Know-How Exchange : Student Questions

Dear Brenda,

Ultimately, it's both: all the publicity in the world won't
sell a useless product in terms of long range quantity (in the shape of sustained and growth-based sales), and having a high quality product alone isn't enough to automatically create sales if no one knows about it through well-placed and well timed publicity.

To create publicity, all products, goods, and services need some quality or trait about them that sets the thing on offer apart and that gives it some unique ability to solve a problem or meet a need and do it well. There must be some trait or some pay off that's worth talking about and that's worthy or being seen to talk about.

Apple did this with digital music sales through the introduction of iPod: they created a device that then triggered a demand (in the guise of portable digital music), a demand that they'd already geared up to meet (in the form of iTunes) in order to drive sales of the iPod.

Simple. But brilliant.

From the beginning, both quality AND publicity were built into the marketing of the iPod; add in the tag line "1,000 songs in your pocket", something no one else had said before, and within weeks, this combination fired numerous social and viral triggers—triggers that created media and popular attention—which, in turn, ultimately drove demand (which then fueled additional publicity, which then led to updated versions of the device, and with them, higher quality), and around and around it goes.

In your debate on the benefits of quality versus publicity, to take one stance over and at the exclusion of BOTH points ignores the value of the relationships between the two points, and it locks success-based thinking in to depending on one quality or the other—which is, in the long run, a losing argument because to generate long term success, and longer term sales, brand recognition, brand loyalty, and brand stewardship, each trait needs (and drives) the position and value of the other.

I hope this helps.

Gary Bloomer
Princeton, NJ, USA

Thank you Gary! so, what you are saying is that you ALWAYS need both in order to be successful! but when companies invest so much in publicity, the quality of the product goes down? that means that people will buy the product, but eventually they will stop because the product is not good enough. that happens often right? i know that this debate may be non-argumentative, but i really need some arguments about this: quality is what sells.

Yes, you need both to be successful.

"so, what you are saying is that ... when companies invest so much in publicity, the quality of the product goes down?"

No. No amount of publicity will generate sales for what is basically, a poor quality product.

Publicity does not impact product quality. Product quality impacts product quality. Garbage in, garbage out.

The thing the drives sales is a quality SOLUTION aimed at a SPECIFIC problem.

thank you!!! this was really helpful!!