Product Marketing and Growth Marketing Defined

Product Marketing and Growth Marketing Defined. Both Product Marketing and Growth connect a company’s R&D and commercial departments. Enabling both the delivery of additional value to the market and the generation of revenue.

Product Marketing, for example, focuses more on producing value prior to the sale. Growth, on the other hand, is more concerned with creating value after the sale.

So, What is Product Marketing?

Product Marketing is a relatively new field and is an umbrella term for a range of activities within an organization. However, it is all about the value exchange, or what I refer to as the “Value Curve”.

The Value Curve is an upside-down U-curve that starts at the left-hand side with an idea and ends on the right-hand side with a purchase or transaction. The most important point in this curve is where the customer and company meet – the product’s value proposition.

And it’s this part of the curve that Product Marketing focuses on – how to build products that offer more value to customers so they can buy more from us, more often, and at a higher price.

Product Marketing is all about how we move along this curve, starting with generating great new ideas and then turning them into products that solve problems or deliver value to customers.

How Do We Achieve This?

Product Marketing focuses on the generation of ideas (the five Ps), the product development process (the four Ps), and on influencing both when it comes to execution (the two Ps) – all of which are critical to delivering more value to customers.

The Five Ps: We start by identifying areas of unmet need within target markets: what problems do our customers have that we could potentially solve? What are their aspirations? How could we use our expertise and resources to deliver solutions that customers would find valuable?

What is Growth Marketing?

Growth Marketing is about accelerating the delivery of new value to a market by developing and executing targeted growth strategies. It’s about placing tactical bets (or experiments) on where a company can create the most value for customers.

It focuses on executing those ideas and then measuring the results of these tactics in an effort to learn and repeat what works, and to stop doing what doesn’t. And while it’s often focused on online marketing, it can also be applied to conventional offline marketing tactics.

How Do We Achieve This?

Growth Marketing uses two critical components – Growth Hacking and Growth Channels. Both of which are essential to delivering more value to customers.

The Two Ps: To create new value in a company, we must experiment with both Products and Processes. And this is something Growth does extremely well. It focuses on experimentation, testing, learning, and adapting in order to achieve its goals. And it is this combination of creativity, rigor, and discipline that makes it so powerful.

So, it’s this approach that helps us deliver more value for customers. Hence, by finding new growth channels and experimenting with new ways of connecting with them. Just like Facebook advertising or SEO – both of which are good examples of online channels.

So, we can use it as part of our growth strategy. And these channels can be used to generate leads for sales teams, which would then convert into customers. In contrast, Product Marketing teams would typically use new product development to discover new channels for delivery or new ways of delivering existing products – for example, we might develop a new flavor or design a mobile app for our product or service in order to reach more people with greater ease.

Conclusion: What’s The Difference?

Product Marketing and Growth are both valuable disciplines within a large organization but they have different roles, responsibilities, challenges, and deliverables. Yet when managed well, they are both capable of delivering more value for customers – something that will ultimately help build your company’s brand…and increase its profitability.