The difference between brand marketing and product marketing
And why startups need to start measuring them differently
The first question you could ask me is that aren’t these two separate things? And you would be right. They are completely different things.
We understand that, I’m not sure if our managers do.
Come on, it’s 2024, you might say. And I would agree. But we still seem to be running into these problems. Hence this little exploration.
What I intend with this little essay is to give ourselves a little vocabulary for understanding how to talk about these (different) things.
When I started working at Freshworks (then Freshdesk) in 2011, no one used the term Product Marketing. Even a few years later, at Wingify, we weren’t really using that term to hire what was essentially a Product Marketer.
Everything was marketing, wasn’t it, and everything led to demand, right?
Well, no. And that’s why the demarcation(s) arose.
Because as SaaS matured, and product companies grew, it became clear that communicating what the product did, and putting that in comparison with the competition was a different skillset than, say SEM and SEO. And it became clearer that both of these are completely different skillsets than what is needed to build a software brand.
This realisation was important to the industry, because one, companies were trying to figure out why a single marketer was unable to do all of the above, and two, marketers were also struggling to do it all, and beating themselves up for not being able to.
I was doing the same, and wondering why I wasn’t good enough. What I wasn’t able to understand then was that I was basically a front-end engineer trying to do data engineering. Of course I was going to suck.
I forgave myself a little for this when I came back to Freshworks later, to lead corporate marketing, and Girish himself told me how long it had taken for him to realise that Product Marketing was just one function and that there was no need to look at all of marketing through just the product lens.
Here’s what usually happens in a startup: The first marketer is hired. They work on positioning, the first decks, the first sales enablement materials, the first product launch, and so on. These are the most critical things in the first year or so, the work that will actually launch the product’s GTM. And therefore this is the kind of marketer who commands a premium at that stage: Someone who can do a bit of everything, and if they also have a bit of experience running ads and generating some demand, they will be rightly seen as gold dust.
But in the last few years, doing just this has not been enough. Startups now do not just require early product marketing, they also need early brand building.
Why?
Because of two reasons. One, there is just so much competition that you have to start investing in brand to stand out, there’s just no other option. And two, brand building takes time, so you need to start as early as you can.
Let’s dive a little deeper.
What does Product Marketing do at a startup?
Just off the top of my head: Positioning, product launches, cross-functional communication, internal enablement, especially to Sales, sales enablement, plus market research and adoption.
What does Brand Marketing do at a startup?
Again, off the top of my head: Brand awareness, recall, media mentions and sentiment, events, brand campaigns, and so on. What does that look like? Social media, PR, funding announcements and launches, content, and thought leadership.
See what I mean? This difference is the point. Especially when startups try to measure everything (and everyone) in marketing the same way. Asking a brand marketer how many product blogs she wrote is a bad question, as is asking a product marketer what the ROI of the monthly newsletter she sends out is.
So how should we measure success then?
Firstly, by understanding that each startup needs to measure success its own way. Some startups need to start building brand early, others need to get to differentiate in an existing category immediately. Second, that thought leadership and brand building need not always be looked at from a product lens, they can be looked at from an audience lens. For example, to sell to marketers, you don’t need to build a blog writing about the product’s features. You can build a blog that teaches marketers how to do something, and then positing that that 'something' can be best accomplished by the your software. And finally, I have a point of view that not a lot of people agree with: It’s not that important to measure success as a startup. At least in its initial days.
The idea should be to create, to produce, to have a plan and keep going, as long as something is working.
And soon enough, you’ll have enough material and metrics to understand what actually is.
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