Founders. SMEs. Startup teams. The moment you mention MARKETING ... eyes ... the eyes, they start a-rollin' ...
They hear: Marketing. They understand: ADVERTISING. Logos, social posts, maybe a brochure.
Yeah, no ... that's roughly 10% of what marketing can ACTUALLY DO.
The other 90% is the part that decides whether your sales team has qualified leads or is cold-calling into the void. Market segmentation. Positioning. Pricing strategy. Channel design. Customer insights that shape product decisions. Competitive intelligence that informs where you play and how you win.
THAT is pure Go-To-Market — the entire marketing value chain from understanding your customer all the way to revenue.
Case-in-point: Segway. Or: How to become a case study for all the wrong reasons.
Brilliantly engineered. Awesome technology. Massive funding. Steve Jobs predicting it would be "as big as the PC." Wait! Steve could be wrong?
Ready to produce 500,000 units a year. Sold fewer than 30,000 in the first seven years. Why? Dean Kamen was so obsessed with secrecy that he prohibited his own marketing team from doing any market research. No customer validation. No pricing research. No target market definition. The result: a $5,000 product that nobody asked for, solving a problem most people didn't have.
The Segway didn't fail because the engineering was bad. It failed because no one did the real marketing work. The kind that would have told them their price was wrong, their audience was undefined. Oh, and many cities wouldn't allow these on sidewalks.
So when I get that eye-roll, I don't take it too personally. It just tells me there's a gap between what marketing means and what people think it means. You know ... the gap ... where growth is hiding ...?
Your experience, any anecdotes — good, bad, ugly?
