There are no moats you can build with features or services alone. Your competitors can copy anything you ship. Instead, you have to differentiate through values. Through messaging. Through brand and storytelling.
What makes this hard, though, is when you get bogged down in the literal.
It’s your job to tell the story of what your product will be. What value it will bring to customers in the long term. What does your brand stand for? What journey are your customers about to embark on?
Just talking about the live state of your product won’t give them that answer. Sure, it’ll give them the story so far. But your company probably has an exciting vision for the future, both for itself and what the world looks like, so you need to paint that bigger picture.
The challenge here is that there’ll always be someone on the team who’ll push for your message to be fully grounded in the literal.
“That feature isn’t live in every market yet”
“Our competitors are way better at that.”
“We’re six months away from where we want to be in that area.”
But as a product marketer, you have to push past that and get creative. I’m a big advocate of product marketing (and marketing in general) going out with a message at least six months - perhaps even 12 - ahead of the product. By this, I mean that you should align with your product teams on what the product vision is, and then get started talking about the value this will create for your customers. Don’t wait for the product to be ready, start talking about this value right now.
To do this, you’ll need to abandon the literal and get creative. Tell the story of the product that your customers will be enjoying this time next year.
It’s not really marketing if we just state the facts, is it?
(Caveat: This shouldn’t be your only approach to storytelling. Be good at the here and now, too. And it’s important not to oversell in certain channels - like your sales team, for example. I’m just saying to get comfortable breaking free from the literal!)
For the sceptics, consider that it takes months of awareness for new customers to even evaluate your product. And then it’s likely to be a few months after they’ve spoken to sales or signed up to your website before they really dig into your product. And for existing customers, you need to reassure them that you have a vision and a plan to consistently add value to your product over the coming months, so it’s worth sticking around.
A good use case for ‘escaping the literal’ right now is the topic of AI. Every tech company needs an AI strategy - but also an AI story. There will be those who get stuck on the definitions or the technical limitations. And there are those who embrace it and run with it. But if you look at the companies at the forefront of the movement, they’re selling a vision of the future.
A startup called Humane went viral a few weeks ago with its groundbreaking wearable AI pin. It’s still very early days for this product category, but the company is getting great share of voice thanks to its aspirational storytelling about what the world will look like, years from now.
Or take Google, which came back swinging yesterday with Gemini, the company’s natively multimodal AI model. This was a generally brilliant product marketing launch, but you’ll see that they’re not being held back by the literal either. Is it perfect yet? Of course not. In fact, there’s a big emphasis on this being ‘the first version’, but time is of the essence when it comes to AI and who’s seen to be leading the pack, so a video that highlights the potential of the product is much more important.
Take some time to look at these product launches and hopefully you’ll get some inspiration on how to get more creative with your product storytelling, and not be held back by the current limits of your product. And please let me know how it goes.
Thanks! 👋
P.S. I’ll be offering some mentoring/coaching sessions in the new year, for product marketers of any level. If you’re interested, just reply to this email and we can get chatting about an intro session.
Awesome insight. Not being afraid to sell forward is huge. Puts a date on when things need to be ready also. Eliminates that delivery creep that can set in with R&D teams.