Marketing Strategy Process — Decide What to Build Before You Build

00要約Overview

01動機Why

The word marketing has gone thoroughly mainstream. Running ads, posting on social media, doing SEO — most people would call those marketing. But those all happen after the product exists. Marketing starts much earlier.

Once, "build something good and it sells" was the way. It isn't wrong, either. The single best product in the world probably sells itself. Motorsport works the same way: plenty of fast drivers never reached F1 — but not one driver who was overwhelmingly fast ever failed to. An app of overwhelming quality sells without a word of promotion.

The trouble is that most real products are merely good. And merely good doesn't sell. Ask anyone the world's tallest mountain: Everest, instantly. The second? Everest 8,848m, K2 8,611m, Kangchenjunga 8,586m. The heights barely differ — the fame and the fortunes differ completely.

The world is full of products that are equally good. So what to build must be decided first. Not "build well → it sells" but "find what sells → build that." The order flipped. That flip is what marketing means.

02方法How

What matters here: don't start from the product (the features). As Marketing Myopia warns, obsess over selling your own product and you lose sight of what the customer actually wants. People want the hole, not the drill. Define an airline as "a company that flies planes" and your competitors are airlines; define it as "a service connecting distant places" and Zoom competes with you; define it as "delivering wonder from places unknown" and movies and VR enter the ring. Competition is decided by the value you deliver, not the product you make.

So how do you find that value? If anyone could just see "what sells," marketing wouldn't exist as a discipline. You can't see it — which is why you loop: Research (understand the market) and STP (decide who gets what value), back and forth.

# The planning-phase loop
Research  ⇄  STP
        ↓
Value Proposition

Research and STP don't finish in one pass. Find a competitor, back to Research; change the target, redo STP. Around and around. Understanding the market is 3.1.1; analyzing it into a decision is 3.1.2.

03価値What

The strategy process does not produce a product.
It produces a decision: what should be built.

Who are you helping? What value are you delivering? Why will you be chosen? Only with those settled does design and development begin. Skip this stage and you land in "I don't know what to build," reaching for technologies, features, whatever AI or library you've been itching to use. But those are means. Marketing is not the science of building products that surely sell — it is the science of raising the odds.