Recently a reader asked us to define the product manager's role in an organization, and explain how that role relates to marketing.

Here goes.

The classic product manager

Brian is a product manager for WhizzinWireless, a company that produces wireless appliances. His product is the WW-240, a wireless modem on a PC card. He acts as the business manager for the product, and is the ultimate owner of the product's success.

The WW-240 came into being because Brian had been a product manager for a related product, a slower modem that was being eclipsed by competitors? faster models. Sales were slipping. Brian's conversations with customers, and his monitoring of the market, told him that WhizzinWireless needed to come out with a faster model, soon. He didn't think he'd have much trouble selling the idea to his managers, because they could see that sales were slipping too, but they weren't sure which of the two emerging standards they should embrace. They wondered which one would end up being most popular with customers.

Brian had done a lot of research. He understood the pros and cons of the two new competing standards. He attended industry conferences and talked to vendors and customers. His customer interviews convinced him that signal strength was very important to customers, even more important than transmission speed, at least for the next year or two.

"That gives us sufficient time to develop and sell enough of these modems to make it worth our while, " he thought. So he decided to go with the standard that would result in the strongest signal. But he also pushed his company's engineers, to see if they could come up with a way to speed up the data transmission rates for the new WW-240. "Best of both worlds, " he kept saying to them. "That's what I want the theme to be. I want to be able to tell people that we can give them superior signal strength and faster data transmission."

His engineers worked on the problem until they found a way to speed up the transmission. They worked up a prototype and were satisfied that a production version was feasible. Brian was ecstatic.

While he had been working with the engineers, he was building his business plan. It included detailed descriptions of the needs of his target customers, current and possible competitors, anticipated sales levels, and the costs of creating, marketing, distributing, and supporting the product. To make sure he was estimating the correct budget amount for each activity, Brian held meetings with the head of each group. He also developed a pricing strategy, which included the price they'd charge to service providers and the retail price.

When he met with the company's marketing VP, Sandra, they spent a lot of time talking about the various ways they could market the product and the materials they would need to support the sales process. They discussed the possibility of a having service providers offer an upgrade or rebate program. They both knew, from their earlier experience selling their other wireless modems, that they'd have to market to wireless service providers and end customers. They'd also have to provide marketing and sales materials for the service providers who agreed to sell the modem. However, they decided that initially they would not sell the product in retail stores, as they didn't think they could get the budget to support the retail channel until the product had reached a certain level of success.

Brian and Sandra agreed on the amount of money they'd devote to marketing. In the first three quarters, they would spend 10% of projected sales, then the amount would drop each quarter by 1%, because they expected that sales would rise and their marketing efforts would become less expensive after the initial launch. Eventually the percentage of sales devoted to marketing would stabilize at five percent.

They didn't talk much about the specifics of the campaign theme. Sandra knew that Brian wanted to use "best of both worlds, " which she felt was OK as a tagline, for now. Her own conversations with potential customers would lead her to a more specific and relevant theme when she developed the campaign. Her main concern, at this point, was the budget. She wanted to make sure she understood what Brian was hoping to accomplish and that she'd have enough resources to meet those goals.

Once Brian was sure that the engineers would be able to keep his "best of both worlds" promise, he finalized his business plan and presented it to his managers. He had been briefing them all along on what he was hoping to accomplish, but his presentation was the formal request for funding beyond the relatively small amount of development money they'd already advanced.

His managers asked him a lot of questions during his presentation. Would they be able to create the product in time to take advantage of the current market opportunity? How easy would it be for an aggressive competitor to imitate the speed scheme that Brian's engineers had developed? And if a competitor did manage to match their speed, what did Brian plan to do in response? Why was he putting off retail sales? Why did he think they had to spend so much marketing money at the beginning of the product's lifecycle? And on and on.

The meeting lasted two and a half hours. Brian answered all their questions successfully, with some assistance from the engineering manager and Sandra. A few days later, Brian received approval to proceed.

Sandra's turn

The product development phase wasn't going to take more than a couple of months because so many aspects of the WW-240 modem had already been worked out on previous WhizzinWireless products. That meant that marketing needed to get started right away.

Brian and Sandra met to plan the rollout and to agree on next steps. "The first thing I need to do is talk to some of the potential customers you've already talked to, and customers who have bought our other modems, " Sandra said. "I want to hear how they would describe your 'best of both worlds' concept. I want to make sure we use their words to describe the benefit of the product, not just words we've come up with."

Brian wasn't offended, but he still felt that "best of both worlds" was a great campaign theme, since he'd thought of it himself and he had been living with it for months. However, he'd been through this process with Sandra before, and she had always surprised him--pleasantly--with a customer-focused approach that improved on his ideas.

Sandra conducted her interviews and learned that customers had heard about the new standards, and were actively seeking modems that provided a stronger signal. They didn't talk about it as signal strength, however. They talked about how, because the signal was stronger, it was "always available, " so that when they were inside office buildings or on the road they could keep working. Speed was important, too, but they thought of speed in terms of how long it took to download a large file or a stack of emails.

Sandra took her findings back to Brian. "I don't suppose we could promise that they will always be able to download their files, no matter where they are--in a tunnel or deep within an office building...."

"No, the only way we could make that promise is if we went everywhere in the country with a modem and tested, " Brian answered. They both knew that was impractical.

Sandra thought for a minute. "Maybe we don't have to go everywhere, " she said. "Why not pick several usually difficult places--like the underground tunnels at New York Penn Station, the middle of the biggest building on the Boeing campus, and some remote, out-of-the-way place, like Block Island--and say something like, 'Penn Station. A 4-megabyte file in two seconds flat' with no interruptions.' Then in the ad, and on our website, in brochures, banner ads, emails, you name it--we could have a comparison table that shows how long it took for the competitor's modem to get the same file and how many times the signal was dropped. A pretty straightforward campaign. We'd run it in business pubs and sites, and provide sales materials for the service providers that used the same theme."

Brian smiled. "That's why I'm a product manager and you're the marketing VP, " he said.

Sandra smiled back, as she wrote down the idea in her notebook. But then she smiled even more broadly.

"I've got another approach...here's the headline: "You'll never get dumped at Penn Station." You could show someone with their laptop open, but they wouldn't be looking at it...they'd be staring at the ceiling of the train, as if they'd just lost the signal again. It could be a bit off-the-wall, something to run in Wired."

"Sounds great. I like the idea of something offbeat, just to draw some attention to the product. Plus, it never hurts to be slightly hip."

They talked further about how these themes would play out in other campaign vehicles, until Sandra had almost enough material to build her marketing plan. She still needed to talk to the VP of sales, to discuss how marketing efforts would support the sales process. Once she and the sales VP had agreed on the strategy, she started building the marketing plan.

She spent the next week and a half on the plan. It started with an executive summary, then a definition of the various audiences, the campaign theme, the vehicles she was going to use and the costs associated with them, the role that the company's website would play in the marketing and selling of the product, and finally an explanation of how she was going to track the results of all of the marketing efforts for the product.

When she finished the plan, she sent a copy to Brian and the sales VP asking for their input. They only had minor suggestions; she incorporated them into her plan, built a presentation based on the plan, and set up a meeting to present the plan to the CEO and top management.

As with Brian's meeting, they had a lot of questions. This time Brian helped Sandra answer several of them. But overall, the meeting went well, and Sandra was given permission to proceed.

Over the next few months, Sandra produced her marketing and selling materials, being careful to test concepts and marketing pieces on actual potential customers. Because she had done her research up front, however, she didn't have to make any major changes.

Sandra had the sales materials ready first, because the salespeople were already making appointments with the major service providers. The ads for print publications were ready six weeks before launch date, but she didn't place them until they secured their first contract with a service provider, which happened about three and a half weeks before launch day. That gave her enough time to place ads in weekly and bi-weekly publications. She had also been working with key editors, giving them the beta product to test, a month or so before the launch. The feedback from editors had been positive so far.

Sandra wanted to make good use of search engine marketing. She and Brian decided to run search engine ads aimed at the end-users of the product. When end-users clicked on one of the ads, they'd be taken to a special landing page that described the product thoroughly and then provided links to service provider sites, so they could complete the sale. Sandra made sure that the service provider Web managers were ready to receive the leads, with their own landing pages, and that they had a method for keeping track of the leads coming from the WW-240 campaign.

When the launch date came, Sandra's team sent the press release over the wire, and to the editors she'd been working with. They also sent an email blast to existing customers. They activated the new Web pages on their website, and started the search engine campaign. Two days before launch, they sent out a mailing to all of the people who had bought modems from WhizzinWireless in the past.

Over the next few months, the marketing team was very busy supporting the new service providers that the WhizzinWireless sales force had signed up. Four months after launch, they had contracts with five service providers. When the biggest contract came through on a Friday afternoon, Sandra went into Brian's office and gave him a high five.

The campaign was a resounding success. By the end of the first year, WW-240 had gained a 15% market share, and was making life miserable for competitors. Each week, Sandra continued to work closely with Brian, coming up with campaign ideas, building more sales support materials, and helping Brian analyze customer response to the product.

Brian made sure Sandra had all the facts she needed about the product, and continued to adjust his business plan and recommendations as he got more customer feedback. He helped the technical team prioritize their upgrade projects and started to develop an idea for a new accessory for the WW-240 that would help increase sales overall.

And so ends our tale of Brian, the product manager, and Sandra, the marketing VP.

Let's look at the responsibilities of each person as they launched the WW-240.

Brian, the Product Manager

• Researched the customer need for the product
• Evaluated the competitive situation
• Determined how the product would be sold to service providers and customers, and developed a support plan
• Set prices for the product
• Directed the development process so the product will meet customer needs
• Worked with sales, support, and manufacturing to make sure they could meet customer needs
• Worked with Sandra on the marketing plan, providing information and participating in discussions
• After the launch, gathered intelligence about how the product was being received by customers, kept supplying marketing with data, and conceptualized new products they could develop and sell.

Sandra, the Marketing VP

• Developed marketing strategy with the product manager
• Interviewed customers to find out which words they used to describe the problem that WW-240 was able to solve
• Met with the sales team to ascertain the sales process and needs
• Developed the campaign concepts
• Created the marketing plan, which included an executive summary, audience description, campaign themes, vehicles, and budgets
• Directed staff in the implementation of the marketing effort, which included PR, email, website pages, printed materials, print ads and search engine advertising
• Measured the results of the campaign and made adjustments based on leads generated and sales made
• Directed her staff to support the selling and marketing efforts of the service providers who were selling the WW-240 to end customers.

Who does what?

Product managers define the product and build the business plan, then manage the implementation of the plan. Marketing managers take the information provided by the product manager, gather their own customer input, create marketing plans, implement the campaigns, and measure the results.

Kristin Zhivago is the editor of the Revenue Journal, a newsletter for CEOs, and Marketing Technology, an online ezine for marketing leaders. Learn more at http://www.zhivago.com

© 2003 Zhivago Marketing Partners, Inc.