Product marketing vs. brand marketing: Separate your product or separate your users?
By Ken Rosen
Cadillac versus BMW
Neiman Marcus versus Macy’s
Macintosh versus PC
Dogs versus cats
Product marketing differentiates your products from other products. Brand marketing differentiates your customers from other customers.
Imagine walking on a solid, enormous, continuous surface presenting all the possible features of products in a category. Customers can and do wander anywhere along the surface: over here is higher quality, walk over there and the price goes down, walk over here and the product gets faster and more efficient. Product marketing inherently assumes this continuous surface connects all the products customers can consider as competitors.
Product marketers look for differentiation. They look for a spot on this surface they can own. And when things go exactly right, they look for customers to self-select based on a deep preference for that spot in the landscape.
In this sense, the Holy Grail for both brand and product marketing is differentiation. But how differentiation is defined in each case is very different.
