How product marketing creates a product-driven company

Marcus designs narratives, create a go-to-market strategy and launch products at HubSpot. Prior to HubSpot, he helped bring AdWords and YouTube products to market at Google and was part of the team that grew the startup Wildfire, which was acquired by Google in 2012.

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1.1 Time-Stamped Show Notes:

1.2 In-Short:

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Time-Stamped Show Notes:

[02:01] What is Vector Alignment?

[03:39] Why is an Identity important for a company?

[18:56] What’s your advice to startups thinking about product marketing for the first time?

In-Short:

Question: What is Vector Alignment?

Marcus: Yes. That whole idea came from, believe it or not, a camping trip that our founder of HubSpot, Dharma Shah, went on with Elan Musk, where Elon Musk told him all about his idea of vector alignment and how it’s the ultimate challenge for companies. And basically Elon Musk’s point was that everybody inside of a company has an energy and has an impact and they can vector that energy in a certain direction.

Question: Why is an Identity important for a company?

Marcus: I think identity is kind of a proxy for brands or cultures.When you’re starting a company and really understanding and creating it. You need to build it based on the people who work at your company, but you can create an identity. And I think just most companies really don’t think about it too much. And the ones that do, it’s clear that they do when it works, especially.

Question: What’s your advice to startups thinking about product marketing for the first time?

Marcus: It’s an investment. Sometimes I see it from startups where they do invest in product marketing early. Sometimes I see them added on later. There’s such a thing about software, especially in B2B software where I work. It’s just that every category is so crowded and it’s easy for these companies to spin up technology and it’s harder to find differences in functionality in your products specifically. So investing in products, marketing, storytelling, strategic narrative and narrative design early on is smart even if you don’t even know what you’re doing.

Sanjana Murali

Sanjana Murali is a Marketing Specialist at Hippo Video. She is an award-winning blogger, one of her articles on “Customer Success” was selected from worldwide participants and won her MVP 2019 award. She has learned the knack of ranking her blogs and website pages in the 1st result of Google Search from her 6+ years of writing and marketing experience. She is also the host of #Limitless webinar and podcast series at Hippo Video. She loves to talk about branding and marketing with videos. An eternal writer, words are her lifeline.