There’s a lot of where advertising, marketing and tech have gone wrong on this blog, so what’s the right thing to do when you’re trying to sell your product?
There’s the basic stuff we need to answer. We want people to buy our product, to solve a certain need, and they will do so because we’ve figured out their motive. But there’s more to it than that: they need to know about you and your product for it to be even considered.
Let’s say you’ve made that great product. The product itself need not align to some vague notion of what your brand stands for. It probably has come from some spark of inspiration, refined through a process of innovation and R&D, and you know that it has real consumer appeal. Look at the ground-breakers, like the Apple Macintosh or the Iphone. Neither was borne from a rear-view mirror look at what Apple had done before. Both were about breaking new ground and creating categories, something that Apple isn’t really doing these days.
But once it’s created, then you should get your brand right. You might even build your brand around that product. Or you could build it around a personality.
I’ve read some of Bob Hoffman’s newsletters where he said ultimately a lot of customers aren’t going to care what your values are. Bob is right on some levels: for a lot of products, this isn’t going to come into it. However, with two products from rival brands being equal in most attributes, you’re going to go with the one you resonate with. Those values might be deep, but in some sectors they won’t be (your choice of juice or butter). They’ll be driven in part by what you believe others will make of you if you choose Brand X, more so if your ownership of Brand X is very visible. They might be driven by how it makes you feel. Maybe you like the look of the packaging of one of them more. But you should have every advantage you can get.
You should get your brand right, because there is such a thing as repeated exposures getting into an audience member’s memory, and if you can be consistent on your encounters with that person—visuals, customer experience, even sounds—then you stand a better chance than someone who doesn’t do any of these things. Your credibility is still going to be judged by how you come across.
Bob does say that fame and distribution are among the reasons someone might choose your product or service over a rival’s. He’s right there, too: people need to know your product exists. And if you’re a smaller firm, you won’t have Superbowl ad budgets. You might reach a tiny amount of people. But to that tiny amount, you still should look credible and desirable—and you should make your product readily available.
Whether you do it through advertising (which Bob says will get you fame with greater likelihood) or press coverage (harder to control, but it worked for Nike in its early days), the object is to get out there otherwise you won’t even be chosen.
That leads to my next point. Choose your media wisely. I’ve pointed out the problems with online advertising ad nauseam on this blog, principally because you can’t trust the numbers. You might also have a very real concern about your brand appearing next to another’s (like X, which surely holds too many negative brand associations to overcome—there’s a reason I call it OnlyKlans). I’ve pointed out how messages can get buried in amongst a lot of noise, be it other advertisements or junk entries in Google. Google itself is a pay-to-play platform now, which also has a risk of harming your visibility if you can’t match others’ budgets. In 2025, that noise includes “AI” or large language model-generated drivel. Therefore, a mix of media, online and offline, still might serve you the best, because I see trust in online sources dropping, especially with their failure to see to “AI”. The trouble is in finding which offline sources remain. And the ones that will give you the greatest exposure are, appropriately, the most famous. (This is why advertising in the Financial Times, even on their website, is relatively expensive.)
Media channels are very fragmented these days, and no one quite reaches the same level of fame as they would have done 25 years ago, for all sorts of reasons. And when it comes to publications, we all have fewer resources, which mean fewer stories get pursued. No one can claim the same audience share. That might mean you’ll need to hit more outlets than you ever did with your press campaigns—something PR Newswire aims to solve, but you may have your own ideas.
The old lessons that we learned pre-internet actually come in remarkably handy, and while we can’t take a 1990 strategy and expect it to work in 2025, they do help us get back to basics. Forget which website or platform is the latest flash in the pan: that’s never your first decision. Figure out how you’re going to reach your people and how you’re going to be famous to them as the one that’s solving their need, and just why they’ll choose you over your competitor.
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