Marketing Can't Fix a Bad Product
The #1 lesson of my career
Unless you’ve known me for a while, especially in a professional context, you probably don’t know that I’ve worked for a lot of companies just before they went bankrupt. At a certain point, it became an inside joke for friends and family. People would ask me, “The place you’re working for still exists?” and would be surprised if I said yes.
Granted, a lot of companies go out of business in general. But I found my way into the tech industry because that’s who was hiring when I was 21 and had no useful work experience—and then once you’re on a certain track in your career, it can be hard to change lanes. And thanks to the massive amounts of venture capital flowing into the tech industry until fairly recently, more tech companies were getting funded than ever should have been, many of which were built on pretty shaky foundations.
When you work in marketing, you often don’t see how the sausage gets made until you’ve been at the company for a while. And let me tell you, finding out that the product you’ve been trying to sell is fundamentally broken can feel like betrayal.
My first job out of college was an unpaid content marketing internship at a ticketing company. If you’re not a marketing person, “content marketing” is what we call the job of writing all the articles on a website that help people find their way to your business via Google search. You look up theater reviews and see a deal for theater tickets. You want to read a recap of a sports game and then pick up discount resale tickets to the next game. That sort of thing.
After several months of focusing on writing and social media marketing, I started helping out on customer service (so I could get paid). This was my first time really seeing the product for what it was and not just the marketing spiel I’d ingested since I arrived.
While I knew the company’s long-term aspiration was to become a comprehensive event-planning destination, in the present it was all about being the ticket resale platform with the lowest fees. And in customer service, I learned about the flip side of being “the cheap one.”
The website was too hard to use and customers were falling through the cracks. It let people make an account without verifying their email, so users would choose email delivery of their tickets, misspell their email address and then never receive said tickets. On the seller side, people would accidentally upload the same PDF for multiple sales, so buyers would get rejected at the event for having duplicate tickets.
There were so many complaints and chargebacks (where you tell your credit card company you didn’t receive what you paid for and they yank back the funds) that the main aggregator site providing traffic to the website delisted it, and sales dropped to almost nothing. With cash flow in the toilet, the company couldn’t pay ticket sellers, the office rent or even employee payroll.
Each of those little instances of poor user experience added up to a product that couldn’t be trusted, and no splashy marketing we did over in the writers’ room of the office could possibly counteract that.
Marketing can’t fix a bad product.
After a year at that tech startup, I moved on to another tech startup. This one was a parking app: The idea was that when you parked on the street, you’d flag in the app that a spot was about to be available before you drove away and someone could come claim it. Giving up your spot to another user would earn you a token that you could then exchange to claim your next parking spot from another user, and so on.
Before I joined the company, the founder and his consultants had done a lot of research, made sure they were on the right side of the law vis-à-vis selling public property (which is where most parking apps run into a problem) and planned a big press launch.
On launch day, users poured in…and did nothing, because there were no parking spots listed as available in the app.
I joined the team about a week later and stayed on for another year as the company tried marketing plan after marketing plan to try to get that level of app traffic back. There was a brand ambassador program, contests, programs targeting small neighborhoods where users could try out the parking handoffs on a limited scale—essentially building the beta someone should have run before the big press launch ever happened.
Nothing took. People would try the app once, not find a spot when they needed one and never came back.
The company also invested both marketing and engineering resources into building out what was originally intended to be a secondary feature of the app: a way for homeowners to rent out their driveways when they weren’t using them for extra cash. Door-to-door canvassers recruited driveway owners to list themselves on the app, but without customers to rent from them, they quickly lost interest.
Toward the end of my year with this startup, when everyone but me and the sales guy had been laid off, the app had its first successful driveway rental. The driveway owner earned his ten bucks or so and hit the button to claim his income from the app.
And nothing happened. The ability to take money out of the app had literally never been built. The one saving grace for this app hadn’t created to begin with.
Marketing can’t fix a bad product.
I then spent several years working for a marketing agency that specialized in copy optimization. Clients would bring in the marketing collateral they wanted to use, writers in my role produced alternate versions, and then the client tested them against one another.
Thanks to a pretty massive database of marketing insights, the agency was quite good at what it did. It wasn’t unheard of to double the revenue of a campaign, though on average results were more modest than that. In general, the agency could pretty confidently increase a client’s conversion rate by about 15%.
In some cases, 15% more customers is a huge deal; if we’re talking credit card acquisitions, even one customer has a pretty substantial lifetime value to the company. But the agency constantly found itself with old-school retail company clients that were already in poor shape before they finally decided to sign a contract.
If you’re on the brink of bankruptcy, 15% more email revenue won’t save you. These companies were failing to compete with Amazon, mostly, lacking unique products or brand value that would make customers stick around. The agency would show them amazing results from email testing…and they’d go out of business anyway.
Marketing can’t fix a bad product.
I work more in the product sphere these days, and I still can’t tell you the number of times I’ve been working on messaging and had to go, “The product does what now?” Or, more often, “The product doesn’t do that? Why not?”
Basic functionality, by any layperson’s definition, totally missing. Convoluted processes to accomplish a simple task, that the product managers look to me as a writer to explain away.
And look, I’m a firm believer in the power of words. I’ve seen plenty of examples of conversion rates doubling or even tripling just by changing the text on a button or in an email subject line.
But you can’t shirk on the hard work of building a product people actually want to use and expect marketing to save the day for you. Contrary to popular belief, marketing isn’t all smoke and mirrors. Or at least good marketing isn’t.
Good marketing illuminates the strengths of a product and helps it find its audience. It doesn’t paper over weaknesses and contradictions.
By far the worst, though, is when a company tries this kind of shady marketing on its own employees, hiding that their revolutionary new product is held together with spit, glue and the power of positive thinking. Because then the marketing team, not knowing any better, parrots those lies to their customers.
Everyone loves to hate on marketing, but the true culprits are the used-car salesmen CEOs who try to convince their investors and workers alike that their vision is already a reality.
Spoiler alert: It never is.
I want to build good product experiences. I want to help users accomplish what they need to do. I want clear, honest, open communication that engenders trust.
Are my morals incompatible with the realities of capitalism, or at least with the venture capital-funded tech industry? Quite possibly.
But I’m done hiding other people’s mistakes for a living. It’s time to see what else is out there.