Our Product-First Philosophy

Yes, we at Metacake consider ourselves philosophers. Not exactly cut from the same mold as Aristotle and Socrates, but we’ve been known to philosophize about a thing or two.

Minus the togas.

A lot of companies separate marketing and product design. They’ll market whatever product you bring to them. “Bring us a product,” they say. “And we’ll bring you the people.”

At Metacake, we approach marketing from a product design perspective. But, what exactly does that mean?

Product Design First

Our philosophy says identifying the right audience is part of the product design process.

If you’ve properly researched your audience and designed the product with that audience in mind, marketing can be as simple as telling that audience your product exists.

Of course, research and assumptions aren’t always dead on.

If they were, every product would be a home run, every business owner would be a millionaire, and every marketer would be considered a genius.

That’s why analytics, optimization and audience feedback come into play. We can then take that data and refine the product to fit your customers need…and then tell them about it.

We Don’t Just Market Anything

If someone comes to us to market a product that we haven’t designed ourselves, we conduct our own assessment to determine if we think it can be successful.

Is it a good product? More importantly, will the audience think it’s a good product? Is there a need for it?

If we believe the answer to these questions is “yes,” we’ll market it. If the answer is “no,” we won’t.

We won’t take money just to get eyeballs on a product. We need to believe the product can actually be successful. That means focusing less on marketing tactics and more on understanding the audience. And designing a great product for that audience.

Real marketing savvy shines through in the messaging and delivery mechanism, not tactics.

Efficient Marketing

It’s easy to spend millions of dollars on marketing so everyone will know about your product, and many companies do just that.

But it’s far from efficient. And it’s kind of a crapshoot.

You could spend all of that money telling the world about your product…but what if your product doesn’t fill a need the world is interested in? Well, let’s just say you ‘re out a few bucks.

It’s easy to design an email and blast it out. Buy a list and blast it out. Buy ads and blast them out. But when you take that approach, you spend most of your time trying to convince people that they need a product.

Our philosophy is much more efficient. We would rather design a product with a specific audience in mind, and tell that audience that this new product exists to fill a certain void in their lives.

Instead of trying to push a product down people’s throats and banging them over the head 400 times with an ad, we’re simply delivering a product that has value to the audience. Marketing becomes so much easier, because the audience actually wants the product. We don’t have to convince them

And that’s the key driver behind our product-first philosophy – offering a product that has real value.

Then it sells itself.