April 2019
The CMO Guide Product Marketing 2019
www.regalix.com Introduction
There was a time when a good product was all one needed to gain traction in the marketplace. That’s not the case today. Technology disruptions, reduced customer loyalty, increasing customer demands, oversupply and intense competition, among other things, have transformed the marketplace.
Consider the following statistics: According to Harvard Business School professor and renowned author, Clayton Christensen, more than 30,000 new products are launched each year, and 80 to 90% of them fail for a variety of reasons. Other studies report over 58% of consumers have tried a new product in the past three months that either didn’t exist or that they hadn’t heard of a year ago. Alarmingly, up to 99% of tech startups will fail within 12 months, according to leading UK experts.1
To succeed today, product companies must ensure that thousands of moving parts work together as a cohesive whole. From choosing to solve the right problem to solving it in the right way, businesses have to formulate the perfect combination of user experience, value proposition, technology and marketing to ensure they have a winner on their hands. Moreover, according to a recent Forbes article, 89% of companies today compete primarily on the basis of customer experience – up from just 36% in 2010.2 Companies need more than a well-planned and brilliantly executed product to survive in this volatile market, proving that the famous adage, ‘just because you build it, they will not come,’ holds true even today. This is perhaps why businesses are increasingly relying on product marketing to create differentiation in the marketplace. According to a study done by Regalix, ‘State of Product Marketing 2019’, 83% of organizations invest in product marketing. With a deep understanding of the industry and a deeper understanding of customers and users, Product Marketing Managers (PMMs) are emerging as the custodians of vital opinions, information and data, all of which are integral to businesses as they prepare to step into the future.
The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself.
Peter Drucker
2 The CMO Guide to Product Marketing 2019 The emergence of product marketing as a vital function
Product marketing as a discipline has been around for many years. Yet, experts, as recently as a year ago, were still writing blogs and articles setting the record straight regarding a PMM’s role and how it differs from what product management or regular marketing people do. While PMMs continue to take products to market, the role they play today carries a lot more significance.
According to a 2016 Cintell report on B2B buyers, high-performing companies are 2.3 times more likely to research their buyers’ drivers and motivations.3 The power of ‘knowing’ the customers and the environment in which they operate has given PMMs the strategic advantage that companies need today to build better products, script realistic roadmaps and deliver truly memorable customer experiences. They are most suited to understand the voice of the customer, or ‘customer-ese,’ with the added advantage of being able to translate it for the rest of the company. As the Regalix ‘State of Product Marketing 2019’ report states, “The role of the product marketer hasn’t changed over the years, but the scope of work has.” Traditionally, PMMs were hired with the primary purpose of taking a product to market. Today, PMMs influence the scope and direction of what companies produce, how they build, how they sell and how they support their customers.