Product marketing

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Product marketing is a sub-field of marketing that is responsible for crafting the messaging, go-to-market flow, and promotion of a product. Product marketing managers can also be involved in defining and sizing target markets. They collaborate with other stakeholders including business development, sales, and technical functions such as product management and engineering. Other critical responsibilities include positioning and sales enablement. [1]

Contents

Product marketing deals with marketing the product to prospects, customers, and others. Product marketing works with other areas of marketing such as social media marketing, marketing communications, online marketing, advertising, marketing strategy, and public relations to execute outbound marketing for their product. [2]

Role

Product marketing addresses five strategic questions:

Product Marketing Managers (PMMs) act as the voice of the customer and answer the previously mentioned questions. PMMs execute their strategy using the following tools and methods:

PMMs drive customer engagement by gaining a deep understanding of the product through its lifecycle. This product lifecycle includes pre-adoption, post-adoption/purchase, and after churning. PMMs collect customer information mainly through surveys and interviews. However, when available, PMMs will use product usage and competitive data to collect information. Users participating in the feedback process are not allowed to write their own answers. Instead, they have a limited set of choices to select from. This restricted selection of options is used to gather information that helps inform the product roadmap and ultimately improve customer engagement.

Relationship to other roles

Product marketing is generally different from product management. The product marketing manager creates a market requirements document (MRD) and gives it to the Product Managers. The product manager then gathers the product requirements and creates a product requirements document (PRD). After that, product managers give the PRD to the engineering team.

These roles may vary across companies. In some cases, product management creates both the MRD and the PRD, while product marketing does outbound tasks. Outbound tasks may include trade show product demonstrations and marketing collateral (hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets, data sheets and white papers). These tasks require skills in competitor analysis, market research, technical writing, financial matters (ROI and NPV analyses) and product positioning. Product marketer's typical performance indicators include feature adoption, new revenue, expansion revenue, and churn rate. [4]

Product marketers are responsible for creating content for various purposes including sales, marketing, communications, customer engagement, and reviewers. In most cases, the existence of collaborative consumption leads to a decrease in product marketers' profits. On the other hand, consumers who share their goods in a sharing-based market are more willing to pay more for a higher quality product than if they were not in a sharing-based market. [5]

Qualifications

The standard educational requirement to become a product manager is a marketing or business degree. This can include a Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA), Master of Business Administration (MBA), Master of Arts (M.A.) or Master of Science (M.S.) in Marketing, and Master of Arts (M.A.) or Master of Science (M.S.) in Industrial-Organizational (I/O) Psychology. A focus in advertising, public relations, communications, graphic design, and other related fields is helpful. [6]

Real-world work experience in related disciplines will help improve qualifications. [6]

Effectively communicating in a second language is an invaluable asset for those working on a project with global or wide-scale implications. Additionally, a unique qualification for product managers is having a background in engineering or computing because it allows for easier interaction with the technical staff. [7]

Related Research Articles

Product management is the business process of planning, developing, launching, and managing a product or service. It includes the entire lifecycle of a product, from ideation to development to go to market. Product managers are responsible for ensuring that a product meets the needs of its target market and contributes to the business strategy, while managing a product or products at all stages of the product lifecycle. Software product management adapts the fundamentals of product management for digital products.

In marketing, market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad consumer or business market, normally consisting of existing and potential customers, into sub-groups of consumers based on shared characteristics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Product life-cycle management (marketing)</span> Succession of strategies by business management as a product goes through its life-cycle

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Marketing management is the strategic organizational discipline which focuses on the practical application of marketing orientation, techniques and methods inside enterprises and organizations and on the management of a firm's marketing resources and activities.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Product lifecycle</span> Duration of processing of products from inception, to engineering, design & manufacture

In industry, product lifecycle management (PLM) is the process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its inception through the engineering, design and manufacture, as well as the service and disposal of manufactured products. PLM integrates people, data, processes, and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies and their extended enterprises.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Product requirements document</span> Outline of intended product functions

A product requirements document (PRD) is a document containing all the requirements for a certain product. It is written to allow people to understand what a product should do. A PRD should, however, generally avoid anticipating or defining how the product will do it in order to later allow interface designers and engineers to use their expertise to provide the optimal solution to the requirements.

Software product management is the discipline of building, implementing and managing software or digital products, taking into account life cycle considerations and an audience. It is the discipline and business process that governs a product from its inception to the market or customer delivery and service in order to maximize revenue. This is in contrast to software that is delivered in an ad hoc manner, typically to a limited clientele, e.g. service.

A product manager (PM) is a professional role that is responsible for the development of products for an organization, known as the practice of product management. Product managers own the product strategy behind a product, specify its functional requirements, and manage feature releases. Product managers coordinate work done by many other functions, and are ultimately responsible for product outcomes.

Industrial market segmentation is a scheme for categorizing industrial and business customers to guide strategic and tactical decision-making. Government agencies and industry associations use standardized segmentation schemes for statistical surveys. Most businesses create their own segmentation scheme to meet their particular needs. Industrial market segmentation is important in sales and marketing.

The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to marketing:

Return on marketing investment (ROMI) is the contribution to profit attributable to marketing, divided by the marketing 'invested' or risked. ROMI is not like the other 'return-on-investment' (ROI) metrics because marketing is not the same kind of investment. Instead of money that is 'tied' up in plants and inventories, marketing funds are typically 'risked'. Marketing spending is typically expensed in the current period.

Customer engagement is an interaction between an external consumer/customer and an organization through various online or offline channels. According to Hollebeek, Srivastava and Chen S-D logic-Definition of customer engagement is "a customer’s motivationally driven, volitional investment of operant resources, and operand resources into brand interactions," which applies to online and offline engagement.

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A market requirements document (MRD) in project management and systems engineering, is a document that expresses the customer's wants and needs for the product or service. It is typically written as a part of product marketing or product management. The document should explain:

Customer value maximization (CVM) is a real-time service model that, proponents say, goes beyond basic customer relationship management (CRM) capabilities, identifying and capturing maximum potential from prospects and existing customers.

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Act-On Software is a software-as-a-service product for marketing automation. The company is headquartered in Portland, Oregon and was founded in 2008, originally retailing its software exclusively through Cisco, which provided $2 million in funding.

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Customer success, customer success management, or client advocacy refers to the process of enhancing customers' satisfaction while using a product or service. As a specialized form of customer relationship management, customer success management focuses on implementing strategies that result in reduced customer churn and increased up-sell opportunities. The primary objective of customer success is to ensure customers achieve their desired outcomes with the product or service, consequently leading to improved customer lifetime value (CLTV) for the company.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Hayes-Wheelwright matrix</span>

The Hayes-Wheelwright Matrix, also known as the product-process matrix, is a tool to analyze the fit between a chosen product positioning and manufacturing process.

References

  1. ↑ Wheelwright, Steven C.; Clark, Kim B. (1992). Revolutionizing product development: quantum leaps in speed, efficiency, and quality (7. pr ed.). New York: Free Press. ISBN   978-0-02-905515-1.
  2. ↑ Wheelwright, Steven C.; Clark, Kim B. (15 June 1992). Revolutionizing Product Development: Quantum Leaps in Speed, Efficiency, and Quality. Simon and Schuster. ISBN   978-0-02-905515-1.
  3. ↑ Glanfield, Keith (2018-02-05). Brand Transformation: Transforming Firm Performance by Disruptive, Pragmatic and Achievable Brand Strategy. Routledge. ISBN   978-1-351-66255-0.
  4. ↑ Burton, Phil; Parker, Gary; Lawley, Brian (2012). 42 Rules of Product Marketing: Learn the Rules of Product Marketing from Leading Experts from Around the World. Happy About. ISBN   978-1-60773-081-1.
  5. ↑ Jiang, Baojun; Tian, Lin (2015). "Collaborative Consumption: Strategic and Economic Implications of Product Sharing". SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2561907. ISSN   1556-5068.
  6. 1 2 Carter, Stephen; Yeo, Amy Chu-May (2017-08-14). "Undergraduate perceptions of the knowledge, skills and competencies required of today's practicing marketer". Higher Education, Skills and Work-Based Learning. 7 (3): 240–260. doi:10.1108/HESWBL-12-2016-0084. ISSN   2042-3896.
  7. ↑ Bennett, Roger (2010-12-16). "What makes a marketer? Development of 'marketing professional identity' among marketing graduates during early career experiences". Journal of Marketing Management. 27 (1–2): 8–27. doi:10.1080/02672571003647792. ISSN   0267-257X.

Bibliography

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