How to Keep an in Sync - Marketing and Product Development

By Kaye Marks

In any company communication can be a difficult thing to achieve, and different departments regularly seem to avoid talking to each other if at all possible. Often this can work just fine, because most departments do not have anything to do with each other, but for marketing, you might be facing some very painful results if you are not careful.

Just to skim the surface, a loosely knitted communication network in the office might cause problems if you promote a new product and send out a huge postcard printing campaign that you start getting inquiries for which you get confused looks from your employees. Do you get the picture?

Nowhere is this more prevalent than when you are introducing a new product, and I have seen so many blunders based on bad communication before and it is rather sad each time it happens. The results can hurt a company a lot and waste them plenty of cash.

The problems almost always come from the development and release of the product being out of sync with the marketing for it. For any new product release, you want to have your marketing out in the public ahead of the actual release, and then another prominent marketing push on the day of the release. You might get a large number of color postcards out to people a month before the product release, and all of those postcards are going to mention the date of the release.

But then the product gets pushed back. The development team needed more time and did not bother to tell the marketing department, so suddenly you have a lot of marketing material that says the wrong thing, and all of your planned marketing pushes for the day of the release need to quickly be scrapped or moved back. You have been boosting up support for a while and you have to turn around and tell your customers they have to suddenly wait.

All it takes to avoid this is to have regular, maybe even weekly, updates between the two sides. Be sure the development team is constantly aware of what kind of marketing pushes are going on, and that the marketing team knows of any potential delays before they send out those color postcards.

This also requires both sides to be completely up front with their progress, and that no one is making assumptions or overestimating the chance of a specific release date.

Really, communication should be a strong part of any kind of department and everyone should be well aware of what is going on in the other departments. I have found that sometimes the reason why a product gets delayed is because one subdivision of the development process is not properly communicating with everyone else.

Sit down before everything starts, get every single person working close to the project together, and make sure all of them have a strong system set up for communicating. Yes, it might take longer to do this, but in the end, you will avoid a lot of nasty pitfalls and have a smooth product release. All it takes is a little communication.

Kaye Z. Marks is an avid writer and follower of the developments in postcard printing or color postcard industry.