What should I think, believe and do as a Marketer?Read and validate it as you are talking to yourself.

1. What is the product?As a marketer the first thing that I should know is what am I going to market? Based on my past experience, in certain time I was not clear about the products and solutions what was there to market or sale? When there is a question, oh… it seems to be a great product could you please assist me to understand the value of it?, immediately I realized how much depth I know about it? This is what a marketer should realize before putting across things to the people. It’s not stopped here, climbing one step to another it makes me more confident and do more what I have not done earlier and to be frank I should know more than the original developer of the product.

2. Why it is required? Now I have understood fairly about the particular product after so much of analysis and questioning myself, but when it comes to the next step why it is required I stuck again. The problem was with me, I was not precise why some body would need it although I had basic understanding on the usefulness of it. There are many marketer has faced the same problem after knowing the product. Here I have learned a lesion, i.e. what it makes a great product to stand out or create different impression on the rest out there. I as a marketer should bring the values to the light to make the product stand on its own.

3. What problem it can be solved?This confused me with the point number two, why the product or service is required and what problem it can solve? But I figured out the difference, why it is required could have a,b,c and d reasons but in case the problems it can solve are the use cases of it. For an example a multimedia audio codec is required for decoding and encoding of audio samples and the problem it solves is allow to do the playback of the audio stream. For an instance the open source wiki is required for the content management and it can solve the problems in many different ways like, it can be used as a platform to share the knowledge to mass community a single point of time, could be used for customized study materials for you and your team, collaboration of text, image, audio and video for training etc. it will go on. From the marketer point of view it is essential for me to identify the problems that can be addressed by the particular problem and show the capability.

4. Is your product or service creates differentiation?This is a successor and combine effort of point number 2 & 3. After knowing why it is required and the problem it can address, now I have visibility on key differentiators in comparison with others in the market. Here what I am doing is identifying the key challenges being faced by competitors and hitting again and again on the key differentiators of my product, which helps

me to make the product stand out of the crowd. In the mean time I should remember not to hit the same point many times which could harm me other way as well. I should keep adding reasons to have a strategy to differentiate.

5. Who needs it? When I was doing all these things, there is one question always there in mind i.e. who needs it? Gradually I came to know you may have all good things in this world but if there is no need of it than what you can do to it? My journey started to find, do market research, public speaking in various conferences, create awareness and through that letting people know what I have for them. But I am tired of doing the same thing again and again in a hope that someone will need it! Now I am going to redefine the way I looked at the market and the strategy to reach out the audience, because I believe there is no defined path to success it is always unique and different.

6. Just connect to them. Now it’s time for me to do the right thing first i.e. connect and help in solving problems.