Page 29 - Intercom On Marketing

MARKETING AS A DIRTY WORD
There’s a famous blog post from Fred Wilson, a co- founder of Union Square Ventures, titled nothing more than “marketing,” where he makes broad statements like “Marketing is what you do when your product or service sucks.”
This post is highly cited by product-focused people as one of their many justifications for not doing any marketing at all. If you build the perfect product, the theory goes, they (paying users) will eventually come to you. I’d argue that mindset is completely wrong. Anyone who thinks marketing can’t add value to and accelerate the growth of your business is just plain naive.
When I arrived at Intercom, a bunch of people were wearing marketing hats in disguise: Des (one of our co-founders) owned the blog, the product managers wrote product announcements, and Eoghan (our CEO) created the homepage of the marketing site. Everyone was doing “marketing”, but nobody wanted to acknowledge it. Why?
I think it comes down to a fundamental misunderstanding of marketing’s role. In the new world of SaaS, marketing should be involved at every
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