community where nothing new came around for a long time. Adding AI into the mix blew them out the water.

Great product can enhance virality of a product, and it's the job of a great marketer to amplify that to great effect.

Great people throughout history knew the importance of controlling the narrative. Figures such as Napoleon, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk actively sought to own a piece of the news publishing media. 

In conclusion marketing plays a big role in the impact on any endeavour, and one cannot emphasize its important enough.





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