Your Product is Your Marketing

In 1994, I attended a company meeting where I boldly made a presentation and declared that “everything we do is marketing.” 

The more paranoid in the room immediately thought, ”uh oh, this looks like a power grab.”  What they didn’t get was, “Hey guys, if the customer has a bad experience because the lanes break down or the food is of poor quality or the bathrooms are dirty, then that PRODUCT experience is our MARKETING.  

What our customers would leave with, I said, is the experience of the product and what they will say to their friends is our marketing.   

They never got it. Two years later they sold the company.

Years later we face the same issue about marketing where many proprietors think that our marketing is about the Internet.

With all due respect, let me set the record straight.

If you think the Internet is about how many clicks you got on your offer or Facebook ad, you’re missing the point.

If you think the Internet is about how far up on Google search’s first page you achieved you’re missing the point.

If you think the Internet is just inexpensive advertising or a substitute for direct mail, you’re really missing the point.

If you think the Kids Bowl Free program, which was "birthed and nurtured"  in conjunction with the people on our BBBI team, is about two free games a day, you also miss the point. KBF,  THE PRODUCT, was the marketing.

Our product is the delivery of coupons via the Internet to an audience that gave us permission to send it to them and it scaled to over 1.4 million kids this year and over 4 million kids since inception.

When TV and radio and newspapers were king, all advertisers had to do was come up with a product that satisfied people’s needs and spend, spend, spend as much as they could afford on advertising. Those with the most money usually won.

Today marketing is about the product. Truth be told, YOUR PRODUCT IS YOUR MARKETING

What do you think?