The Product Delusion
TL;DR SUMMARY: The idea that a great product sells itself is outdated. In today’s product-saturated markets, competition is fierce, and consumer behavior is driven more by convenience than loyalty. Marketing isn’t an add-on—it’s the key to driving adoption, especially in an AI-powered world where ideas and IP can be copied/stolen/remixed instantly. Research shows that loyalty metrics like NPS don’t predict growth, and relying on a small group of devoted customers won’t move the needle. Real success comes from expanding your reach and making your brand easy to find and choose. To win, businesses must stop obsessing over products and start treating marketing as a strategic growth engine.
Let’s break it down further —
The Problem with Product Thinking
We’ve all heard the old chestnuts about products that never needed to stoop to “marketing” (read: shouting on the corner with a placard around your clownish body)...
“Tesla never advertised, and is successful.”
“If you just make a great product, the people will show up.”
“The best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. It feels like an exceptional product that ‘speaks for itself.’”
“3 steps to creating a self-selling product.”
These statements are massively popular and fuel the idea that improving the product alone will drive success.
But this forward-thinking belief system is actually over a hundred years old. You can trace its origin to the production-oriented mindset of the Industrial Revolution (1880s–1920s), when those that could harness mass production had few competitors.
As markets became more crowded, businesses had to actively promote and differentiate their products. This shift led to the advertising boom of the early 20th century, laying the groundwork for modern marketing, advertising, and ad-supported media.
The notion that a great product will market itself is outdated and ignores how saturated marketplaces have become, and how competition and consumer behavior have evolved.
The Productization Barrier to Innovation
The push to “productize” everything homogenizes outputs and creates blind spots, like I discussed in The Branding Delusion. Following a strict product-oriented approach often stifles creativity, making it harder to see new opportunities beyond what already exists.
Real innovations have been proven, time and again, to come from following novelty and interestingness without objectives rather than rigid adherence to logic and objectives.
The tightly regimented, up late obsessed in the laboratory, entrepreneurial inflamed, production-orientated mindsets that truly believe they can tweak tin into gold, end up forging their own gilded-cages, unable to pivot to the next perch on the branch of time.
Invention Matters Less Than Innovation, Especially in an AI Era
Historically, the fear with the internet was that if something was online, it was accessible to everyone. Companies hesitated to share unique ideas or innovative products. I remember worrying that my music would get stolen or my ideas would be jacked.
Now, the opposite is true—everything is online, and everyone is encouraged to share it all and forget about the barriers of the past, rooted on by the AI and LLMs out there that have scraped vast amounts of data, including copyrighted materials and proprietary information, training AI to replicate human-like thinking. Companies have unwittingly, or totally wittingly, fed their best ideas, financial insights, and proprietary datasets into an open-access cloud.
So in a world where no idea is truly ownable, no angle unique; how can a product break through?
Not only does the product have to be great, the experience and support have to be next level, the offering and uses unique and intriguing, and there has to be a strategic marketing support structure that guides adoption and distribution of awareness long enough for market share to rise up and meet the hoped for behavior change.
Rory Sutherland puts it succinctly:
“Marketing is half of innovation. It's one thing to have a good product or a good idea – the behavioral change necessary to get people to adopt it is arguably the more difficult part of the problem. Counterintuitively, really big ideas may require more marketing since they demand more behavioral change. It always struck me as odd that it took a pandemic for video calling to take off, until you realize it demands simultaneous changes in social behaviors.”
The success of a product is a combination of the quality of the product, the effectiveness of the marketing strategy behind it, and how easily people can integrate it into their lives.
And I’ve got some news you are already well aware of - there are a lot of products out here….and not a lot of strategies to match it beyond believing Field of Dreams was a biographical film.
It’s not the mythologized; “if you build it, they will come,” it’s the more straightforward and stark; “if you build it, people DGAF until you compel them to.”
There Are Too Many Products Already
We live in an age of abundance—there are more products and services than people on the planet. If you need something, the sheer number of choices is overwhelming. Within a 10-mile radius, you have countless options for any product or service. I can get pants at a boutique, Target, Old Navy, the mall, a thrift store, Goodwill.
But think for a minute - are people always going to choose the absolute best, standout product? Or are they more likely to settle for convenience?
If a consumer were truly loyal to a particular brand, marketers believe they would climb over barbed wire to get their fix. But the narcotic effects of brand/product loyalty is a drug being pushed and injected in the boardrooms of America, not being cut up into lines on the kitchen tables of actual people.
The Myth of Loyalty
Among all the objects surrounding you, how many brands do you feel true loyalty toward?
Loyalty is limited not because of people’s lack of passion, but because math is real—there will always be fewer die-hard loyalists than fair-weather generalists. The truth is, loyalty to products, trends, even other people, is far less predictable and reliable than many marketers would like to believe.
What appears to be favoritism on a spreadsheet may just be a temporary trend, habit, or even a response to convenience rather than genuine devotion.
As consumers, we know that brand loyalty plays a minimal role in our decision-making. But in the presence of leadership, we inflate the importance of brand affinity and consumer devotion.
Marketers, business-types, economists; they all love to segment people into data points, consumer behavior categories and brand loyalty silos.
But if someone told us our behavioral data and consumption patterns define our lives better than we can, we’d reject the idea outright. Or maybe you’re sold on that math, if so, keep reading…
Loyalty is an arithmetical abstraction of complex consumer behaviors, not a dependable strategy for growth. The laws of Buyer Moderation and the non-binomial Dirichlet model show that loyalty mathematically exists in only small amounts.
Recent research confirms that popular loyalty metrics—such as the belle of the business ball metric known as Net Promoter Score (NPS)—have no correlation with future purchasing behavior or revenue growth.
Even more strikingly, Ehrenberg-Bass research indicates that changes in customer satisfaction scores have no measurable impact on business revenue. Recommendation intention does not predict loyalty, and NPS does not predict growth.
Loyalty may be a nice concept, but it’s a mathematical anomaly and you shouldn’t build a brand on the shifting sentiments of NPS.
Growth Comes from Market Expansion, Not Product Perfection
Marketers hoping to expand market share must focus on being mentally and physically available to the total addressable market and in particular, ultra-light category buyers. Depending on customer loyalty for growth is a losing game—it’s an arithmetic abstraction, not a strategic action item.
To increase your chances of success in today’s market, brands need to recognize the limits of product thinking and embrace top-down marketing strategy as an influential factor in driving innovation and behavioral change.
A great product alone won’t guarantee success—but strategically sound marketing can help improve the odds.
Action Steps from the Marketing Accountability Council:
Reach Broader Than You Think with Advertising – Prioritize mass awareness campaigns rather than hyper-targeting niche audiences. Growth comes from reaching light and non-users, not just existing loyalists.
Optimize Brand Availability – Ensure your brand is easy to find and purchase both digitally and physically. Leverage omnichannel distribution and retail partnerships to maximize accessibility.
Leverage Behavioral Science – Focus on how consumers actually, not ideally, behave and make decisions. Use heuristics, framing, and defaults to find ways to make your product the easy and obvious choice.
Shift Focus from Maintaining NPS to Market Penetration – Stop using loyalty metrics as a proxy for growth. Instead, track and optimize for expanding category reach, mental availability, and share of search.
Marketing and Product; The Priority Pair – Marketing should be embedded in business strategy just as much as product-development. Think of marketing as a way to continuously create a supply for the demand you hope to spark with your product.
By implementing these steps, businesses can break free from outdated product-centric thinking and use marketing as a powerful tool for driving innovation, adoption, and long-term success.