The Importance of Marketing
Builders often treat marketing like something that happens after the real work is done.
First you build the product. Then, once it exists, someone writes the website, polishes the pitch, prepares the launch, and figures out how to sell it.
I think that is backwards.
Marketing is not just promotion. Marketing is how the customer understands the product. It is how the product becomes legible. It is how a person moves from "what is this?" to "this is for me."
Tony Fadell has a useful way of framing this: the customer only sees what they see through the lens of marketing. That does not mean tricking people. It means the story, positioning, naming, packaging, pricing, onboarding, and product experience all shape what the customer believes the product is.
If the story is weak, the product feels weaker than it is. If the story is clear, the product has a chance to be understood.
Marketing Starts Before Launch
Great marketing starts while the product is being shaped.
This is one of the biggest lessons I have learned working across healthcare, AI, hardware, mobile apps, and founder-led products. The best marketing is not pasted on at the end. It is discovered alongside the product.
Who is this for?
What pain are we naming?
What old behavior are we replacing?
What category does the customer put us in?
What promise can we make honestly?
What must they believe before they care?
Those are product questions and marketing questions at the same time.
Fadell's point that technology should be in service of the customer matters here. Too many technology-led teams talk about the what. They talk about the model, the architecture, the cleverness, the automation, the patents, the pipeline, the benchmark. But customers usually buy the why. They buy the outcome, the identity, the relief, the status, the trust, the momentum.
The what matters. But the why creates meaning.
Marketing Forces Clarity
One reason marketing is so important is that it exposes fuzzy thinking.
If you cannot explain the product clearly, there is a good chance the product itself is not clear enough yet.
This does not mean every product needs a simplistic tagline. Some products are complex. Healthcare is complex. Deep tech is complex. AI workflows can be complex. But complexity is not an excuse for confusion.
Good marketing asks for precision:
- Who exactly is the customer?
- What is the acute pain?
- Why does the current solution fail?
- What changes after using the product?
- Why now?
- Why should the customer trust us?
When a team cannot answer those questions, the product usually suffers too. The roadmap becomes scattered. The ICP shifts every week. Sales invents a different story on every call. Engineering builds features without a clear hierarchy. Design optimizes flows without knowing what value moment matters most.
Marketing is not the paint. It is part of the architecture.
The Product and the Story Shape Each Other
One of my favorite ideas from Fadell is that marketing should inform the product and the product should inform marketing.
That loop is where good product strategy lives.
When you write the story early, you discover product gaps. You realize the onboarding does not prove the promise. You realize the pricing does not match the buyer's mental model. You realize the feature you thought was central is actually supporting evidence. You realize the strongest benefit is not the technical capability but the emotional relief around it.
This has happened to me repeatedly.
In AI healthcare products, for example, it is tempting to lead with the technology: ambient transcription, LLM-generated notes, specialty-aware workflows, coding support, clinical assistants. All of that matters. But the clinician often cares about something more human: I want to finish my notes without staying late. I want to be present with the patient. I want less administrative drag. I want documentation that feels trustworthy.
That story changes the product. It pushes you to care about latency, editing, trust, defaults, specialty nuance, mobile access, and what happens after the visit. The marketing is not separate. It becomes a way of seeing the product through the customer's eyes.
Storytelling Is a Product Skill
Fadell mentions watching Steve Jobs hone the iPhone story over and over before presenting it publicly. That matters. The famous launch did not work because the slides were pretty. It worked because the narrative compressed years of product thinking into something people could feel immediately.
Storytelling is not fluff. It is sequencing.
What does the customer need to understand first? What tension do they already feel? What contrast makes the new product obvious? What language does the market already use? What language should we avoid because it creates the wrong frame? What do we show, and when?
Product managers should care deeply about this. A roadmap is a story. A product spec is a story. A launch is a story. An onboarding flow is a story. A sales demo is a story. A pricing page is a story.
The story does not replace the product. It helps the product land.
Marketing Is Also a Filter
Marketing is not only how you attract customers. It is how you attract the right customers.
This is underappreciated. Vague marketing creates vague demand. Vague demand creates noisy feedback. Noisy feedback creates a messy roadmap.
Clear positioning gives the product a sharper learning loop. It tells some people, "this is for you," and tells others, "this probably is not." That can feel scary because founders and product teams often want the market to be as large as possible. But in the early stages, broad positioning can be a trap.
A product gets stronger when it serves a specific pain extremely well.
Marketing helps define that boundary.
Marketing Builds Trust
In AI products, marketing has another job: it creates or destroys trust.
If you overpromise, the product feels unsafe. If you hide limitations, the customer will find them later and feel misled. If you use magical language for something probabilistic, you teach the customer the wrong mental model. If you pretend the AI is always right, you create risk.
Good AI marketing should be ambitious but honest.
It should explain what the product helps with, where the human stays responsible, what the system does with data, and why the customer can trust the workflow. This is especially true in healthcare, finance, legal, education, and any domain where mistakes matter.
Marketing is not just growth. It is expectation setting.
The Best Marketing Makes the Product Feel Inevitable
The highest form of marketing is when the customer hears the story and thinks, "of course."
Of course my phone should not need a physical keyboard.
Of course a thermostat should learn from me.
Of course clinicians should not spend their evenings writing notes.
Of course teams should be able to ask questions of their own knowledge base.
That feeling does not come from hype. It comes from naming a pain so clearly that the solution feels overdue.
This is why marketing belongs near the center of product building. It helps the team understand the customer, sharpen the promise, choose the right details, and build something that can be recognized when it finally reaches the world.
The best builders do not look down on marketing. They use it as a discipline of clarity.
Because the product only matters if people can understand why it matters.