Marketing to the fore

There is an age-old adage that "a good product will sell by itself and there is no need to market that". I have always wondered if this is always valid. I do realize that
this might be a topic that has been beaten to death but I would like to give my spheel of things based on my limited observation of certain markets and tactics used by
different companies at different times and why they did what they did.

I think most of us would agree, that any product good or bad always requires certain amount of marketing, and that certain amount would be heavily reliant on not just the quality of the product(which includes the features)but what kind of market the product is serving, the demographic it is trying to address and what the competition of the product is(or more precisely what the competition is/isn't doing to market their product eg:Pepsi vs Coke)

I have always been amazed by the marketing's ability to make a product tick despite the product having certain technical frailities. iPOD I would say is a cracking example
of how they beautifully employed different marketing strategies to make sure the product reaches the masses. You might argue that it was one of a kind music player - I
agree certain techincal aspects of it is very impressive(it was the first to introduce the touch-wheel using cap sensors). But what makes me analyze this product is the fact that Apple has managed to take technology that has been around for a some time now (ATT Bell Labs first introduced their Mp3 technology way back in 1991) and make it an instant hit by incorporating subtle changes to the player itself. Despite the fact that iTunes has not had the best of reviews people are more than willing overlook this for the "cool" factor it offers. Apple in all its campaigns has made no bones of the fact that this products' target audience is the age group between
15-30. If you notice their ads carefully they always make sure the white heads phones are always prominent (which by the way was another master stroke- until that point all
of the mp3 players came with either black head-phones or color matching the player itself). I can go on and on about how well the marketing team of Apple has done not only to get the initial buzz going with both the consumers and the media alike but also to sustain people's interest at the same after the product release.

If iPOD gained immensely by their marketing strategies it got me thinking on whether there were products which were decent in terms of quality but never made the cut by
their bad marketing campaigns alone. But it was very hard to come up with one(though there have been plenty of goof ups in terms marketing, I doubt on whether bad marketing alone
cut short a product's existence) which kind of means that marketing takes the word to the public but there is no questioning that from thereon its the product's quality that ensures its life or lack of it.

But at the same time one needs to also consider the product and the market you are playing into. Let me illustrate what I mean with the example of strategies used to market movies wherein they market through any available public medium- television, radio ads,hoardings,campaign by the people involved in the movie through interviews and promos and offlate there is also another strategy wherein they pre-release portions of the best song / sequence (though the studios claim these were stolen and released without their knowledge - increasing occurences of the same makes me doubt it) in the movie to arouse extra interest. What the producers have learnt over the years is that even if the movie's content is not great with intelligent campaigning they can ensure a good opening . And if you have sufficient number of prints you can infact get a substantial portion of the investment back in the first couple of weeks of the movie's run.

On the contrary, there are products which do not require much of marketing because over the years the respective products have established themselves to be very reliable in
terms of quality. One product that immediately comes to mind is the "Prestige" pressure cooker. This product has been around for as long as I remember and there are very few ad campaigns that I have seen this product feature in. So in general marketing is required for an initial "sell" to have the potential customers enthused and sometimes to make sure the customers updated on what is new with their product etc.,

So the bottom line is that even the best of products require certain level of marketing for the customers to take notice and from thereon it's the product's quality that takes precedence, but the marketing only takes a back seat then and does not vanish. I realize I have made the statement couple of times in the article :). This is true even for each of our careers where you have constantly invent ways to market yourself to make your employees take notice.

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