How to Avoid an Identity Crisis as a Product Marketer

Product Marketing’s identity crisis can spiral into a product marketer’s identity crisis really quickly

Question 1. What comes to your mind when I say Apple? The new-gen products it builds or the exclusivity/elitism associated with owning an Apple product?

Question 2. What comes to your mind when I say Samsung?

You get the drill.

I’m pretty sure your mind connected Apple products to a state of exclusivity or even elitism termed as “cool”, while Samsung was its tech-savvy, best-in-class yet nerdy competitor which did not have much of a social status to show for.

Am I right? Or am I right?

A great deal of why an awful lot of people think this way is because Apple has mastered the art of Product Marketing. Positioning itself as a premium product which when purchased would directly inflate your social status. Do you think that’s a coincidence? Nope. That’s genius product marketing at play.

Hi! If you’ve read this far, go ahead, challenge my opinions, or leave a mean comment. Just kidding. Stick around and maybe read the whole thing and then maybe we can have a virtual cuppa over some product marketing banter (?)

So Product Marketing suffers from a bit of an identity crisis at every place I’ve looked. From stealth start-ups to early-age start-ups to medium and big-size firms. But WHY? Marketers have been marketing products for decades now and yet when one is asked “As a product marketer, what do you actually do?”, we fumble and jumble. And I’m not saying that’s because we don’t know what we’re doing or what our KPIs are, it’s purely because Product Marketing looks so different across different products/companies. That’s precisely why nobody knows where to put the product marketing team. With the Product team or Marketing team? Or both? Or neither?

Well, the answer is neither.

Where product marketing should be placed depends on a myriad of factors like the type of product, their demographics, in those demographics which user and buyer personas are being targeted, are these personas of potential customers or existing customers, and to achieve that where is the product marketer placed in the marketing funnel.

Leading to this is the following image where you can see that product marketing lies at an intersection of Product, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. Because a product marketer aligns with all the aforementioned teams to achieve different goals and KPIs, and of course to market a product successfully.

The spectrum that PMM now needs to work across is humungous and often times they are spread thin. Barring the fundamentals, there is not a lot that remains the same and PMMs often have to navigate their careers based on past learnings and intuition. Because you won’t know if you’ll like working on a particular product in a particular industry until you’ve done that before.

Oftentimes, young product marketers struggle when trying to switch jobs because they have possibly worked/owned the entire marketing funnel but on the surface level. Let’s face it, you cannot have worked on each sector of the funnel to the level of perfection until and unless you have spent years doing it. I myself have had a tough time determining what niche I’d want to pursue in Product Marketing because there’s always a lot happening that “PMMs own”.

Let’s break down how a PMM’s (product marketing manager’s) role differs according to which team they belong to - the Product Team or the Marketing team. Here’s a comparison of what it would look like -

You could always alter the above chart to add or remove your tasks based on your product’s needs, but in the meantime, you can use this as a blueprint to understand where you lie in your current/dream job and what you’ll be doing.

Now let’s talk about the difference in the role of a product marketer when it comes to selling say B2B v/s B2C. Needless to say, both demand different approaches from a product marketer. While B2B focuses on industry-specific, data-driven, and relationship-based approaches, B2C massively emphasizes mass appeal, simpler messaging, and establishing an emotional connection. Here’s a comparison table -

In a nutshell, B2B sales collaboration is more consultative in its approach with longer sales cycles and multiple decision-makers. Whereas, B2C is pretty much straight-forward, focusing directly on an individual customer hence leading to shorter sales cycles and swift decisions.

Lastly, I’ll talk about the difference it creates in a PMM’s job responsibilities based on where they are placed in the marketing funnel: TOFU, MOFU, BOFU, all of them, some of them.

Your role, responsibilities, and KPIs will vary highly based on where on the marketing funnel are you placed. As a product marketer it’s your job to adapt to the strategy or create one for the stage you’re at in the marketing funnel and further align your goals with it in order to achieve your KPIs.

Following these blueprints will definitely help you evaluate what you do as a product marketer, where you are headed, where you want to go, and what you’ll need to do in order to reach there. So while we can’t always define Product Marketing’s identity, we can define what is yours as a product marketer. :)