A Good Product Sells, Others Needs push

A Good Product Will Sell Itself:Others needs push...

12th August,2011

By Idise Chukutem

As a marketing person myself, I have participated in quite a number of animated discussions about how a worthy product is supposed to sell itself and you should not really waste money on stupid things like advertising or brand promotion because if people need the product you have, they will find you and buy your product anyway.

First time it happened to me was back in my years in aviation marketing: the company I worked for manufactured a new aircraft type that was a good and cost-effective substitute to many existing better-known analogues but lack of promotion left us with virtually no customers. Yet whenever I came up with some creative idea on how we could approach prospective customers better with our information, I was invariably told that the airlines that needed the type of aircraft we had would eventually find us anyway.
As you understand, I used to be the proponent of the idea that you need to invest in marketing properly for your product to get the exposure it needs for people to find the product and at least add it to their comparison lists instead of just going to the bigger names they are already aware of.
But later on, during my years here in internet marketing, I had to change my point of view quite a lot to accommodate another simple truth: there are different kinds of good products and while some good products will actually sell themselves, others will need significant PR and social media help to get into the market they belong to.

Let’s take an obvious example – Skype. I don’t think there are people who will argue that Skype actually is a widely popular service for free computer-to-computer calls and many people buy Skype credits and pay for their subscriptions to make long-distance calls for a fraction of what they cost with traditional operators.
Every time I see some of my friends go to an overseas business trip or leaving to live abroad, I see the same process repeated: they first teach their parents to use Skype and explain what exactly they should do to enjoy unlimited communications with their beloved children even when the children are thousands of miles apart.
But the irony is that recently I have realized that Skype is not even the service that is involved in large-scale advertising or promotion campaigns: you will rarely see an ad for Skype services (and those you will see will likely be an affiliate link with the publisher getting a percentage of every payment you will make to Skype after landing on their website from that publisher’s link or banner). The team does send occasional press releases related to important events about Skype and they do publish announcement posts on their official blog – but this is hardly something you will often see other companies doing to get all the exposure they can: for example, one competing with Skype VoIP startup sends me a new press release every couple of week with some corporate news or interesting surveys they carry out to get some coverage in the blogosphere.
But Skype is actually an example of a very silent company: the team works on the product and quality of service and word-of-mouth delivers the information on the service to everyone who needs a cheap (and sometimes totally free) way to call people in other cities or countries.
What’s more, Skype does not even seem to be engaged in the SEO battle around the hot search queries related to their service: if you do a search on Google for “free long distance calls” or “free phone calls”, you will see Skype nowhere on the first page of search results – not even in the sponsored results section. At the same time those very pages (as well as sponsored links) are full of Skype competitors trying to grab some market share (possibly from Skype as well) and numerous reviews in the blogosphere of various services that can be used to make those calls – obviously featuring Skype as one of the options.
Yet Skype itself keeps it simple and silent and demonstrates how a good product will really sell itself without any significant marketing help. By now Skype is the de-facto standard for free and cheap phone calls where the service is used to the extent that it has already become the largest provider of international phone calls. But the problem is it takes tons of things – a great service being the first one of them – to make such things possible at all.

But unfortunately for all those creative minds that offer excellent new products and services, such examples are not all that frequent and in many cases you will need to work a lot to even get the initial buzz started at all before you will be able to enjoy the results. It is especially true for when you make a totally innovative product that simply has no competition because it is the first of its kind. Of course it rarely happens but sometimes people do launch startups that have not been seen before at all – and these startups take building awareness for the potential market to realize such a service exists and learn to use it.

This is probably the worst situation of all: you do not have any competition yet people in your target audience simple don’t realize they have a need you want to address with your product. So even if your product is totally excellent and probably even revolutionary and game-changing, you will have to work first to help your target audience realize your product is exactly what they need for happiness. But when you get at least some people to use your product, you will already be able to enjoy them sharing information of your excellent product with their friends – and if the product is really worth it, you could face the bright faith of Skype itself.
This is exactly why I now insist that you can not simply launch a great service and expect it to become extremely popular without doing anything to help that popularity: unfortunately people only look for particular services or products when they realize a need for them exists, and this does not happen always to innovative products. For example, I highly doubt anyone realized the need to blog in 140 characters or less when Twitter was launched but with all the buzz around it, the service is now widely popular even though no one but its founders realized the need it satisfies.

So I think a good product can sell itself – but without an initial push it will hardly get enough exposure to arrange for the word-of-mouth marketing to bring the product on top of the market. But while the situation is pretty good for good products – as such products will actually sell themselves even if they may need initial push, for bad product the situation is even worse: no matter how much promotion you arrange for, chances are they will still remain without any user base simply because no product will be used if it’s poor only because it is hyped everywhere

Unfortunately this is exactly what we see so often in the technology blogosphere: a startup is launched surrounded by coverage in all the major industry blogs and sometimes even in the mainstream media, it gets thousands of new users who come to see what the blogosphere is abuzz for – and leave in a day or two because they can’t see any value in this particular product.
This is the worst scenario of marketing and sometimes I have to ask myself how it happens that no one tells those startups their products are not needed at all and they waste thousands upon thousands of dollars on development and PR support for their launch event – but getting to the very same result.
So my opinion is that while there is no universal receipt that will be valid for everyone: should you rely on your product only to sell itself or should you help it sell itself with marketing and promotion efforts, there are some things that are quite obvious: where a bad product will never sell itself, even a good product will still take some help to begin to sell itself. And if it is exceptionally good, chances are it will at least learn to sell itself.