Product Marketing Quotes & Sayings

Fact is, the work place to a great extent is "where we live." We need star accountants. Boffo saleswomen. Over-the-top creatives in marketing and new product development. And so on. But, since we're effectively talking about "where we live," good sense and good business and "good" engagement throughout the "supply chain," from vendor's vendor to customer's customer, we would benefit mightily-including on the P & L-if we insisted (!) on: "Pleasant." "Caring." "Engaged." — Tom Peters

The best ads are about the customer and how the product will change his life. — Roy H. Williams

The Free People brand plans to drive growth on three different fronts: product expansion, geographic expansion and improved marketing. — Richard Hayne

Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value. — Philip Kotler

IDEO's Tom Kelley briefly mentions the practice of searching the fringes of consumer behavior in his book The Art of Innovation: Just as we often can't predict a product's success, companies can't always divine what feature or use will catch the public's imagination. For that reason, companies need to be in touch with what "quirky" uses consumers have thought up for their products, and be ready to restructure their marketing accordingly. — Heather Lefevre

The guerrilla is obsessed with benefits. Whenever offering a product or service, she focuses on how it will benefit the consumer and builds everything - the product, the delivery, the marketing - around that benefit. — Jay Conrad Levinson

Setting customer expectations at a level that is aligned with consistently deliverable levels of customer service requires that your whole staff, from product development to marketing, works in harmony with your brand image. — Richard Branson

Great marketing cannot sell a pedestrian product very well. — John Sculley

Brainstorm your big idea(s). (2 hrs) Identify your product, customer, competition, and sales/marketing strategy. (2 hrs) Identify your plan for operations, management, capitalization, and finances. (4 hrs) Create a life plan. (4 hrs) Validate your business idea. (8 hrs) Type up your finished business plan. (4 hrs) Execute and follow through on your plan. — Steven Fies

I was a VP of marketing, I was regional sales manager in fashion, and marketing director in communications and product development. I was always a corporate Fortune 500 girl. — Patti Stanger

It is time to leave traditional marketing concepts which focus on the product and marketing experts should focus on customers' experiences about the product.Today, since traditional marketing concepts are insufficient and firms that use the experiential marketing are getting successful as they appeal customers' feeling and sense. Firms owners should have direct relationship with the customers, so customers can reach the firm and the product when wants to get experience. — Anonymous

If your marketing is not delivering consumers to the cash register with their wallets in their hands to buy your product, don't do it. — Sergio Zyman

Marketing and press kicks up dust. It gets in your eye, and then you're not focusing on the product. — Jan Koum

I left Google after four years of working on Google Maps, search, and Google TV as a product marketing manager. I knew I wanted to do something on my own. — Brit Morin

These devices only became very popular after all of this technology was hidden behind a red button that did it all — Mark Butje

These are the bozos. They are graspers and self-promoters, shameless resume padders, people who describe themselves as "product marketing professionals," "growth hackers," "creative rockstar interns," and "public speakers. — Dan Lyons

Marketing is what you do when your product is no good. — Edwin H. Land

Aesthetic isn't simply about good design for good design's sake. — Noah Kerner

With growth hacking, we begin by testing until we can be confident we have a product worth marketing. Only then do we chase the big bang that kick-starts our growth engine. — Ryan Holiday

If your author platform is not well built, you may lose readers to an inferior product that was simply easier to find because its platform was superior to yours. — Carole Jelen

We weren't trying to strike it rich with Firefox. It's open source and it's free. We weren't trying to take over the world; we had kind of modest goals, and it was OK if it failed. We were a lot freer to make risky decisions. If you can afford to do things that way, it's just so much better. You're not thinking about venture capitalists or marketing or sales. Just product and users, all day every day. — Blake Ross

When I die and go to hell, the devil is going to make me the marketing director for a cola company. I'll be in charge of trying to sell a product that no one needs, is identical to its competition, and can't be sold on its merits. I'd be competing head-on in the cola wars, on price, distribution, advertising, and promotion, which would indeed be hell for me. Remember, I'm the kid who couldn't play competitive games. I'd much rather design and sell products so good and unique that they have no competition. — Yvon Chouinard

The true mark of a leader is the willingness to stick with a bold course of action - an unconventional business strategy, a unique product-development roadmap, a controversial marketing campaign - even as the rest of the world wonders why you're not marching in step with the status quo. — Bill Taylor

At the end of the day, if you have a great product and service paired with the wrong pricing strategy / business model, you don't have a business. — Richie Norton

In the Java world, security is not viewed as an add-on a feature. It is a pervasive way of thinking. Those who forget to think in a secure mindset end up in trouble. But just because the facilities are there doesn't mean that security is assured automatically. A set of standard practices has evolved over the years. The Secure Coding Standard for Java is a compendium of these practices. These are not theoretical research papers or product marketing blurbs. This is all serious, mission-critical, battle-tested, enterprise-scale stuff. — James Gosling

In an age when mass pleasures like television are becoming more feeble and homogeneous, the very act of discrimination becomes a form of protest. At a time when mass marketing of food produces a product so disgusting that it has to be wrapped in distracting gimmicks to be sold, the mere fact of paying attention to what you eat and drink and telling the truth about taste is a revolutionary act. — Lynn Hoffman

Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you. — Seth Godin

To truly launch a great product, you need partners. Channel and marketing partners share in your success and share in the costs of reaching your target audience. — Jay Samit

You don't sell the product, you sell the philosophy. When you sell a product, you have customers, when you sell a philosophy, you have believers. — Soumeet Lanka

What is happening on the inside, is reflected on the outside. If you lack the confidence, you very well may feel pushy in selling your product or service. If you lack a clear plan on exactly how to grow your business, you're going to play it safe rather than do what it takes. If you feel desperate, your prospect no doubt will feel your push. If you're unclear about your exact target market, then implementing focused marketing will be nearly impossible because you don't know where your target market hangs out, their preferences, and even what and where they buy. The more you nurture your inner entrepreneur, the more it affects the outcomes of your business. — Lisa A. Mininni

I have come to believe that politicians are in the business of 'marketing' their product to the public, by exaggerating threats and over-selling government solutions. — Arnold Kling

As new mainstream customers are acquired and new markets are conquered, the product becomes part of the public face of the company, with important implications for PR, marketing, sales, and business development. In most cases, the product will attract competitors: copycats, fast followers, and imitators of all stripes. — Eric Ries

Products can introduce more complexity over time, but as far as launching and introducing a new product into the market, it's a marketing problem. You have to explain everything you do, and people have to understand it, within seconds. — Kevin Systrom

Nike is a marketing-oriented company, and the product is our most important marketing tool — Phil Knight

The key element of success is a product that matches all of what you've done in your message and your marketing, and all the emotion that has to be transmitted to the consumer through the product. — Ricardo Guadalupe

It is not wrong to think that the traditional buying of a product has been replaced with an unwritten contract of shared values between a business and its customers. — David Amerland

Marketing is the act of inventing the product. The effort of designing it. The craft of producing it. The art of pricing it. The technique of selling it. — Seth Godin

I'm looking for best practices constantly. Apple has beautiful design, beautiful product, incredibly functional. But mostly it's about picking product, getting behind it, marketing it and introducing it to a customer. What they've done just inspires me. — Millard Drexler

The acceleration of the marketing process, the concentrating of manufacturing, greater diversification, increased international competition, have in turn speeded up product improvements, product innovations and new product introductions. The stakes are high, the failures costly. — Tom Sutton

Here's how Apple does marketing in a nutshell: Make a great product, then let people know about it. That's it. Neither aspect of that is easy, but the important thing is it has to happen in that order. It all starts with a great product. — John Gruber

For those of you unfamiliar with the term "growth hacking," growth hacking focuses exclusively on strategies and tactics (typically in digital marketing) that help grow a business or product. The concept was first coined by Sean Ellis of Dropbox fame back in 2010 in a blog post. It has since changed the face of startup marketing, with Techcrunch guest writer Aaron Ginn explaining that a growth hacker has a "mindset of data, creativity, and curiosity. — Monica Leonelle

I always point people to the article '1,000 True Fans' by Kevin Kelly. If you choose your thousand ideal customers or readers properly and find the single author blog that targets that audience, you never have to do any more marketing. You're done. That is a lesson that very few product developers and marketers have learned, and it's unfortunate. — Tim Ferriss

People in business are uniquely unqualified to see their own companies and product objectively. Too much product knowledge causes them to instinctively answer questions no one is asking. — Roy H. Williams

Marketing begins before the product is launched. — Seth Godin

Feedback doesn't tell you about yourself. It tells you about the person giving the feedback. In other words, if someone says your work is gorgeous, that just tells you about *their* taste. If you put out a new product and it doesn't sell at all, that tells you something about what your audience does and doesn't want. When we look at praise and criticism as information about the people giving it, we tend to get really curious about the feedback, rather than dejected or defensive. — Tara Mohr

All you need is the best product in the world, the most efficient production in the world and global marketing. — Akio Morita

Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about. And it does not, as marketing invariable does, view the entire business process as consisting of a tightly integrated effort to discover, create, arouse and satisfy customer needs. — Theodore Levitt

Your marketing must focus on your customer's concerns, problems, anxieties, hopes, frustrations and how your product will bring more/less of each. Identify marketing channels (ways of reaching customers) most likely to convert strangers into customers. — Rob Burns

Anyone with a great product to sell should never criticize competing products. Your product should sell on its own merit. Consumers want the best of the best, not the best of a bad situation. — Zack W. Van

You see yourself as a good product that sits on a shelf and sells well, and people make a lot of money out of you. — Princess Diana

With the explosion of technology over the last 15+ years, we are in the process of a complete paradigm shift in regards to how we communicate in our marketing, public relations and advertising. Social Media has forever changed the way businesses and customers communicate and the beauty of it is that, through your channels, you can reach your audience directly and at lightning speed. Social Media has also changed the way customers make their buying decisions. Pinterest, Google+, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, have made it easy to find and connect with others who share similar interests, to read product reviews and to connect with potential clients. Within these networks there is an amazing and wide open space for your unique voice to be heard. As the web interacts with us in more personal ways and with greater portability, there is no time better than the present to engage with and rally your community. — Kytka Hilmar-Jezek

If your product is shaving cream, you can use the headline, "The five things you'd better know about shaving and how many different ways it affects your body." Plus, you can include tips on how to shave, the best ways to shave, and what every kid should know when it's time to shave. Cover topics such as the structure of various shaving creams and the impact that shaving has on your skin. You could even give the history of shaving. When did it start? How did it start? Who started it? Get this: if you offer all this advice and plug that Web site every where you're already promoting your product, the site becomes an information source that folks are going to send other folks to in order to get this information. So information-based marketing accelerates your reach and increases word-of-mouth — Chet Holmes

Ninety percent of the success of any product or service is its promotion and marketing. — Mark Victor Hansen

I did not sell Amway, but I sold Shaklee, which was an Amway-type product sold through multi-level marketing. — Andy Kindler

In my first start-up, I had an initial advertising budget of $5 per day total. That would buy us 100 clicks per day. At $5 per day, marketing people scoffed and said that is too small to matter. But if you think about it, to an engineer, 100 real humans everyday giving your product a try means you can really start improving. — Eric Ries

So it comes down to scarcity, one product or service having qualities you won't find everywhere or ideally, anywhere. It's the job of every brand to seek that out as their standard, their stamp. — David Brier

There are three creativities: creativity in technology, in product planning, and in marketing. To have any one of these without the others is self defeating in business. — Akio Morita

Testers for 7-Up consistently found consumers would report more lemon flavor in their product if they added 15% more yellow coloring TO THE PACKAGE. — Malcolm Gladwell

No growth hack, brilliant marketing idea, or sales team can save you long term if you don't have a sufficiently good product. — Sam Altman

One good product is better than many fake goods. — Lailah Gifty Akita

You are your greatest product and behind every book lies an author who wrote it. — Geraldine Solon

Because nothing sells in the modern Christian marketplace like the notion that Christians are beset on all sides by powerful forces desperately in need of a good disemboweling, it was inevitable that religious marketing would flow into the country's politics. And religion has been sold there solely as a product. — Charles P. Pierce

There's nothing remotely interesting to me about marketing music as a product. — Mark Edwards

Remarkable marketing is the art of building things worth noticing right into your product or service. Not slapping on marketing as a last-minute add-on, but understanding that if your offering itself isn't remarkable, it's invisible. — Seth

If you don't believe in your product, or if you're not consistent and regular in the way you promote it, the odds of succeeding go way down. The primary function of the marketing plan is to ensure that you have the resources and the wherewithal to do what it takes to make your product work. — Jay Conrad Levinson

If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea, it's this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.
Social change, education, new-product launches, religious movements ... it doesn't matter, the story is the same. Movements are at the heart of change and growth. A movement - an idea that spreads with passion through a community and leads to change - is far more powerful than any advertisement ever could be.
As you consider what to do next, you're faced with a difficult choice. It's difficult because it represents giving up something you may be quite comfortable with, and it's difficult because it requires an all-or-nothing commitment. — Seth Godin

In practice, ship and iterate means that marketing programs and PR pushes should be minimal at launch. If you are in the restaurant business, you call this a soft opening. When you push the babies out of the nest, don't give them a jetpack or even a parachute - let them fly on their own. (Note: This is a metaphor.) Invest only when they get some lift. Google's Chrome is a great example of this - it launched in 2008 with minimal fanfare and practically no marketing budget and gained terrific momentum on its own, based solely on its excellence. Later, around the time the browser pushed past seventy million users, the team decided to pour fuel on the fire and approved a marketing push (and even a TV advertising campaign). But not until the product had proven itself a winner did it get fed. — Eric Schmidt

I don't think Steve Jobs nauseated people when talking about how great Apple stuff was. The reason why he didn't nauseate people is because it was true. The start of all great marketing is to have a great product. — Guy Kawasaki

Embrace iteration as the road to improvement, but don't let that lull you into rolling out poorly-thought-out crap. — Kate O'Neill

We're obviously going to spend a lot in marketing because we think the product sells itself. — Jim Allchin

Like Free People, the Urban brand is planning to grow by expanding product assortments, expanding the brand reach and by improved marketing. — Richard Hayne

There's no "get rich quick." There's no "overnight success."

However, this doesn't mean that when you decide to start a business that you're just starting. You could start making new money tomorrow.

I was fishing with my son and taught him that you can't catch a fish unless your line is in the water. A truth my dad once taught me.
You may have spent years learning a skill or creating a product or service that you just simply haven't thought to monetize. Like leaving a fishing pole on the ground along side the river, but not having your line in the water yet.

All you need to create a new stream of income is to make something consumable and offer it at a price that someone will pay.

If you're not making offers, you're not making money.

Get your line in the water! — Richie Norton

Jobs described Mike Markkula's maxim that a good company must "impute"- it must convey its values and importance in everything it does, from packaging to marketing. Johnson loved it. It definitely applied to a company's stores. " The store will become the most powerful physical expression of the brand," he predicted. He said that when he was young he had gone to the wood-paneled, art-filled mansion-like store that Ralph Lauren had created at Seventy-second and Madison in Manhattan. " Whenever I buy a polo shirt, I think of that mansion, which was a physical expression of Ralph's ideals," Johnson said. " Mickey Drexler did that with the Gap. You couldn't think of a Gap product without thinking of the Great Gap store with the clean space and wood floors and white walls and folded merchandise. — Walter Isaacson

It is not in vain that the strategic criterion of placing only short runs on the market prevails in order simultaneously to create a feeling of scarcity and avoid an appearance of uniformity, both of which encourage consumer demand. This is such a powerful criterion that it is not uncommon to discontinue production of a much-sought-after product, sometimes to the relative desperation of the shop staff, who were sure they could sell it. — Enrique Badia

Don't obsess over having the 'latest' version of a product. For there was a time that the previous version was the latest. — Mokokoma Mokhonoana

The Apple Marketing Philosophy" that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: "We will truly understand their needs better than any other company." The second was focus: "In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities." The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. "People DO judge a book by its cover," he wrote. "We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities. — Walter Isaacson

Not only because the product wasn't a great product, but remember it took us five or six years to ship it. Then we had to sort of fix it. That was what I might call Windows 7. — Steve Ballmer

Often, the disconnect between the marketing hype around a new product and what the product actually does is astounding. — Mitch Kapor

Force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do. — Keith Rabois

Too many companies believe that all they must do is provide a 'neat' technology or some 'cool' product or, sometimes, just good, solid engineering. Nope. All of those are desirable (and solid engineering is a must), but there is much more to a successful product than that: understanding how the product is to be used, design, engineering, positioning, marketing, branding-all matter. It requires designing the Total User Experience. — Donald A. Norman

Is it weird that when I see a cool t shirt or pick up a toothbrush or see a new car I don't think about the product itself? I think about the thousands of people and dollars to make it.

I think about how the retailer that took the risk to buy and resell it. Then I work backwards to the store costs, the distributer who got it there, the shipping company that brought it over from China, the factory workers that made it, the people that sourced the materials and the people that harvested the raw materials, and on and on..
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The global economy is amazing. Your $20 t-shirt is a freaking miracle. — Richie Norton

A growth hacker doesn't see marketing as something one does but rather as something one builds into the product itself. — Ryan Holiday

You can build the most important companies in history with a very simple to describe concept. You can market products in less than 50 characters. There is no reason why you can't build your company the same way. So force yourself to simplify every initiative, every product, every marketing, everything you do. Basically take out that red and start eliminating stuff. — Keith Rabois

...a long-term reputation is only at risk when companies engage in vocal launch activities such as PR and building hype. When a product fails to live up to those pronouncements, real long-term damage can happen to a corporate brand. But startups have the advantage of being obscure, having a pathetically small number of customers and not having much exposure. Rather than lamenting them, use these advantages to experiment under the radar and then do a public marketing launch once the product has proved itself with real customers. — Eric Ries

In marketing terms, a commodity is an undifferentiated product that is just like its competitors. It isn't usually very innovative, and offers a similar set of features and price point compared to competitive products. In other words, its defining characteristic is its "sameness" compared to other similar products. When a product becomes a commodity, the price that it commands in the marketplace tends to erode. People aren't willing to pay extra for your product. They consider it and those of your competitors to be interchangeable, so no one company has an edge in sales. — Chuck Frey

The hard work and big money you used to spend on frequent purchases of print and TV advertising now move to repeated engineering expenses and product failures. If anything, marketing is more time-consuming and expensive than it used to be. You're just spending the money earlier in the process (and repeating the process more often). This is worth highlighting: The Purple Cow is not a cheap shortcut. It is, however, your best (perhaps only) strategy for growth. — Seth Godin

The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. — Jeff Bezos

Since I'm a mother and a wife, I have to have passion or the frustration would win out. But I love managing people. The product is second to managing the people. And marketing to consumers is so challenging because it is evolving constantly. — Andrea Jung

Brand and product don't compete. Brand is product, and everything else conforming to the unique story that consumers create when they think of you. — Laura Busche

My grandma used to make syrup for us because we couldn't afford it and I just played around with her recipe. I made strawberry syrup and that didn't really work out but I made strawberry-vanilla and that sold. Then I just went out and took marketing classes, went to seminars, learned about marketing a product and striking deals. It ended up taking orders of $1.5 million. — Farrah Gray

Fifty years later, in the 1920s, the American DuPont Company independently set up a similar unit and called it a Developmental Department. This department gathers innovative ideas from all over the company, studies them, thinks them through, analyses them. Then it proposes to top management which ones should be tackled as major innovative projects. From the beginning, it brings to bear on the innovation all the resources needed: research, development, manufacturing, marketing, finance, and so on. It is in charge until the new product or service has been on the market for a few years. — Peter F. Drucker

For one thing, there's an essential human factor in every business endeavor. It doesn't matter if you have a perfect product, production plan and marketing pitch; you'll still need the right people to lead and implement those plans. — Bill Gates

Over the past 60 years, marketing has moved from being product-centric (Marketing 1.0) to being consumer-centric (Marketing 2.0). Today we see marketing as transforming once again in response to the new dynamics in the environment. We see companies expanding their focus from products to consumers to humankind issues. Marketing 3.0 is the stage when companies shift from consumer-centricity to human-centricity and where profitability is balanced with corporate responsibility. — Philip Kotler

marketing tells one story about the company, usually connected to corporate strategy at the senior level, while the products tell several stories, depending on a product manager's vision of his or her own strategy. — Alex Bogusky

It's simple: Happy customers reward you with their loyalty. Exceptional customer service converts into customer loyalty. It converts into raving fans who will praise your team on Twitter, and Facebook, and talk about their experience over lunch with friends. There is no greater marketing for your product than happy, surprised, raving fans, and no reason you can't start now. — Sarah Hatter

Nirvana's success drew attention to a marketing demographic previously ignored by the mainstream, and inadvertently started a gold rush with advertising executives, product manufacturers, merchandise distributors, fashion coordinators, and rock imitators, the latter of whom have yet to equal the sincerity, power, and wit of Nirvana. — Kim Thayil

People are not interested in your product or your business; they are interested in solving their own problems. — James Dillehay

They believed that it was a mistake to separate product development from marketing, as most of their contemporaries did, because to them the two were indistinguishable: the object that sold best was the one that sold itself. — Malcolm Gladwell

Any successful hospitality operation - be it a hotel or restaurant, chain or independent, low-cost provider or luxury establishment - requires an effectively performing individual operation. You have to attract the right customers, have the service product, set the right price for your product, and provide the right level of service - all the while managing your employees the right way to achieve your goals. This requires a combination of knowledge from a variety of disciplines, and thus this section includes contributions from our faculty in human resources, management, marketing, operations, and strategy. — Michael C. Sturman

Teach and you'll form a bond you just don't get from traditional marketing tactics. Buying people's attention with a magazine or online banner ad is one thing. Earning their loyalty by teaching them forms a whole different connection. They'll trust you more. They'll respect you more. Even if they don't use your product, they can still be your fans. — Jason Fried