“We’ll just do some marketing.”

Why that sentence usually spells trouble.

I recently came across a LinkedIn post by Karolína Juráčková that captures the absurdity of our times perfectly. She was describing hiring for a marketing team. The first candidate could handle the full online mix and strategy, and thought about the business as a whole. She asked for CZK 320 an hour. The second could only click through social media and send emails – nothing beyond that. She asked for CZK 500.

Companies today often have no idea what they actually want from marketing, or how much to pay for it. They expect a full strategy and positioning on a budget that would not cover an average campaign. Or they want A-players but will only pay them out of commission.

From a product-management perspective, I run into this misunderstanding constantly. I walk into a company, development has just finished something new, and in the meeting room the magic sentence is spoken: “Right, the product is done – now we’ll do some marketing for it.”

In general I dislike the terms “marketing guy” and “we’ll do some marketing”. Most people imagine someone who simply takes the finished product and makes nice pictures, writes website copy and posts on social media.

But when, at that moment, I ask three absolutely basic questions:

1. Who exactly is your customer?
2. What specific problem do they have, and how does our product solve it?
3. How – and above all why – should they choose you rather than the competition?

A great silence falls. Nobody knows. The questions hang in the air until someone settles it with a saving idea: “Let’s find an aggressive salesperson, some sales ninja – they’ll sell it somehow.”

That is exactly the moment you walk into a dead end.

Marketing is not just communication

The cause is that our idea of marketing has been flattened to an extreme. It has shrunk to marketing communication alone – creating posts, managing social channels and setting up performance campaigns. Plenty of people think that is marketing. It is not. Communication is only its small executional part – the cherry on the cake.

At its core, marketing is not about creating content. It is a system and a decision-making process.

It is about where the company is heading. How it understands the market and how it wants to operate in it. How it connects the product with sales and with development (or production) so that it generates profit – by meeting the customer’s needs, as the textbooks say.

Real marketing, to exaggerate a little, asks the fundamental questions of life, the universe and everything. If you skip those questions and go straight to hiring someone to make pretty pictures for social media, your product will sooner or later hit a wall.

It does not matter how many buzzwords you put in the job ad. All that matters is whether you can connect the dots and see things through to a result. If your company only does marketing once the product is finished, it is high time to change that. A good marketer will ask you the same questions at the start anyway, in order to do their job. Otherwise they will target “everyone” – and therefore no one. Your communication budget goes up in smoke and nothing happens.

Translated from the Czech original, first published on Václav Duda’s Substack Produktový management prakticky.