Between a Rock- Product Management and a Hard Place- Brand: The Challenge for Product Marketing

Product marketing is often one of the first roles to get cut during a business downturn and I've often wondered why.  In reality the juggling act that product marketers must play is a challenging act of managing peers, executives, expectations and delivering marketing assets and programs that impact and enhance, product revenue.  At the center of the Product marketing role, from what I've seen, is a constant balance and tension between Product Management and Creative/Marketing Services.  One team designing and creating services and products for end-customers, the other a creative team designing assets, images and providing editorial services for the Product Market to go outbound with.  And why is there a natural tension between these two groups and Product Marketing?  It's pretty easy to see.

Given product marketing's role to deliver information to customers in an engaging an easily consumable fashion, we walk a tightrope between Product Management and Creative.  Product Management ideally has created features and offerings that will resonate in the market.  And they want to tell the whole world about it in a kitchen sink fashion.  But in the end, feeding features and benefits in a customer-friendly voice means bringing a prospect down a path that may take some time.  Telling your product story in a world filled with content, advertisements and social media means trying to get the attention of somebody who's nearly in ADD-mode.  So you must be succinct, you must be memorable and craft marketing content and copy that hits the mark and stays with your targeted audience.  Basically it's taking a big bag of "stuff" and ideas, and distilling it down to impactful ideas and imagery.

Once you have your content and copy, you need to get it produced in a variety of different assets within print and online.  You have to get it edited to make sure it stays within your brand voice and fits into the broader, corporate marketing umbrella.  And that line with Creative often gets blurry.  In their attempts to "clean up" or make the copy more "brand compliant", you often lose specific ideas, features and details that they think may be extraneous.  They may nix non-standard ideas and phraseology to toe the corporate line and in an attempt to keep content within brand.  And this line is often fuzzy and hard to define leading to content and ideas that have been inoculated and have lost their edge and effectiveness.  And when you've got 80 things to do today, you can't over-work and perfect any one project so you accept wants been returned to you and move on.

So that fine line between the kitchen sink approach of Product Management and perfectionist behavior of Creative often leaves Product Marketing in the precarious position of driving content and assets through the system in the most expedient and effective manner.  It's not about being perfect, it's about getting a compelling story to your audience in a multitude of ways.  And walking that tight-rope between these two key collaborators can be a huge challenge.  Just try not to fall off that tight-rope because as you can guess, doing so will lead to really unpleasant results!