Marketing before product launch: why it can't wait

Beyond Promotion: part 2 of 4

New here? Part one sets out a definition of marketing and the four pillars behind it, so start there if you can, it’s short. What you think marketing is will have been shaped by whatever you’ve seen under that name before, good, bad or just very busy, so it helps if we’re working from the same definition. This part puts it to the test with examples drawn from our work and six reasons marketing needs a seat at the table before the big decisions are made.

The call tends to come in one of two flavours. The first is “we’re thinking of building something, what do you reckon?”, which is a joy. The second is “we’ve built it, priced it and ‘just know’ it’s what our marketplace needs or wants, can you market it?”, which comes up often enough to be worth writing about and is less joyful.

By that point most of what decides whether the thing sells has already been decided, often by a very nice person with a spreadsheet and strong convictions. Promotion then gets handed the bill for all of it, which is a bit like asking whoever ices the cake to fix the recipe.

Not every business works this way and not every call goes like this. Plenty get the early decisions right, and they make for much duller stories. The ones below are the ones that didn’t, which is where the lessons are. Names and numbers have been changed to protect the innocent and the occasionally embarrassed.

1. Six of the seven Ps happen before anyone sees any communication

Five client examples show what that looks like in practice, four covering Product, Price, Place and Process, and a fifth showing what happens when Promotion itself skips the research that should sit behind it.

1.1 Getting the product right

A technology product built for a specialist business sector is a good example of Product itself being the problem, long before a campaign got anywhere near it. It was designed to replace some of the paper based processes in that sector and act as a kind of all in one solution for logistics businesses. The specification had been built around some fairly wild assumptions about what buyers actually wanted, a handful of features nobody had asked for, priced for a segment of the market that turned out to be smaller than hoped, and validated more by conviction than by putting it in front of a real buyer.

I visited sites myself and found problem after problem, and the only testing the client had done was with some ‘known associates’. One key feature needed a decent mobile signal on client sites, and some sites simply didn’t have one. One of the headline features solved a problem the sector didn’t actually have, and the paper version it replaced was quicker. Getting work into the system took heavy manual entry on top of that. It’s a hard sell when the thing you’re replacing is a clipboard that works.

We were brought in late, but not too late. No amount of promotion fixes a product built on guesswork, it just gets the wrong pitch in front of people faster. What it needed instead was the assumptions tested against actual buyers, the feedback fed back into the specification, and the product itself reshaped before a penny of spend went near a launch.

It’s a bit like selling a torch that only works where there’s already a plug socket.

At a technology company we worked with on a similar problem, once the specification was rebuilt around verified buyer needs rather than assumption, trial win rate against comparable products rose from around 12% to nearly 35% within two quarters.

1.2 Getting the price message right

We had a client whose entire pitch, for years, rested on being the cheapest credible option in its category. That’s an easy story to tell while it’s true, but as competitors closed the price gap the same pitch started converting less well every quarter.

The search and enquiry data flagged the shift before the sales figures did. Interest was moving away from cost and toward outcomes and guarantees.

So the proposition changed. Price stayed on the page as a practical detail rather than the headline. Few people in the sector were ever seduced by a headline that just says “cheap”, and the case for choosing the business was rebuilt around what a customer actually got at the end of it. That’s Product and Positioning work. It happened months before a single ad was rewritten.

For a management consultancy that went through the same repositioning, enquiry-to-quote conversion moved from roughly 8% to 19% over the two quarters that followed, on the same traffic.

1.3 Getting distribution right

An IoT product tells a similar story about Place. It had taken roughly eighteen months and a six figure R&D bill to develop, and the growth the business needed to make that spend pay back depended on markets well beyond the UK, the domestic market alone was never going to get anywhere near breakeven at a sensible pace.

Advertising into a market with nobody there to sell into it is like printing menus for a restaurant with no doors, beautifully designed, read by absolutely no one who can actually get in.

What actually moved the breakeven date forward was building a distributor network across the export markets that mattered, agreements, onboarding, training distributors to sell and support the product properly, the same groundwork we’ve written about in developing a go-to-market strategy for an IoT solution. That’s Place, not Promotion, considerably slower and far less glamorous than booking media, but it’s what the numbers actually needed.

For the IoT manufacturer in question, once distribution partners were in place across the first few export markets, breakeven moved forward by more than a year, without a single extra pound spent on advertising.

1.4 Getting the activation process right

A technology company’s device activation process is a good example of Process turning from a liability into an advantage. Customer feedback kept circling the same complaint, activation was slow, fiddly and needed an installer to call back in for support more often than it should. Nobody had treated it as a marketing problem because it happened after the sale, but it was quietly costing referrals and slowing the growth the business was chasing.

A fiddly activation process is flat-pack furniture with the instructions in the wrong language, everything needed is technically in the box, the customer just has to ring a stranger to find out how.

Once the research made the pattern impossible to ignore, the activation process itself got rebuilt, fewer steps, less room for error, no call-out needed for the ordinary case. What had been a source of complaints became one of the things installers actively recommended the product for.

Once the reworked activation process rolled out at that device manufacturer, support call-outs for new installations dropped by over half, and installer referrals rose sharply within the first two quarters.

1.5 Getting the search intent right

This last one is different from the first four. Search intent belongs to Promotion, because SEO is Promotion by any definition, and this is what happens when Promotion goes ahead without the research that should have sat behind it, proof that even the one job everyone remembers still needs the unglamorous work done first.

When we picked up one client’s SEO, an article already live on their site was pulling in plenty of impressions in Google and almost no clicks.

Digging into why, the exact phrase it was ranking for, an acronym specific to that client’s sector, meant something entirely different in medicine, and Google was serving the article to a completely unrelated and thoroughly confused audience. Nobody had checked what the term actually meant to the people typing it before it went live.

No amount of extra promotion fixes that after the fact. The research has to happen before the writing rather than after, which is exactly the audit we ran, and the clicks followed once the targeting did.

For a legal firm we worked with in a similar position, click-through on the article rose from under 1% to around 6% within six weeks of retargeting the content at the right audience, while impressions barely moved.

1.6 What the five examples have in common

Four of those five came down to Product, Price, Place and Process working badly, or in one case working badly enough to become a strength once it was fixed. In more than one of these engagements the honest recommendation was to cut advertising and events spend substantially rather than increase it, because promotion wasn’t the lever that needed pulling. Every one of them would have looked like a promotion problem to someone who only checks whether the content calendar is full.

2. Six checks before the big decisions are made

Section 1 showed what the work looks like once someone has done it. This section is about what it costs when it isn’t done early enough. Sometimes marketing gets called in after the horse has bolted, once product, price, name and channel are already decided. Each of the six points below ends with a check you can run on your own business, and the last one shows what happens when the honest advice wasn’t to market harder at all.

The evidence turns up wherever you look. McKinsey, working with executives at over a hundred of the largest global companies, links involving marketing in strategic planning to a 1.4 times higher top line. A meta-analysis of 114 studies found a clear positive link between a business being market oriented and its performance, including how well its new products do. Robert Cooper’s research on new product success points to faulty customer and market information as the biggest single cause of failure. None of it is proof, but it all points the same way.

2.1 It matters who fills that seat

None of this works if the wrong kind of marketer is given the seat. “Marketer” covers people with very different shapes of expertise, generalists with broad but shallow knowledge, specialists with deep knowledge in one narrow area, T-shaped people with broad knowledge and real depth in one of those areas, and M-shaped people with real depth across several. Which is right depends entirely on the organisation, its size, its stage, the budget and resource it realistically has and what actually needs solving first, there is no universally correct answer.

A specialist whose depth is communications only, a brilliant copywriter or a sharp paid media operator, is seldom the right person to hold this particular seat. They can execute superbly once the direction is set, but this seat exists for the six Ps that happen before communications, and that calls for someone with genuine breadth, not more depth in the one job most businesses already over-value.

It’s the same mismatch as putting your best joiner in charge of designing the house. Brilliant with a chisel once the plans exist, but the plans themselves need someone who can see the whole building before a single wall goes up.

The biggest offender here is the designer who’s quietly become “the marketing person” by default, usually for having been the only one in the building with strong opinions about fonts! Nothing against designers, a good one is worth their weight in gold once the strategy actually exists, but a beautifully art-directed communication has never once told a business who its customers are, what they’ll pay, or why they should choose it over the competitor next door.

None of that is really the designer’s fault. It’s the business owner who quietly assumes marketing means “make it look nice”, hires accordingly and spends the next eighteen months wondering why looking nice hasn’t moved a single number that matters.

We go into the practical difference between a generalist, a specialist, a T-shaped and an M-shaped hire, and which tends to suit which kind of business, in this article on why founders sabotage their own marketing.

Getting the seven Ps right depends on someone with the breadth to see all seven. Getting any one of them right in detail is usually somebody else’s job entirely.

A quick nod to all seven

Product, Price, Place, Promotion, People, Process and Physical evidence, the full seven Ps set out in part one. All seven show up on most projects we run, the five examples in section 1 are simply the some stories we had to tell, not a scorecard of which ones matter most.

The check: model the best case before you spend on promotion, and if the honest numbers say don’t market it, saying so is still marketing doing its job.

2.2 Test demand before you build

We’ve seen this pattern often enough, particularly in tech, that it stopped surprising us a while ago. A business spends six or seven figures building a product on the strength of “build it and they’ll come”, gets it built, then gets in touch to “market this” once it’s obvious nobody is coming. At that point we’re less a marketing consultancy and more a search party.

The product, the price and the market fit have never been properly tested, and no campaign, however well built, retrofits research that should have happened before a line of code was written. The old saying about closing the stable door after the horse has bolted assumes somebody checked the horse over before shutting it in. Most of the time here, nobody checked there was a horse worth stabling in the first place, they just built the stable and hoped.

The fix is getting marketing into the room on day zero, before a line of code or a brick is laid, while research can still change the decision rather than just narrate it afterwards.

For one manufacturer we saw go through this, by the time we were called in, roughly £250,000 had already been spent on development against a conversion rate under 0.5%.

It’s not just us. A CB Insights analysis of 101 failed startups found that no market need was the most common reason for failure, cited in 42% of cases and ranking ahead of running out of cash.

There are proven methods for exactly this, from structured buyer interviews to pilot offers, and they tell you a great deal more than a friendly chat with a mate.

The check: validate the product and the price with real buyers before a line of code or a brick is laid, not once it’s built and nobody’s coming.

2.3 Price in both directions

Price sometimes gets decided in a spreadsheet, long before marketing is ever asked what the market thinks something is worth. Somebody works out cost of goods, adds a margin that satisfies the board, and calls the result the price. Whether a customer agrees is treated as marketing’s problem to solve afterwards, with clever messaging, rather than a question that should have shaped the number in the first place.

A price built purely from a spreadsheet has excellent arithmetic and absolutely no opinion from a single customer.

Test it properly and the right number is just as likely to be lower as it is higher. Most businesses only check in one direction.

Our own work on client pricing bears that out. Just as many clients have needed the evidence to lower a price that had been pitched on ambition rather than what the market would actually bear, as have needed the confidence to raise one that had been left too low out of nerves.

The stakes are high. Marn and Rosiello’s Harvard Business Review analysis of the average economics of 2,463 companies, published back in 1992, found that a 1% price improvement, with no loss of volume, lifted operating profit by about 11%, against about 3% for a 1% gain in volume. The same arithmetic works in reverse, which is why a price set out of nerves is so expensive.

Price is also only half the picture. How a client’s customers actually budget matters just as much, whether a purchase competes against capital budget or operating budget changes who signs it off and how quickly, “doing nothing” is a real competitor and deserves to be priced against directly, and the right finance or leasing option can turn a purchase that stalls at the price line into one that clears it.

Pricing research has plenty of tried and tested techniques, from willingness to pay studies to controlled price tests, and they take more than a spreadsheet and a hopeful margin.

The check: test whether the market would pay less as readily as whether it would pay more, and check how your buyers actually budget.

2.4 Test your positioning, name included

Positioning is where a product ends up in a customer’s head. The name is one of the things that puts it there, alongside price, packaging, who sells it and whatever competitors have already claimed.

Andersen Consulting had to prove this from a standing start. A legal separation from Arthur Andersen in 2000 forced it to give up its name entirely and become Accenture, a coined word from an internal naming contest that drew more than 5,000 suggestions. Candidates were screened for trademark and language problems, and one reportedly meant “dreadful” in Greek. Even the winner got a rough reception, with one employee saying it sounded like a dental appliance. The business then spent an estimated $175 million on a global campaign, running across 48 countries, to give the new name a meaning before a competitor or a lazy assumption filled it first. It worked, but only because the positioning work was funded and taken as seriously as the name change itself.

Not every business has $175 million to build a meaning from nothing. Every business has the option of doing the same thing on a smaller, cheaper scale, and we’ve done exactly that for clients numerous times.

Decisions about how something will be perceived, starting with the name, often get made by committee, months before marketing is in the room, then get defended afterwards rather than tested beforehand. A name that clashes with an existing trademark, means something unfortunate in a target market, or simply says nothing to the audience it needs to persuade, is far more expensive to discover once it’s on the signage, the packaging and eighteen months of paid search.

Rebranding means redoing every piece of collateral, every redirect and every sales call that opens with explaining why the name changed. Most of that is avoidable with a few weeks of research before the name is chosen, not after.

Perception can be tested too, through audience research and trademark and language checks, and knowing which results to trust comes mostly from having done it before.

The check: research how the audience it needs to persuade will perceive it, name included, before it’s on the signage and eighteen months of paid search.

2.5 Match the route to market to the buyer

We have found several instances where distribution decisions, direct sales, retail, a marketplace, a partner network, that got made on margin and control rather than where the buyer actually goes looking. A product built for a direct sales motion when the market buys through distributors, or listed on a marketplace when the real decision makers expect a relationship led sale, ends up fighting its own route to market before a single advert runs.

The best product in the wrong channel still looks, to the buyer, like no product at all.

The same question applies if we identify opportunities to grow beyond a client’s home market. Do buyers there purchase direct, through a local distributor, via an agent or through a marketplace, who owns the relationship, who handles support and returns, and what margin is left once each of them has been paid?

The route that works at home rarely survives the flight. Taking an existing proposition into a new industry raises the same question from another angle. The product may be identical, but the buyers, the gatekeepers and the way they buy can be entirely different, so the route has to be rebuilt around them rather than photocopied from the last one.

Mapping how buyers really find and buy is a skill in itself, and it comes mostly from experience, however capable Rita in sales is between calls.

The check: choose how you sell based on where the buyer actually goes looking, not on margin and control alone.

2.6 Sometimes the honest answer is “don't”

Sometimes the honest answer to “can you market this?” is “don’t.” We were once asked to market a retail outlet, did the groundwork properly rather than just picking channels, and came back with feedback the client didn’t especially want to hear about footfall, location and the maths behind the offer.

To their credit, they acted on it. They closed the shop.

On paper, an engagement that ends with the shop closing looks like a marketing failure, and an agency less fussed about honesty would happily have kept the retainer ticking over. Looked at properly, the alternative was spending real money promoting something the numbers said was never going to work, and closing it was cheaper and kinder than propping it up for another year. It’s not the sort of case study that goes on the homepage, but it’s an honest one, and honesty is underrated in this industry.

Modelled out for that retailer, staying open another year would likely led to losses in the region of £190,000 to £230,000 against best-case takings. Closing early meant that money never left the business, and it went into marketing the same business online and developing a focused, tailored product line in specific verticals.

Telling a business not to market something takes the commercial modelling to back it up, and the experience to say it when nobody wants to hear it.

The check: if the honest numbers say don’t market it, saying so is still marketing doing its job.