I have been having a number of discussions with some business incubators and the companies that have been incubated by them. General feeling in this community is that they don’t need marketing and they are not at a stage where they have to look at marketing. Their model is, let the technology evolve and then we will hire a PR and Advertising agency and go for a big-bang launch of their product/service.

How so wrong, and how so misguided they all are!  This is one of the reasons why there are more failures than successes. This is what I famously keep referring to as Marketing Excess Vs. Marketing Success. Marketing, if employed right from the seed stage is probably the one thing that will prevent  your company from becoming unsuccessful.

Never mind, they have a wonderful idea and the technology works well, but they wouldn’t know if the customers want them and they haven’t gotten into the skin of the game except perhaps some dipstick survey or focus group interviews. These groups are also typically handpicked people that aren’t a clear representation of potentially paying customers .

Essentially, there is a huge gap in the startup ecosystem in terms of understanding the importance of marketing.  It works down to the following things:

• Marketing works irrespective of the size of the company or the size of the budgets
• Marketing is not about throwing dollars out of your window and it is about customer acquisitions
• Technology is simpler in comparison to customer acquisitions; hence marketing that is related to customer acquisitions should be given as much priority or more in comparison to technology
• The complete cycle of creating technology to finding paying customers needs marketing to make it happen
• Focus towards growing your business and not award winning launches when it is too late  

customer acquisition dipstick survey focus group interviews marketing budgets marketing excess marketing readiness marketing success product launch startup ecosystem startup marketing