Marketing and Too Many Products

Marketing was an interesting chapter for me, but I wish it had offered more in terms of how to correct marketing problems. 

I know that in my own organization many departments are frustrated by our marketing department due to the fact that in almost every new client meeting we hear "I didn't know you did that?" about many of our products. 

In defense of the marketing department, our organization has had the tendency to innovate quickly for specific clients and roll out products for small subsets of our overall client base. So we have dozens and dozens of products that our created for specific clients that could potentially help other clients, but are not a part of our core business. This would make it very hard to market in that it's an ever changing landscape and with so many products it's hard to find focus points. 

I am reminded of an organization I worked with ten years ago that specialized in dash-mounted video cameras for police departments. They too had a plethora of products; dash-mounted video cams, interview recording, file transfer for courtrooms, automatic video upload, license plate reading technology, and more. The marketing department there operated on a very simple, foot in the door focus. They wouldn't market all of their products and dilute the offering, but put all of their focus on creating the best dash-mounted camera capabilities in the market, then once their foot was in the door the account management team would work with the account to expand their product offering to that client. 

It's tough to be in marketing but it's better to have one or two solid products rather than a multitude of products that no one knows aoubt and are hard to market. 

Reference

Schmidt, S. W., and Yelich Biniecki, S. M. (2016). Organization and administration of adult education programs: A guide for practitioners. Information Age Publishing, Inc.