Video Transcript

Hi. I’m Dustin Clark. I’m the Senior Director of Strategy here at Element Three. Today, I want to talk to you about product, specifically that marketing cannot fix a product problem. So if you’re thinking about your product and how you take it to market, you could have a couple of issues, could be a demand issue, an awareness issue. That’s
something that marketing can help fix. It could be a targeting issue
or a conversion issue.

That’s also something that marketing can help fix. But if you’ve got a bad product,
investing in your marketing is probably not the route to go. The problem that you’re going to get from that is if you throw gasoline on the fire of marketing and rush a bunch of sales into a broken product, that might work for today, but three months down the road, six months down the road, people start leaving bad reviews on social, on software review sites, on Yelp, we’ve all done that search where we’re looking for a solution, and then we see the Google reviews and the one and a half stars and it gives us pause.

People got there because they didn’t fix what was broken and they just tried to get the quick-turn sale. If you’ve got a product that you’re consistently getting feedback on, doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, or there’s friction, then I would encourage you to invest first in listening to your audience, figuring out what they need, figuring out where the problems are, and fixing those problems first before you go to market.

Marketing can’t fix a bad product. Marketing can help an unknown product find new audiences and it can help audiences and products make a connection to where they desperately want to buy what you have to sell them. But if that thing is broken or imperfect, you’re going to want to invest in fixing it first before you create a bigger problem by creating negative brand awareness.