By Poornima Mohandas | 2 min read

People often confuse product marketing with product management. While there should always be close collaboration between these two functions and some amount of overlap, it is important to call out the differences. 

Research firm, SiriusDecisions, now part of Forrester Research, has a very thorough model distinguishing the two roles, but I like to keep it very simple. 

With years of experience doing product marketing for multi-million dollar enterprise B2B products, keep in my mind my views and opinions are going to be coloured by that. This might apply slightly differently to the B2C world or to the hardware world.

Differences Between Product Management and Product Marketing

Here is how I like to look at it. Product Management listens to the market and builds products. Whereas Product Marketing talks to the market and positions products in the marketplace. 

Role of Product Management	Role of Product Marketing
Product manager listens to the market	Product marketing talks to the market
Responsible for building and testing a product that meets market requirements	Responsible for taking the product to the marketplace with the right positioning

You will see that in the Indian market, the product management function is a lot more mature, has been around longer, and has a significantly larger community of practitioners. On the other hand, Product Marketing is less mature, sometimes misunderstood, but is nevertheless a growing function as India has over 9,000 tech start ups and counting. 

Why Should You Care About Product Marketing?

So why should you care about product marketing? You may build a great product but how will the world know about your shiny new rocketship? How will the customers in your target market get to know about your rocketship and how it is different from the competition? This is where product marketing comes in. Product marketing crafts the message and works with the larger marketing to get the word out to different key audiences including:

• Customers and prospects
• Industry analysts and influencers
• Sales and inside sales
• Partners.   

Key Functions of Product Marketing

How does Product Marketing achieve this? Product Marketing does so through its five key pillars:

1. PRODUCT POSITIONING:

Define core positioning and messaging assets for products.

2. PRODUCT LAUNCHES AND RELEASES:

Plan and execute product launches in the marketplace. Communicate the value of major releases to customers, sales, partners, and analysts.

3. SALES ENABLEMENT:

Sales, inside sales, partner enablement through training, continuing education, competitive analysis, and sales collateral.

4. ANALYST ENGAGEMENT:

Impress and engage key industry analysts through briefings and vendor evaluation surveys like the Gartner Magic Quadrant and Forrester Wave.

5. DEMAND GENERATION SUPPORT:

Support campaigns, webinars, and events with product-related content and direction.

More on these in my upcoming posts. 

Guiding Principles of Product Marketing

As a product marketer you represent the product to both internal and external audiences. To make sure that you deliver relevant messaging that resonates with your audience, here are some guiding principles that I like to follow. Sometimes when you are stuck in a meeting room, between a rock and a hard place, these guiding principles can often help you navigate the situation. 

• Focus on value and benefit to the customer rather than feature and function

• Put the spotlight on the customer. This means less of me and more of you.

• Align marketing campaigns by buyer persona and buyer problems, not just products or services

• Leverage and build marketing assets to overcome your liabilities

Remember these guidelines principles are not ever-green, but forever evolving with the times. 

I hope you found this introductory post on product marketing, its definition, its differences from product management, its key functions, and some key guiding principles useful. What is product marketing according to you? Write back with your comments and feedback.