Marketers like to scoff at the idea that a good product will sell itself. We like to convince ourselves that no matter how great an idea is, unless we have a hand in pushing it down the consumer’s throat, no one will care.

But let’s face it, if you were selling the cure to Cancer, it wouldn’t matter if you were pitching it from the back of a speeding truck, you’d still have to fight off lines of people nipping at your bumpers.

Why Marketers Exist

Sadly, no matter how important you think that your database driven group calendering system is, Penicillin it is not. That’s why you need Marketers to transform your generic Web 2.0 widget into something worth talking about.

So, now that we know why Marketers exist, lets return to the first point.

As a profession, we are absolutely wrong to think that products don’t have to sell themselves — especially if we are talking about web services. Marketing as a vector for user generation has always boiled down to a question of Money versus Time. The more money you have, the less time you need.

Most web startups have very little of column A and just a fraction more of column B.

That means, ladies and gentleman, the only thing standing between you and the Deadpool is . . . you guessed it, the product.

The most important metric for a young startup is the rate of internal referrals. If your users aren’t inviting their friends, it is time to start asking the hard questions. It’s also time to break down the reality distortion field you have built up against bad news. Let’s start with the easy ones –

No, things won’t pick op on their own.

No, your good press isn’t going to save you.

Yes, your user feedback is almost always more important than your “hunches” about user behavior.

Your Marketing team’s job is to shape your message, disseminate this to the public, and convince them to give your product a try. Their next responsibility is to figure out why everyone hates your application and tell you how to fix it. If the second part is ignored, the first part doesn’t matter — unless, of course, you have a boat load money to throw at the problem.

The lesson here?

Entrepreneurs, when Marketing tells you something is a problem, understand that fixing it is the only way they can do their jobs. Engineers, plan twice and cut once — if you deliver a buggy product, don’t expect Marketing to be able to be able to sell it to a jaded public.

And for you Marketers, remember you are not the center of the Universe and that no matter how much lipstick you put on a pig, it’s not going to become your Prom Date.

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