How I think about product marketing

No one likes to feel pressured >:-(

Being as anti-authoritarian as I am, it is no wonder that the term "self persuasion" easily burrowed itself in my curiosity. I don't quite recall where or when I first happened upon this concept; all I know is that when I did, I wrote it on my whiteboard in big letters and drew big two circles around it. (Typical ENTJ behavior.)

Simply put, self-persuasion is, well, it is self-definitional. Self-persuasion is what's found when we study the process of influence and behavior: When trying to influence someone into a certain behavior, it is the absence of direct attempts that actually works.

This places self-persuasion is in direct contradiction to the act of salesmanship, I know; I am making the argument that self-persuasion is a fundamental concept to anchor product decisions. I am going to discuss how knowing your audience, understanding and leveraging your competitive advantage, meeting your users where they are, the concepts of co-design and co-ownership, and finally, pricing psychology, all come together to assemble a product strategy that, besides building a good product, enables self-persuasion in the buyer.

Cognitive dissonance, rationality, and integrity

First, some background on self-persuasion. (I think it provides a plausible "why" we observe this phenomenon.) Social psychologist Dr. Elliot Aronson boldly claims that you, me, we, the entire human endeavor, are on the quest to integrity. That is, to feel like an honest person, to embody moral uprightness, to feel as though you have arrived at a state of being whole and undivided.

Life is chaotic and unfair, and most of us do not feel that way—so our biology compensates us with cognitive dissonance, which allows us to feel as though we are still on that path even when we're realistically not; distancing us from our cognition, the rational mind provides the necessary rationale to substantiate the false belief, eliminating the need to be aware of the how dissonant your behavior is to your inherent set of values. Maybe we should refer to it as the rationale mind instead.

To use self-persuasion as a working product model, you should agree with Aronson's notion about integrity.

Product marketing and narrowing my own cognitive dissonance

My general feelings towards product marketing are of complete excitement and enthusiasm, plus a dash of dissonance. While I am passionate about product marketing because it is customer-centric; because it is the bridge between the product and the market; because it enables strategic decision-making and cross-functional collaboration; because it embodies the balancing act of art and science—it doesn't change the fact that I had a diary entry titled "Marketing is Rape" from 2014. This is what most of what product marketing does:

• Researches the market, customer, and user
• Identifies ideal customer profiles and target audiences
• Crafts messaging that positions the company strategically
• Strategizes product pricing and packaging
• Establishes customer <-> product feedback loops
• Enables sales with tools, training, and resources
• Monitors competitor activity and conducts competitive analyses

Product marketing is a very cool job, but it was not my first love. I am principally drawn to psychology (and continue to find myself unmotivated to enter professional academia), and I am leveraging my passion for psychology and insight into self-persuasion to shape product marketing in a way that feels good to me.

—END PREAMBLE—

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Knowing your audience

I could philosophize on how elusive truly knowing your audience will always be. My point here is that it's a non-negotiable first step, which to most, I hope, is an obvious idea. But how do you know you know your audience well?

So to start, ask: do I actually know my audience? Do I know them well? How do I know that I know I audience well?

In SaaS/Cloud world, you can always ship faster and see what sticks or A/B test indefinitely, but ultimately, I've found that building products from a deep, human-centered understanding of your audience will produce products that solve real problems. Problems that your audience has, specifically.

Priorities, priorities

While knowing your audience can strictly be about who your product is servicing at its core, there are as many audience distinctions as there are unique business problems to solve.

Knowing who are you building the product for will clarify which steps to take in the product and marketing strategy. It can not only inform what you should build next or how to prioritize product decisions, but when it should hit the market as well. In other words, who = what * when. For example:

• Incorporating AI into your product to attract "early adopters"
• Releasing a customer-requested feature update to nurture at-risk accounts
• Launching a social media campaign to promote resources for young adults
• Implementing a chatbot to increase product demonstrations

While knowing your audience can strictly be about who your product is servicing at its core, there are as many audience distinctions as there are unique business problems to solve.

User research: Infinitely complicated?

Why do entrepreneurs frequently give the advice "do something you know"? It's because if you did, you'd be the target audience you were building a product for! But, we all only have one life and 24-hours in a day, so... incomes research.

User research is difficult, and can be especially daunting when starting from scratch because people are infinitely complicated. Yet, I'd argue, infinitely straight forward. In my eyes, people are captivated by their beliefs and are motivated to action by their circumstances.

Beliefs

Beliefs are a dimension that you can uncover quite easily because people love to talk about themselves. Lol. You just need to show up and ask the right questions.

People will reveal their beliefs to you either intentionally and directly through speech and adornments (immediate signals that you file away for later analysis) or indirectly through behavior (a progressive, ideally unprompted signal).

These signals point to qualitative value-judgements an individual places in the world. Signals can be explicit and implicit, immediate or progressive, and prompted or unprompted. When uncovered as a prompted response, they are conscious, explicit beliefs. When unprompted, they are implicit beliefs.

Circumstances

Circumstances, on the other hand, are a bit more elusive as there may be sensitivity around this subject, but circumstantial data are invaluable. I've placed asterisks for the data types I've generally found the most robust findings with.

• Demographic data: age*, gender, income, education level*, occupation
• Geographic data: country, city, zip code
• Behavioral data: purchase history, online behavior, interaction with previous campaigns
• Device and platform usage data: type of device*, operating system, browser preferences, social media platform activity

When it comes to understanding your audience through research, there is no "comparison" between explicit beliefs, implicit beliefs, and circumstantial data. They all makeup the picture.

Gathering Data

My preferred way to gather this type of data is directly through a survey, where the cognitive load is kept to a minimum and the outcomes can be recombined (carefully) with auxiliary data to reveal more robust insights. There are also survey platforms that provide a pool of participants with pre-filled socio-economic data, too. Maybe I'll write more extensively about that at a later point.

The Design Thinking Way

Design Thinking is a class I took with Dr. Waller @ UT and it taught me multiple ways to understand your audience in ways that were HUGELY different to anything else I'd ever learned academically or come across professionally. Born out of the field of design, design thinking involves a lot of empathetic-thinking, huddling over a messy desk, whiteboards, and sticky notes.

As a ground-up problem-solving methodology, design thinking emphasizes a human-centric approach to problem-solving and is particularly useful in addressing complex, ambiguous, and interdisciplinary challenges. When you don't have a clue about your audience at all, become fast friends with design thinking.

When you don't have a clue about your audience at all, become fast friends with design thinking.

Because design thinking is fundamentally empathetic in approach, you start by deciding who you want to help and go from there. You heard me right. You start by deciding the who. You can think of design thinking as an user-obsessed approach to problem-solving.

One example of a design thinking approach is a Day in the Life exercise where you observe a particular cohort of person (literally and ideally consecutively over a reasonable timeframe, such as a week) and photograph and timestamp every activity that they do. This exercise is expensive on time and does seem overkill, but in carrying out exercises like these, I saw the undeniable value in it.

The point of design thinking is to incorporate the prospective buyer into the problem-solving process at every step along the way, allowing you to both deeply understand the problem-set you're solving for and the human-with-the-money in the equation.

In the end, design thinking exercises provided me with tangible evidence for how people lived their lives and what problems / frustrations they run into on a regular basis. Many product marketing staples as such journey and empathy mapping come from design thinking, too.

the Continuous Discovery way

Continuous Discovery is an ongoing and iterative product practice where you regularly meet with real customers in effort to understand their basic requirements, evolution of needs, and explore potential solutions through continuous hypothesis testing.

‍Theresa Torres wrote an amazing book on Continuous Discovery, so I won't go on about it here. IF DONE RIGHT THOUGH, meaning you wrangle the bureaucracy game and establish continuous discovery as a cross-functional, collaborative practice among product teams, it's a game changer and will forever be on my product marketing mantle.

TLDR;

Just know your audience, whatever that means to you, however you can. There are a million ways to understand who you are trying to help when you combine data intelligence with social creativity. A million ways. It can, will, and should inform everything the company does. Also, plz don't just fill out a persona card with best guesses. It will help no one.

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#2 Competitive advantage

Establishing the approach

Once you know who you are targeting, it's time to contend with your real competitive advantages to understand the most strategic approach to business growth. Remember who = what * when? Through taking stock of the company's strategic assets, it will inform approaching strategy from either the marketing lens (when) or the product lens (what).

Consider the marketing funnel (awareness, interest, consideration, intend, purchase, post-purchase) or the company's platform / product / solution / service competencies. If the brand is healthy, that means we're not solving for marketing and that the strategic approach will hinge on what the product is delivering.

On the other hand, if customers are happy and satisfied but there just aren't enough of them, then the challenge lies with marketing +/ sales depending on business model. And to be strategic in marketing, you will need details about how the funnel is performing.

Funnel attribution

Funnel-based attribution models allow us to take a data-driven approach to understand the customer journey and how customer conversions are happening at each phase of the funnel.

Product marketing, who typically owns sales enablement, should partner closely with sales to uncover data that can be used in a lead scoring model. To get said data, you'll have to establish scalable and intuitive processes that accurately capture lead source, timing, location, business size, job title, industry, and more.

Armed with this data, you can now measure against the close rate to attribute conversion effectiveness for each touch point in the funnel.

Establishing a strong lead scoring model is an incredibly powerful tool, and is a noble goal to pursue regardless because in the pursuit of building one, you will inevitably become intimately familiar with how business development flows through the organization. And THAT is the golden ticket, baby. 

TLDR;

Understanding and communicating the competitive advantage is a function of product marketing. In understanding it well, product marketing helps organizations identify the best approach to fuel business growth. Also, really good things happen when sales and marketing have a solid relationship.

#3 Meeting people where they are

I love how easy "meeting people where they are" sounds.

Understanding your audience is one thing; meeting them where they are is a whole other art altogether. The present particle of "meet" points directly to how meeting people where they are is an act of threading the needle, except here, the thread and the needle are strangers and are moving in different directions at different rates.

Beyond knowing who is moving through your funnel and how they are moving through, meeting people where they are goes beyond demographics and dives into the realm of psychology and behavior. It's about where they hang out, virtually and metaphorically. It's knowing where they sip their coffee and where they scroll through memes. When you meet people where they are, it's like playing matchmaker—connecting your product with their favorite habits.

People are influenced by their environment, experiences, and current state of mind. To enable the best chances of self-persuasion, to create a sense of autonomy, a product marketing strategy should aim to align with their journey naturally and allow them to feel as though they are building your own adventure.

To design the marketing and UX/UI customer journey in this light, refer back to the psychology of their online behavior,  the platforms they love, or the language that resonates with them and keep why the user embarked on this journey to begin with in mind (your competitive advantage).

What are their daily habits? Are they tweeting their thoughts, Instagramming their life, or drowning in LinkedIn articles? Knowing this helps you seamlessly integrate your product into their world and the knowledge to artfully strategize marketing touchpoints. By meeting people where they are, you're not just selling a product; you're becoming a part of their narrative, and that's where the magic of self-persuasion begins.

By meeting people where they are, you're not just selling a product; you're becoming a part of their narrative, and that's where the magic of self-persuasion begins.

#4 Co-design and co-ownership

In a world saturated with choices, consumers crave a sense of ownership.

Ownership isn’t just about delivering a product wrapped in a shiny bow with their name on it; it's about throwing a never-ending DIY party where your customers are the VIP guests. Can you imagine a world where your users feel like they're not just buying, but building?

Co-design and co-ownership invite your audience into the creative process. Open the gates for their ideas. Provide avenues for user input, feedback loops, and collaborative decision-making.

When consumers feel a sense of ownership, they become advocates, passionately promoting what they helped shape. Co-design isn't just a strategy; it's a philosophy that transforms buyers into stakeholders, fostering self-persuasion through a shared journey of creation.

#5 Pricing psychology

The assumed last mile (because there is no free lunch).

For the consumer, the psychology of pricing is about numbers, but is also hardly about numbers. It's also all the things that happened before checkout AND the numeric representation of the value the customer perceives in the product. Experience versus expectation. Perception versus reality.

The point of pricing psychology is to fulfill

• Value in the users hands
• Maximize company value

To deliver value to the users hands and not bungle self-persuasion at the last mile, your pricing strategy should fall within the acceptable financial-emotional range of your audience. That means what you charge for your product should align closely with the perceived value, which requires deeply understanding your customer (and doesn't leave any money on the table :-)

Do you buy it?

Understand their perceptions of value, their price sensitivity, and the emotional triggers associated with cost. This will allow you to strategize pricing and packaging. Here are some of the ways you can tune the transaction value:

• Localization, adjusting prices according to country
• Anchoring, showing values along the customer journey that advantageously positions the product price
• Bundling, sell multiple products at a lower overall price
• Tiered pricing, offering different packages with varying features and prices that cater to different needs
• Usage-based

Whichever method you decide, each approach should not shock your audience. Unless it's pure delightful shock, I guess. Pricing isn't just about numbers on a page; it's a strategic tool for self-persuasion, shaping the perception of value that ultimately guides purchasing decisions.

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