The Smarty Role of Product Marketing

Product marketing, as opposed to product management, deals with more outbound marketing tasks (in the older sense of the phrase). For example, product management deals with the nuts and bolts of product development within a firm, whereas product marketing deals with marketing the product to prospects, customers, and others. As a job function within a firm, Product marketing also differs from other marketing jobs such as marketing communications, online marketing, advertising, marketing strategy, public relations, etc. Here are The Smarty Role of Product Marketing.



From a societal point of view, marketing is the link between a society’s material requirements and its economic patterns of response. Marketing satisfies these needs and wants through exchange processes and building long term relationships. It is the process of communicating the value of a product or service through positioning to customers. Marketing can be looked at as an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, delivering and communicating value to customers, and managing customer relationships in ways that also benefit the organisation and its shareholders. Marketing is the science of choosing target markets through market analysis and market segmentation, as well as understanding consumer buying behavior and providing superior customer value.

There are five competing concepts under which organizations can choose to operate their business; the production concept, the product concept, the selling concept, the marketing concept, and the holistic marketing concept.  The four components of holistic marketing are relationship marketing, internal marketing, integrated marketing, and socially responsive marketing. The set of engagements necessary for successful marketing management includes, capturing marketing insights, connecting with customers, building strong brands, shaping the market offerings, delivering and communicating value, creating long-term growth, and developing marketing strategies and plans.

Role of Product marketing in a business addresses four important strategic questions:

1. What products will be offered (i.e., the breadth and depth of the product line)?
2. Who will be the target customers (i.e., the boundaries of the market segments to be served)?
3. How will the products reach those (i.e., the distribution channel and are there viable possibilities that create a solid business model)?

At what price should the products be offered.
Product marketing frequently differs from product management in high-tech companies. Whereas the product manager is required to take a product's requirements from the sales and marketing personnel and create a product requirements document (PRD), which will be used by the engineering team to build the product, the product marketing manager can be engaged in the task of creating a market requirements document (MRD), which is used as source for the product management to develop the PRD.

In other companies the product manager creates both the MRDs and the PRDs, while the product marketing manager does outbound tasks like giving product demonstrations in trade shows, creating marketing collateral like hot-sheets, beat-sheets, cheat sheets, data sheets, and white papers. This requires the product marketing manager to be skilled not only in competitor analysis, market research, and technical writing, but also in more business oriented activities like conducting ROI and NPV analyses on technology investments, strategizing how the decision criteria of the prospects or customers can be changed so that they buy the company's product vis-a-vis the competitor's product, etc.

One issue that faces Product Marketers is that they are chartered with developing much of the content for the various constituents (sales, marcom, customers, blogs, etc.). Creating content tends to be given more value than the actual research and thinking that is behind all the content.

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