The Role of Marketing in a Start-Up

I know a company with a very energetic and smart marketing person who managed to spend the first six months of her tenure without any impact on the top line of the business. Everything she did she did well. But she was asked to focus on the wrong things: changing logos, changing product names, etc. Which compels me to write a few lines about what I think marketing should do for a start-up.

The best marketing, of course, is a great product. Great products sell themselves --if and once people know about the product and how the product can help them. This, in my mind, defines the marketing function. The primary role of a marketing person ought to be to provide feedback from the market to the product team to ensure that the product is great and sells itself. The second role ought to be to make sure that the right people know about the product. The third role, the one I want to focus on, is perhaps the one that is less talked about, and one which offers a lot of room for creativity: making sure that potential customers know how the product can help them. This means bridging the gap between the company's or products' capabilities (let's call this supply) and customers' needs (demand). This gap can be non-trivial, and is often changing. A good marketing person will constantly be building bridges between supply and demand. For example, a company that supplies search engine marketing technology, including keywords that are relevant to a marketer's offer, can meet the demand of marketers seeking search engine marketing help. But it can also supply marketers seeking to reach the fast-growing and mostly untapped latino audiences, it can help the little tapped market of Spanish marketers, it can help companies include the right keywords to have their press releases found by a majority of searchers looking for their products and services, and it can help website designers figure out which words to include in their customers' sites for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes: ensuring their sites are found by prospective customers. But few prospective customers looking for any of those applications is likely to realize that a company which develops SEM technology has the solution they need. It is thus part of Marketing's job to package the underlying technologies into as many products or wrappings as are necessary to directly address each of the audiences who can benefit from them. This is particularly important for a start-up, which typically does not yet know which of several potential target markets will give its products or services a warmer reception.