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>Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market, and later on, navigating the markets the company operates in.

No. See Wikipedia: Marketing is the methodology of communicating the value of a product or service to customers, for the purpose of selling that product or service.

Marketing is about communicating the value of the product. Regardless of the actual quality of the product. Building a great product is not marketing.

Well, I spoke too quickly about the wikipedia article then. It must have changed, or I've read another page. The page which says that is wrong. Communicating product value is only part of the marketing mix.

Building a great product is most definitely part of marketing. For example there are methods and techniques which faciiliate it and are subject of marketing journals and marketing academia. One of these methods is the "segmentation-targeting-positioning" framework.

I can get you many more citations if you wish, or you can spare me the time, and search for them yourself. Perhaps you will learn something of value in the process.

'Segmentation-targeting-positioning' doesn't support your assertion and you're conflating marketing and product development.

This thinking can occur because often entrants to a competitive marketplace will assess their competition, identify a weakness and deploy a product to meet the need. The development of the product in this scenario is not 'marketing' as you assert.

Product development is dictated by marketing strategy.

How would you build your product if you don't know what the market conditions are? How do you find out what the market conditions are? By segmenting the market by behaviour/need/price sensitivity, then targeting a segment which is underserved (or you can serve better), and finally positioning your product to cater to that particular segment with specific product design, messages and distribution channels.

Marketing doesn't develop the product. It just designs it (writes the specs).

Marketing doesn't write the specs for the product. Product management does. It's okay, man. Marketing is a thing. It's just not all things.

Word.

>Product management does.

Maybe in start-ups or 1-product companies. Even then, this is not a good practice. Your customers will make a choice between you and competitors/substitutes. The product team does not know or understand this process. They don't do choice modeling, they write code.

Marketing and lying about a crappy product does the company no good. People will either pick up on it right away, or leave soon after using/buying it.

Good marketing teams will evaluate your product VS the competition and use the good parts for communicating the message. Amazing teams will also take the bad parts and bring them up to the product teams so they can confirm weak parts and put them in the queue to get looked at.

Marketing a bad product will only last so long.

Not according to the American Marketing Association. Their definition - which is used as the textbook definition of marketing - goes like this:

"Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."

Marketing is _not_ simply about communicating the value of products. Advertising something that doesn't help a customer create or experience value is not marketing.

I think you'd find this article and the comments interesting:

http://avc.com/2011/02/marketing/

Oh my god! It's the same article and the same comments, just different words are used. Being Seth Goddin surely helps in getting the point across though...

The original post doesn't claim they didn't do marketing. In fact, the first sentence in the post is "Short answer: great product, some marketing and a bit of luck.".

The whole quote about "without any marketing is" is:

Pipedrive could have grown to 10,000 paying customers without any marketing: by describing it as "it's a piece of sales software" on an uncrawlable site without any design, without onboarding emails, without press mentions, without a single ad and blog post.

I took that as the author using hyperbole to critique how "enterprise" sales systems work by literally just existing.

Hey, thank you for chiming in. I'm not sure how you got the impression that I insisted we "don't do any marketing." - sorry if I wasn't clear. What I aimed to say was that product was the main reason for getting to 10k, and marketing tactics and strategies I described each contributed further.

I wanted to make a more general point to all the people who misunderstand marketing. Actually, the overwhelming majority of people associate marketing with advertising or design on flyers. The point I wanted to make is geared towards people in startups who misunderstand marketing and thus completely avoid the topic, which more often than not, reflects on their success.

It also leads to inventing terms like "content marketing", "inbound marketing", "growth hacking". Oh, the irony with the last one. A marketing term, to trick people who hate marketing, to do marketing...

I'm sure it pans out great for people like Rand Fishkin, Dharmesh Shah and Sean Ellis. The problem is, the people who fall for these neologisms get disconnected from the much, much larger marketing community. They get inside of an echo chamber. Instead of reading thorough articles, by authors which credentials are checked, claims are investigated and arguments - reviewed by peers, they get moz.com and quicksprout and kissmetrics, unbounce and optimizely. Well, I guess people get what they ask for - something easy, which does its "magic".

My last line in the previous post was a cheap shot and uncalled for. I'm sorry about that.

this is actually great advice. what would you recommend reading?

ISSN: 1573-059X; 0022-2437; 0022-2429; 0732-2399; 2164-3970; 1520-6793.

https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site.

ama.org

Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.

I'm sensing a marketing academic. I agree with some points and the echo chamber is very real

However, while I wish there were more people reading peer reviewed journals and debating the full spectrum of marketing, the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online (we are talking about SaaS here).

Research and empirical work takes time but consumers move quickly, especially online, so by the time reports and data are published it's out of date. The only half decent way to keep up with developments is to buy into some of these "neologisms" or you will be left behind.

> the literature is unfortunately 5 years behind what's actually going on in businesses and online

Did you come down to this conclusion by yourself, or did you read/heard it somewhere? Also, I'm not an academic.

Marketer here.

What exactly is wrong with data and insights from a variety of sources that might include Moz, Optimizely, etc? These are marketing technology companies and have a unique bird's-eye perspective of raw data across numerous companies. Further, people like Rand Fishkin know their shit. You might disagree with it, but I guarantee if you had a conversation with him and voiced your arguments, he'd be able to cite plenty of data to back up his claims and have an honest debate about it.

Marketers who take what they read as gospel concern me, and I fully agree with that. People need to do their due diligence and figure out how things apply to their business. They should also read broader respected industry news sources (ie. searchengineland, searchenginejournal, etc.), and be active in communities of people tackling similar challenges with similar experience to trade notes.

I agree with the other comments though on the fact that building a great product isn't necessarily marketing. Informing great product design through solid market research could come from marketing, but that is very different than physically building a product. The "build it and they will come" fallacy is a dangerous one. Communicating that you have a product is the act of marketing. Even placing it on a website with content is marketing because you may get organic search traffic, or referral traffic if people link to you, etc.

I don't doubt Rand Fishkin as a marketer. I just don't like misleading people via inventing new terms for already known concepts, like "content marketing" for PR. It disconnects his followers from a lot of knowledge and they keep on reinventing the wheel.

Or optimizely's A/B testing, which depending on your definition is anywhere between wildly imprecise and outright fraud. And this is by design, because they know their customers just won't put the effort into learning experimental design, sampling, normalizing, distributions, hypothesis testing and validating. It's just much better to charge clueless people a monthly fee for what is essentially a redirect script with a WYSIWYG editor, while telling them what they are doing is scientifically sound. And off to the echo chamber they go. Changing a button's color improves CTR by 90%. You can read that on pretty much any blog. Moz, ConversionXL, unbounce, kissmetrics, SEJ, any blog/publication which passes for "industry authority". Sorry, I just don't have the time to sift through all of this self-serving bullshit.

Fully agree there is a lot of fluff out there, and some of that is people trying to generate ongoing news or indexable content where there isn't really anything worth putting out.

That said, I'm not sure I agree with your take on the new terms. Sure they are buzzwords to some degree, but I see content marketing as distinct from PR in that it largely focuses on content creation, has considerations for SEO, etc. One could argue that PR has those components as well, but I see the distinction as PR focusing more on outreach to key individuals in the media, handling issues management, etc. Again, some overlap for sure, but I don't see content marketing efforts doing everything PR does or vice versa.

Again, people need to read a variety of sources, and part of the problem is there is no great way to tell whether a source is credible. But I think it is better that people start going down the rabbit hole than wander around completely oblivious.

Since you seem have a high threshold for what you consider value sources of industry info, do you have any recommendations for how others might discover those on their own? I'd be curious what you consider reputable sources.

ISSN: 1573-059X; 0022-2437; 0022-2429; 0732-2399; 2164-3970; 1520-6793.

https://www.informs.org/ (a couple of the journals are published by them); their Analytics magazine is also good, as well as their site.

ama.org

Any book published by Springer, Emeral Insight and Taylor & Francis Group.

for websites - the emarketer.com, meclabs family, econsultancy, conversion-rate-experts.com, distilled, butleranalytics.com, dmnews.com, kaushik.net, analyticsvidhya.com, ppchero.com, internetretailer.com, targetmarketingmag.com, SELand.

I don't like SELand much, but haven't found anything better when it comes to news about search. Do you have any suggestions?

Thanks for sharing your list. I have to say I find it a bit interesting that you knock on Optimizely, Rand Fishkin and co but then reference ppchero, conversion-rate-experts, etc. They all have a range of quality, but I've seen high-quality pieces from both the sources you discounted and the sources you like.

I LOVE the Meclabs properties. MarketingExperiments.com is absolutely fantastic in particular. Definitely a fan of the others you listed as well. Avinash Kaushik is my analytics hero and I often find myself linking to his pieces when trying to educate about attribution or how to look at data.

SearchEngineLand is pretty decent for getting raw industry news, but some of their pieces are definitely skewed based on the biases of the authors. Believe it or not, there is actually some decent discussion that happens on Reddit in /r/ppc and /r/adops as well as every now and then in Quora.

My biggest problem right now is finding time to digest all the info. I used to be able to carve out a decent chunk when that was a large part of my role in the agency world, but now that I'm client-side my days are filled with many other items, so I have to fit it in where I can.

>Marketing is the science of bringing a product to market... Marketing is not a science

How come?

Two things.

First, marketing is not a scientific discipline. Full stop. Calling it a science does real science a disservice, and reeks as we say down south of putting on airs.

Second, you're trying to make marketing encompass every piece of a business, from product idea to design to construction and beyond. It isn't everything. It isn't about designing or creating a product (other than marketing materials or services), even if marketing may help shed insight into the targets' needs. At some point you're going to realize that by attempting to fit everything into the marketing bucket that the term marketing ceases to have meaning.

Voice of reason, thank god. Are we working at P&G here? This is startupland, nothing is scientific in the academic sense, least of all marketing or customer behavior. "Peer reviewed?" Please....

> Are we working at P&G here?

No, teradata.

This article itself reads like a piece of marketing to me.

The aim was to share what has worked for Pipedrive. Of course, I hoped to show myself and Pipedrive in good light in the process - sorry if the balance wasn't right for you there.

Also, "... used by 20 or so companies" is marketing. Sometimes getting to 1 company can be challenging.

Wow, I applaud you for defending marketing on HN. Bravo, brave soul. I wholeheartedly agree as well.

Hate is love;

War is peace;

and everything is marketing.