Product Marketing Is the Best Marketing

Need to clear something up based on a bunch of LinkedIn posts recently:

Product marketing is the best marketing. The best product wins over the best marketing.

You think Anthropic is winning because of some Cannes Lions worthy brand campaign? No, they are winning because Boris Cherny is on X every day educating developers on how to reinvent themselves with Claude Code. Boris has added more EV to Anthropic than the hundreds of millions they spend on traditional marketing.

Product marketing is the most prestigious marketing role at Apple, and the rest of marketing exists to showcase and amplify their work. The most senior marketer at Apple is a product marketer. The story serves to support the products, not the other way around.

Sure, there are outliers where great marketing can cover for a mediocre product in the short term. My man Dave Gerhardt did some of the best marketing I’ve seen in my career at Drift, creating a category and propelling them to a $1b exit to Vista. But the product itself quickly became meh, Drift was sold again for far less than $1b to Salesloft, and then just quietly went away. Even Dave couldn’t have saved Drift.

Great marketing serves the product, it isn’t a replacement for it.

Originally posted on LinkedIn.