Tech Marketing: How we got here

These essays are for founders and investors of product-led startups who want better marketing. Because—let’s be honest—Silicon Valley is known for leading the world on many things, but marketing is not one of them. My message is simple: You can build great products and have great marketing. 

One of the fundamental challenges is that founders continue to reference a marketing playbook written by tech giants over a decade ago—often without accounting for how their businesses are different.

The playbook: Build great products, create network effects that drive adoption, and avoid investing in marketing for as long as possible. Founders think, “This worked for Google; it should work for my company, too.” 

It’s true that Google, Facebook, and Twitter got away without investing in marketing for a long time. Facebook waited nine years to hire its first CMO; Twitter waited ten. Both were public companies already.

These companies’ success without a serious investment in marketing, confirmed for many that investments in product—not marketing—will ensure the best path for growth. On top of that, investors and founders already are suspicious of anything that can’t be quantified. 

Founders (and executive recruiters) in search of a marketing head talk excitedly about the success they’ve seen “without investing a penny into marketing.” It’s a badge of honor, and for many, it validates the idea that their product is so good that it sells itself.

Many founders believe their product has network effects early on, before it’s proven to be true. Others overestimate the magnitude of network effects and take a long time to develop an equally powerful go-to-market motion to make up the difference. 

The tech landscape also looks a lot different than it did when Google and Facebook were growing. As Alphabet CMO Marvin Chow pointed out in a recent interview, startups face a much different business climate today that demand new approaches to marketing:

“As a marketer, brand means so much more to so many technology companies now than it did even ten years ago,” Chow said. “We have a very strong brand, but it’s important that we tell that brand story and remind people about the Google that they love.”

‘I’m Audi 5000’ 

If you lived through the 80s, you might recall a catch-phrase people used when leaving a room: “I’m Audi 5000.” The phrase got popularized after reports that the car had problems with sudden unintended acceleration.

After the unwanted attention, Audi went dark for the next fifteen years. When the company did advertise, it played it safe by only emphasizing straightforward, measurable features like fuel-efficiency and engine specifications.

Then, a new CMO came in and hired the advertising agency where I worked to revamp its image. Our campaigns referenced the company’s racing heritage while capturing an emotional sell to reach a broader audience. Since then, Audi has significantly grown its market share in the luxury auto market in the U.S.

The truth is, many tech companies could benefit from a similar shift in marketing strategy—but few are willing to take the risk. Why?

When you assume all of your customers are as logical as you  

When I was leaving the advertising industry in 2008, my colleagues said, “Good luck, tech marketing is the worst marketing in the world. Maybe Facebook will be different…” They would go on to explain that everything in tech is about features and performance (“10x more powerful,” “low latency”) and how it’s almost never about benefits or how the product makes the user feel. 

This is a byproduct of the intensely data-driven culture that’s helped make Silicon Valley so successful. Technologists who start companies apply a quantitative approach to every aspect of their companies. This creates a culture where things that are not measurable are deemed dubious. (I once worked for a founder who had a saying: “If you can’t measure it, it’s not real.”)

It follows that, things like brand development and customer satisfaction that can’t easily be quantified take a back seat.

You can see this play out in the way companies run product experiments. The timeline for seeing results on growth experiments has gotten shorter and shorter, which has allowed builders to innovate faster. This is great—but when you try to apply that rapid development mentality to marketing, it doesn’t work the same way. 

People don’t change their minds that quickly about a product, and they don’t often take risks on brands they don’t know. There are many tools you can use to analyze web traffic and mentions on social media—but measuring brand affinity is far from an exact science. And the less exact it is, the less founders want to risk or prioritize it.

Tech-to-tech sales

Another thing that helps explain how tech marketing got to where it is: b2b is a significant category in tech. A lot of hi-tech companies sell to other tech companies (or technical decision-makers at larger companies) that speak their language. They can speak technically about products with very little translation required from their customers. Think about the very first companies that occupied the Valley—microchips, semiconductors, database management software.

Distribution channels for tech companies often involve channel partners and resellers where products are bought in bulk by technical decision-makers who evaluate features.

Tech companies can get away with straightforward product marketing when all of their customers speak their language—but even then, only to an extent. When companies expand into new markets or confront a competitor or enter a negative PR cycle their first significant challenge, they are required to start explaining themselves more. Start telling stories … start marketing. :)

Have your cake and eat it too

Product-led marketing doesn’t have to be literal or uninspiring. Founders can build an engineering-first, data-driven, analytics-obsessed, rational-thinking, product-centric company and still have good marketing. Decision-makers are human beings, and human beings are multi-faceted. You can be precise in describing your product’s features and also appeal to the many other factors that drive user behavior.

I work with founders with great products to develop great marketing around. Investing in marketing doesn’t always mean hiring a big team and spending a lot of money. 

It starts with shifting your company’s mindset and enabling the parts of marketing you already have—however small—to make the most impact.