It’s the Product, stupid.
Mark Hughes, the chief marketing guy for Half.com before it got bought by eBay and the author of Buzzmarketing, came to speak at DreamIt on Tuesday. His talk was surprisingly great, as I have a somewhat large distaste for marketing, and here’s why: he said no amount of marketing can make up for a bad product. In fact, he says he will refuse consulting contracts from companies who admit their product is not as good or better than the competitions. Sales will go down.
Jim Young, co-founder and former CEO of HotOrNot.com, came in to DreamIt to speak yesterday, and someone asked him, “How can you improve your viral coefficient?”. His response was perfect: Who cares? If you have a great product, people will talk about you. If not, all the people your “viral” product draws in will never come back.
We saw this at Etsy as well. Etsy had fantastic content (Ooooh, pretty pictures!) and a good Product. And people talked and blogged and linked to Etsy. Then came news media (like the NY Times) and eventually TV media (Martha Stewart, Good Morning America). We didn’t pay a PR firm or buy Google AdWords or even do SEO*. And you know what? 50% of Etsy’s traffic is referral traffic, 25% is from search engines, and 25% is direct.
A lot of companies get distracted by marketing strategies, business development, advertising campaigns, or search engine optimization. If your CEO is by nature a marketer or biz dev or MBA, be careful. They will naturally want to do what they like, what they are good at, and what they have a fine tuned understanding of. Someone needs to remember: lipstick on a pig doesn’t change the pig.
*Now that Maria has taken over as CEO, she has gone and paid for those things.
sara girlscantell said,
July 23, 2009 @ 1:58 pm
i couldn’t agree with you more.
(and i still laugh when i come across paid ads from etsy.com, because it’s so ridiculous and unnecessary. that’s one thing the community has always demanded and is just dumb, dumb, dumb.)