Brad Feld On Guerilla Marketing

I can get behind most of that, except for this bit:

"If you have amazing products, the marketing of those products is trivial".

I don't buy it. This smacks of "if you build it they will come." You still have to get the word out to your customers that you have this amazing product, and/or you still have to get your customers to come looking for you (top of mind awareness, etc). Sure, it's easier to market if your product is awesome, but an awesome product isn't going to market itself (some specific scenarios related to viral marketing aside).

I certainly won't argue against trying to build kick-ass, awesome products (we're doing so at Fogbeam Labs!) but I think it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of marketing strategy and a wide variety of tactical marketing initiatives.

Maybe it's not as simple as "best marketing wins", but we know the best product doesn't always win either.

Consumers are drawn to inferior products (just like they are to junk food and lousy music; and in the personal sphere, to bad lovers / toxic bosses) for a whole lot of bizarre and perverse psychological reasons. But also due to the inexorable power of marketing, in its various guises and generalized forms.

I can see where Brad is getting at, and the lessons are quite valid, for those us attempting to engage ourselves in that minority slice of the global economy concerned with creating services and products or services of actual, intrinsic value -- as opposed to fluff ("experience"), addiction, or outright graft, which are the driving concerns behind the bulk of activity on in modern, post-industrial economies (such as ours) at present.

But if there's one lesson that can be easily drawn from the post-war economic experience -- it's that consumers' decisions are quite often very far from rational or "quality-driven."

They're just as often driven by fear, anxiety, the need to conform. And that's exactly where the magical power of marketing comes in.