You’re talking about gaming. Completely different beast.

No point in having product sit on shelves. If you’ve got an okay product, then invest in marketing to move it!! It’s that simple.

You can have the most functional product in the world but if you cant sell it its worth nothing

The reality is as long as the packaging looks good, the product can be subpar.

There’s always time to make it better, but it’s not a necessity if its profitable.

It’d be nice to have the complete product that performs amazingly in the beginning, but more often than not that feedback loop is necessary to improve it.

It’s an interesting catch 22. If its a good enough product then you don’t need to market it, is true to a degree. If we replace the word market with getting users / testers, then the feedback loop requirement is met & not only will the product improve but it’ll not need excess marketing.

In order to have money to spend on product building, you need people to spend money.

If people don’t buy your product. It doesn’t matter what % you’re spending on marketing vs product. You’re going bankrupt.

If the best product always won, we would have never used VHS.

Quick buck vs LT view.

But really there shouldn’t be a total trade off. I’m an ex ceo and ex cro and have to admit, the game has changed in my world (b2b tech). Now the buyer wants to do their research, deal with experts not BDRs, and they want to have confidence they’re partnering with the right providers. There’s also a trend in “build it yourself” given how efficiently and well companies can build technology.

If I have to rationalize dollars, I take the long view and try to be scientific about each penny, like yield management in the airline business. Instead of butts in seats and maximizing yield, we do that with investment allocations for outcomes. To be fully complete you need to incorporate the non financial “soft” things like reputation, brand, how it affects hiring, you name it.

But in practice most companies are weak and the people at then just don’t want to get fired.

From working in large companies there are a few things, 1: marketing is easy to spend on and always gets results (or vague results that appear to be helping) vs product development is expensive and doesn’t always work out with a lot of sunk cost risk 2: people that run marketing tend to be very personable as they are sales people. They tend to do a better job selling to leadership that they need more budget. 3: marketing is easily hired out to 3rd party contractors who can do the whole marketing plan for you without much employee involvement. Whereas product development requires you to be really effective at running your company, team cohesion, vision, etc.

In the case of Activision, it seems they have been challenged with development for years now so they doubled down on the part that was easy for them to execute, as they struggled to retain talent and develop product.

You make up for a mediocre product with good marketing. You can spend all the money in the world on product but at some point you get diminishing returns. Look at every super hero movie they have more $$ than brains to spend on the product and yet the movies are still subpar.

Marketing is about exposure per $ so you can get a lot of eye balls to help sell through the mediocre product.

Look no further than Patron and Beats. Also any product that you can only do so much product development, like Supreme or Luxury eyeglasses, or luxury anything really. At some point, people won’t pay more for better quality but they will for vanity, which is the main point of marketing outside of step 1 awareness.

This has been the most helpful thread I’ve seen in a long time. It really is a marketing centric world. I think any budget should be 70% marketing, 30% product.

They think they’ll make more profit by spending more money in those areas.

With some exceptions, and within reason, every dollar spent in marketing will give you higher ROI and lower risk than every dollar spent on product development.

I see this all the time working in the eCommerce sector. And tbh the only way to truly fail is to go to either side of the extreme.

Saw a startup basically do 90% on development to make a sick product. They thought “build it and they will come” and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. Ran out of budget to sell & market, so they ended up having to be acquired by another company for pennies on the dollar who did have the gunpowder for marketing.

Then you have the private label brands or companies who just barely “make” a product, but they already have a celebrity partnership lined up and all this elaborate marketing. That will appear to work right out of the gate, but since the product tends to be bad or nothing new it will fizzle out with no repeat sales.

Every brand I worked with who succeeded was somewhere between the two.

because distribution, not product is king. If you build it, they will not come

Yyyeeepp… None of them were taught that customer retention is a lot cheaper than just marketing to new people and then disappointing the new people.

And beyond that it’s a huge waste. Think of all the HP printers that are in the landfill right now that worked for a year and then clogged.