Public Relations Basics | Creating a Product You Can (& Want to) Market

Your PR efforts don’t need to start until you have a product to market. That can start with creating a great product that customers want. With such a saturated market, how to do that is the big question.

Customers don’t often purchase a product that is the same as one they already purchase. The exceptions: when that identical product is cheaper, conveys a different message (for example, having a better brand name), or comes with better service.

While the first step to having a successful product is to create it, the second step is to actually market it. Most products will never be discovered without marketing or PR efforts. These efforts help your potential buyers and customers to discover your product or service.

As Seth Godin mentioned in Purple Cow, you don’t need an exceptional product, but you do need exceptional marketing. You don’t have to create an exceptions product, just one that is worth talking about. This is key in PR as well, since WOM is now something that can be considered a PR activity as well. With marketing and PR strategies and activities merging together online, this “exceptional marketing” requires exceptional PR, too. From Chris Murray’s summary of Godin’s book, found in The Marketing Gurus anthology,

Remarkable marketing is the process of building things into your product or service that are worth noticing. Not adding marketing to your product or service last minute, but understanding that if what you’re offering isn’t remarkable, it is invisible in the marketplace. (Marketing Gurus, pgs. 218-219.)

The old rule of creating products was to create something safe that was already on the market and doing well in the hopes that you could steal a little bit of the market away from the already present products. Now, we have to create products that customers want and can find. This means that our PR efforts to include making our product transparent, locatable, and easily acquired. With the old rule not having much weight in today’s marketplace, your best bet is to create a purple cow: a product that is unique enough to talk about who’s marketing makes it remarkable, that is, worthy of remarks.

Any company can come up with a great product idea. The lack of will to go forward with that product is what keeps many companies in the dust. Most companies want to create a product that people won’t talk about, a safe product that meets needs enough and is mildly successful. Why not create and market a product unlike others? Seth mentions that this doesn’t usually happen because companies are fearful of taking that risk.

Why create a product that blends into the background? Take advantage of other companies doing just that and create something that stands out.

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