When Product Design is actually Marketing.

As an entrepreneur in the software business, I get to (have to) touch all things: product (of course), marketing, sales, finance, legal, operations and support. One of the parts I most enjoy is marketing. That probably wouldn’t sound strange at all, except that my background is techie all the way. I started out as a hobbiest and when I started professionally, I rose up through the ranks of the development domain fairly quickly, ending up as head of development for the last 3 companies I worked for, before I started Devshop. Now as head of development I suppose I was no longer a pure techie anymore, so that explains some of my fascination with marketing. Since, as an executive, you represent your particular function, but also have to play nice with the other executives running the other functions, so you get exposed to a lot of non-development disciplines.

I now find myself in a position where marketing is one of my key responsibilities. So, like learning anything new, I run around soaking up knowledge and experience where ever I can find it. I have a coach or two in this area, plus a pile of my own thoughts and theories as a “marketing-outsider”. I get to benefit from established best practices to kick start my own marketing processes, but having no formal marketing background myself, I also get to test and challenge some assumptions and conventional marketing wisdom here and there – and I get to you know, plead ignorant to a certain degree because as I said, I don’t have any formal marketing training and therefore can’t possibly be expected to know better!

So in thinking about marketing programs for my company, I see things breaking down into 3 categories:

• Traditional programs – advertising, events, promotions, etc.
• Newer “web marketing” programs – blogging, online community participation, the YouTube phenomenon, etc.

and the odd-ball of the group:

• Product design – wait… huh? When did product design become marketing?

I’m not just talking about the concept that “better designed products sell better” – sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. There are a lot of factors. But I’m talking about something much more tangible.

We’re smack dab in the middle of one of those P-A-R-A-D-I-G-I-M shift thingies. (Yes I spelled paradigm wrong on-purpose.) Most of us in the industry at this point have seen the power of social software. We’ve seen applications like Facebook, Basecamp, Flickr, blogging tools and so forth take off like wild fire. Sure, they’re pretty simple, elegant tools that serve a real need. But I would attribute their success to something much more fundamental: they all increase in value, the more you interact with people around you. Basecamp is about collaborating with a team. Flickr is about sharing with others. Facebook is about keeping in touch with others. Blogging tools are about sharing and (via the blog roll) associating with others. It seems that the social nature of these applications drive the meteoric adoption rates we’re seeing, far better than ANY other marketing program ever could.

If marketing is all about getting your product (or service) into the hands of customers, then making your software highly social is in direct support of marketing – I dare say, a marketing program in-and-of-itself.

We’re seeing that with things like information overload, too many products in every product category, too many choices, that good ol’ fashioned referrals are certainly one of the most effective ways of getting your product into the hands of more customers. Today, the easiest way of making a product choice is contacting a buddy and asking, “what do you use or like, and why?” That’s what I would call a “pull” referral. Someone asked for help in making a selection. Then there’s what I call “push” referrals – someone “invited” someone to particpate in using a product.

That said, there are many things you can do to bake-in the referral process into your software. Invitation capabilites are great – tell a friend, invite a friend, create an account for a friend… There are things you can do to your product design that make it increase in value for each user, the more friends or colleagues that each user invites or brings along for the ride. And the great thing about this kind of product design is that it enhances customer value AND serves as a powerful marketing vehicle (especially compared to advertising, which is largely considered a drain and necessary evil by most users of software).

This is why I consider the social elements of product design a marketing function as much as a product development function. In some product categories, it has even completely displaced other marketing programs such as advertising, as we see certain products gaining traction with what the owners call “zero traditional marketing spend.”

So there you have it. All you product developers out there, you’re actually marketers in disguise! (na na). At least, you should be.