Chapter 5: Marketing
The Essential Investment
marketing, 5 Ps, product, price, position, placement, promotion, customers
I spent most of my career on the business development side. Marketing was home. And yet I was a little unusual in that world — I was a marketer with an accounting background, someone who could read a balance sheet in the morning and write positioning copy in the afternoon. Finance people trusted me because I understood the numbers. Marketing people trusted me because I understood what they were trying to do. That combination turned out to be more valuable than I expected.
I’m telling you this not to brag but to explain something that matters: marketing and finance are not separate departments that happen to coexist. They are deeply, fundamentally intertwined. Your marketing plan and your financial model have to talk to each other constantly. If they don’t, one of them is lying. So whatever else you do — build a real working relationship with the person who runs the money in your organization. It might be you. It might be a partner you bring in. But that relationship has to be close and it has to be honest.
With that on the table, let’s talk about marketing itself.
Define Yourself Before Someone Else Does
Here’s the most important thing I can tell you about marketing, and I want to say it plainly before we get into frameworks and theory.
If you don’t define yourself, your competitors will.
I mean that literally. I just finished a consulting engagement — about five years working with the same client — where this had happened. When I came in, they hadn’t ever really nailed down what they were. They had products, they had customers, they were operating. But they had never done the hard work of saying: this is who we are, this is what we stand for, this is the thing we do better than anyone else.
So the market filled in the blank for them. Every time their salespeople talked to a prospective customer, the customer would say something like: “Oh, you’re kind of like X,” or “That sounds similar to what Y does.” And the salespeople would say, “No, no — that’s not really what we are.” But then they couldn’t say clearly what they were. They couldn’t define themselves definitively because they had never thought it through.
Overcoming someone else’s positioning of you is one of the hardest things you can do in marketing. It’s not impossible — we eventually got there with this client — but it costs time, money, and credibility you don’t have to spare when you’re building something new. Don’t make them pay it.
If you’re coming to market with something brand new, this challenge gets even sharper. People will try to categorize you. They’ll reach for the closest thing they know: it’s like X, but for Y. Sometimes that analogy is close enough to be useful. Sometimes it’s completely wrong and it will haunt you. Be prepared for both, and be ready to push back with precision. Know exactly what you are. Know exactly what you are not.
The 5 Ps
Now — the framework I use. You may have heard of the 4 Ps of marketing. I work with five. The addition isn’t arbitrary.
Product, Price, Position, Placement, and Promotion.
Let me walk through each of them, because the theory is only useful if you understand what it looks like in practice.
Position
I put this one first even though it’s third on the list, because it’s where you have to start. Everything else — your price, your promotion, where you sell — all of it flows from how you’ve positioned yourself in the market.
And as I just described, if you get it wrong, you’ll spend years trying to recover.
Position is your stake in the ground. It’s the answer to: why you, why now, and why not someone else? It’s your value proposition, your brand identity, your reason for existing in a market that has options. The work of positioning requires you to understand your competitors as well as you understand yourself — because you don’t exist in a vacuum. You exist in a landscape. Where you stand in that landscape is your position.
Spend more time here than you think you need to. Then spend more.
Product
Get the product right. That sounds almost too simple to say out loud, but it’s harder to execute than it sounds.
One of the questions entrepreneurs wrestle with constantly is: when is the product ready to ship? And the honest answer is that you could work on it forever. There is always one more thing to improve, one more edge case to handle, one more feature that feels essential. If you wait for perfect, you’ll never launch.
So how do you know? You feel it — but you also test it. Find a small group of people or businesses who are willing to work with an early version, people who understand they’re getting something unfinished, who will give you real feedback and not just tell you what you want to hear. A beta release with the right early customers is invaluable. It gives you signal before you’ve made your big commitments. It lets you refine while the stakes are still manageable.
Ship it when it’s ready enough. Then let your early customers help you make it better.
Price
Pricing is a game of if-then, and you need to think it all the way through before you pick a number.
If you’re entering a competitive market, price may already be partially set for you. You can differentiate from the market price — higher or lower — but both directions come with consequences. Price higher and you’re making a claim about quality, service, or exclusivity. You’d better be able to back it up. Price lower and you’d better be sure you’ve run the math on your margins and your long-term sustainability.
The race-to-the-bottom trap is real and it’s brutal. I’ve been in markets where a big incumbent decided to undercut me not because it was their best strategic move, but because they could. They had the cushion to go below cost temporarily just to make life difficult for a new entrant. They didn’t have to win on quality — they just had to outlast you. It worked. When you’re setting your price, you have to ask yourself: what happens if someone bigger than me decides to go lower? Do I have a response?
Be very careful with low-cost as your primary positioning. It’s a narrow lane with powerful traffic.
Placement
This one is straightforward in concept but tricky in execution: put your product where your customers will find it.
In a business-to-consumer market, this might be more intuitive — you know roughly where consumers shop, what platforms they use, how they discover things. In a business-to-business market, it gets more complex. The channels are different, the decision-makers are different, the path to purchase is longer and involves more people. Know which market you’re in and design your placement strategy accordingly.
Placement is not an afterthought. I’ve seen companies build genuinely good products and then make them nearly impossible to find. That’s not a marketing problem — it’s an execution problem. Don’t let it be yours.
Promotion
This is my favorite one. And I believe, without much hesitation, that you cannot promote enough.
Promotion has to be clever. It has to be accurate — nothing damages a brand faster than promising something you can’t deliver. It can’t be misleading. And it has to be on point — resonating with exactly the right message for exactly the right audience at exactly the right moment.
That sounds like a high bar, and it is. But the process of getting there is genuinely fun if you let it be. We did a lot of A/B testing with that consulting client I mentioned — trying different messages, different framings, different channels. Some of it fell completely flat. Some of it clicked in ways we didn’t expect. That iteration is where the real insight lives. You don’t know what resonates until you try things and measure the response honestly.
Don’t fall in love with your first idea. The best promotion usually comes after you’ve thrown away three or four good ones.
How You Know It’s Working
Here’s the highest praise I received during that five-year engagement.
About two years before we finished, the client’s CFO came to a review meeting. CFOs are not known for effusive praise. He looked at the numbers and said: “Revenues are up 2%.”
Two percent. Not exactly a victory lap moment, right?
Except the market they served was down fifty percent that year. Their whole sector had contracted by half, and they were up 2. That doesn’t happen by accident. That is the 5 Ps working. That is positioning holding steady under pressure. That is promotion resonating when everything around you is pulling attention away. That is pricing that kept margins intact when competitors were panicking. That is placement that kept the pipeline moving when deals were harder to close.
Two percent in a fifty-percent-down market is a magnificent result. And the CFO knew it. High praise from a CFO, I’ll take it.
Marketing Is a Translation Layer
I want to leave you with one more thing — something that doesn’t get said enough about what marketing actually is.
Marketing is the translation layer of a business.
It translates internally: it takes what engineering is building, what operations is delivering, what finance is constraining, and turns all of that into a coherent story that the whole organization can align around. When marketing is working well internally, everyone in the company knows why they’re doing what they’re doing and how it connects to the market.
And it translates externally: it takes that same story and carries it outward to the customers, the partners, the press, the people who need to understand what you are and why it matters to them.
Both directions are essential. You’re not just talking to the market. You’re helping the organization understand itself. That’s a different kind of job than most people expect when they think about marketing — and it’s more interesting for it.
I genuinely loved this work. Not just the creative part, not just the customer-facing part — all of it. The connective tissue of it. If you have any instinct for that role, pursue it. A company with great marketing intelligence distributed across it is a company that knows who it is.
That knowledge is more powerful than most people realize.