Startup Marketing: When Less is More

It might sound counter-intuitive, but for a fast-growing Internet technology company, sometimes less marketing is better. Before you disagree and point me to the examples of runaway startup marketing success such as Dropbox, Pinterest or Fab.com, please let me explain what “less” really means and the pros and cons of doing “less” marketing.

There are 3 way “less” marketing means for me:

 

• Less attention from the general press (in some specific cases, less attention from the tech blogosphere)
• Less coverage of the marketing tactics and marketing channels
• Less promotion, less $ spent to acquire new customers

First, let’s just point out all the issues with adopting “less” marketing:

 

• If we do not spend a whole lot of time getting the blogosphere and media attention, we will not get much press, we will not get the desired TechCrunch “bump” in traffic so crucial to many startups. We won’t get nice reviews done by Walter Mossberg on the WSJ that drive thousands of new customers to sign up.
• If we do not use or spend enough on multiple channels, including of course Google AdWords, a smattering of blog-based display ads, or even some mobile ads, we would risk not generating the momentum and growth that we need to demonstrate to our next round investors of our runaway success. As a result, we might just run out of funding and have to close shop.
• Without press coverage and sufficient presence on the market, we will lose the first mover advantage, and will have a hard time differentiate ourselves against our competitors. (who will undoubtedly spring up right after any first mover)
• Lacking presence and hype in the market, it would be increasingly hard for us to recruit top-tier talents, especially developers talents, who spend most of their waking hours online.

So aren’t we shooting ourselves in the foot with this pig-headed idea that we should do less marketing? Here comes some counter arguments to think about:

 

• In a recent interview, marketing guru Regis McKenna, whose all encompassing Apple marketing strategy I had reverently wrote about, said “Less attention is better,” and cited the example of the Big Blue 1984 ad run by Apple as an example of where “More” is worse – the ad generated a lot of attention, but it did not generate the right type of reaction in the desired type of customers. It grabbed all the attention, it drove away corporate buyers, and became the iconic representation of the Mac, even as Apple was losing money. Attention actually makes it harder to segment the product.
• More attention, more promotion leads to a lot of new customers or sign-ups, which we tend to thing is always a good thing. Not so for a scrappy, fast-growing startup. The product probably still needs some tweaking (even after an extremely successful beta launch), the company needs to figure out the rest of the whole product experience package: customer onboarding, customer training, customer services. Imagine trying to recruit people for these positions, while training them at the same time, and expecting them to deliver the perfect customer experience to the hordes of early adopters who flock to our service after a mention in the press. Somehow, it tends to disrupt more than benefit the company.
• As McKenna also points out, “attention” is impossible to segment, because attention is not driven solely by needs or usage intent. When a company opens the floodgates too early to get the coveted mass of customers for the elusive “network effect,” it is surrendering a lot of its control over the customer experience and product direction, because it will have to start responding to the customers’ needs, its product road map starts to branch into different specific directions, based on how the customers’ feedback and influence are going.
• Avoiding lack of segmentation is also the reason why we should not spend a whole lot to acquire new customers and cover the full spectrum of modern online advertisement. With the typical startup-level amount of resources dedicated to marketing, it is going to be impossible to run, manage, analyze and optimize many marketing channels, for multiple segments at the same time (especially if we do not know the segment extremely well). More likely than not, spending more and doing more marketing might actually make it worse because the complexity renders any performance measurement impossible.
• The last advantage in laying “low” is that we do not wake lumbering competitors up, and we also do not build such massive hype and expectation (the Color app first launch comes to mind), that when we inevitably fail to deliver that high expectation, we risk a major backlash and subsequent lapse into irrelevance. Again, if we do not spend a whole lot on market exposure efforts, we will be able to control the expectation, avoid sending a massively threatening (but toothless) message to our potential competitors, and generally be able to launch and hone the product, build a loyal, responsive community of customers in peace before scaling up to the next level.

The startup and early expansion phase of a company invariably is the “War” phase, to borrow the Peacetime CEO vs Wartime CEO terminology invented by Ben Horowitz. Sometimes we might feel that marketing strategy is the drum corps, the shock troops of the market battlefield essential to ensuring victory. But as Sun Tzu says “To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill” — i.e., sometimes Less is More.