Jeff Bezos: Put Your Energy Into Making A Great Product Not Into Marketing

Before if you were making a product, the right business strategy was to put 70% of your attention, energy, and dollars into shouting about a product, and 30% into making a great product. So you could win with a mediocre product, if you were a good enough marketer. That is getting harder to do. The balance of power is shifting toward consumers and away from companies…the individual is empowered… The right way to respond to this if you are a company is to put the vast majority of your energy, attention and dollars into building a great product or service and put a smaller amount into shouting about it, marketing it. If I build a great product or service, my customers will tell each other.

Quote by Jeff Bezos taken from a Charlie Rose invterview (http://www.charlierose.com/view/content/11138)

I’ve always been a “product guy.” I don’t disrespect what great marketing can do for you, but there are too few Don Draper’s in the world and too many Duck Phillips.

I’ve run marketing groups, business development, working on public relations campaigns and drug my tired self up and down the east coast trying to convince the “big guns” of old media to write about our product. I did my first press tour in NYC in 1991, back when I was with NCR and had no clue what I was doing.

Having a great product by which I mean a product that consumers really care about is worth more than 100 pundits, analysts and press releases. Focus on the product. Focus on the product team and how they are building. Make sure they love what they are doing. If the product team doesn’t love their job and what they are building, how can you ever expect your customer to love it?

Success starts and ends with product. You can prop up your numbers for a while with advertising spend but in the end if the product doesn’t cut it no amount of marketing will save it. Anyone bought a Microsoft Kin lately?