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- Tony Fadell on how founders should think about marketing
Tony Fadell on how founders should think about marketing
In the clip below, Tony (co-creator of the iPhone and iPod) argues that you must be able to articulate the “why” of what you’re building before you build it:
“What normally happens is you have these brilliant engineers, designers, scientists, and researchers… they develop, develop, develop, and then at the end, they call in marketing and say, ‘Now tell a story about this and let’s get it out to the world’.”
Marketing will then try to create a story around this product, but it turns out to be a fictional story because the product was based on “whats” not “whys”.
“Stop impressing the geek next to you. What is the superpower you’re bringing or the pain you’re killing for your end customer?”
The product and the marketing both need to be created at the beginning together.
Fadell advises founders to think about marketing similar to how Hollywood approaches film promotion:
“A movie starts with a treatment. It has an audience. It says to the audience: here's the characters, here's the storyline, the plot, etc… Then it comes out, and then there's the marketing of the movie, and that story was created at the beginning. If you're gonna do a great product you need to create that treatment for your product. I call that the “Press Release”… who's the audience? What features do you have? What pains are you solving for people?”
Articulating this roadmap will keep everybody in sync and help you tell a cohesive, non-fictional story. Then hopefully the product overdelivers on that story.