1. Product: product managers or an engineering team are usually product owners.
2. Place (distribution): this is the responsibility of business development or sales.
3. Price: usually this is determined by sales or product managers.
4. Promotion: This is left to marketers. Unfortunately, their entire scope is limited solely to advertising.
Of course, the skillsets needed for all the Ps may be too enormous for marketers. Nonetheless, startups should involve marketing in all these aspects. This will help ensure the right type of customers are acquired and the brand will grow stronger.
The product: keep it simple and address a particular need
Very often the product is designed and developed by incredibly gifted technical people. However, they simply are not close enough to the real pain points of consumers. This applies, for example, in the case of VR equipment, which has not been such a big hit as was anticipated because for many people VR doesn’t really solve a problem they face in daily life.
When marketing is not involved, there often appear features that ruin the user experience of otherwise excellent products. So forget about such cool features; what really makes a product successful is that it provides a simple solution to a real problem, according to a blogpost on the website of the INSEAD business school.
The product team and marketing people should work together from the very beginning of the initial concept. The product manager is there to take care of product requirement documents and testing; the marketing manager needs to understand the market, then ensure the product will solve a real pressing need and that the unique positioning of the product is identified.
-jk-