I find it somehow disappointing how many people confuse marketing with sales or promotion.
In the low-brow definition marketing is the set of all decisions regarding product, price, distribution and promotion. As soon as you start a company, you will do marketing. It's either bad or good or something in-between but it's marketing.
Promotion is something different. You can forget promotion, sometimes. Provide a working cure for AIDS or cancer and you need no (active) promotion.
But in today's crowded markets, the possibility of making a software that solves problems no one else addressed yet, is rather low. Then, promotion becomes as important as the product. They interact.
Promote your product badly and you'd be wasting money when you're making a good product. For in most cases, you don't need to make your software scale or easy to enhance, if just a few people know about it and use it.
Make a bad product (with no intend to improve it later) and you'd be wasting money when you're spending lots of it on promotion. For sooner or later, your customers will turn to your competitors and there will be no way to get back the money you spend on promotion.
In other words: All your marketing decisions, including how much money you spend on the product and promotion, affect your profit.
In the low-brow definition marketing is the set of all decisions regarding product, price, distribution and promotion. As soon as you start a company, you will do marketing. It's either bad or good or something in-between but it's marketing.
Promotion is something different. You can forget promotion, sometimes. Provide a working cure for AIDS or cancer and you need no (active) promotion.
But in today's crowded markets, the possibility of making a software that solves problems no one else addressed yet, is rather low. Then, promotion becomes as important as the product. They interact.
Promote your product badly and you'd be wasting money when you're making a good product. For in most cases, you don't need to make your software scale or easy to enhance, if just a few people know about it and use it.
Make a bad product (with no intend to improve it later) and you'd be wasting money when you're spending lots of it on promotion. For sooner or later, your customers will turn to your competitors and there will be no way to get back the money you spend on promotion.
In other words: All your marketing decisions, including how much money you spend on the product and promotion, affect your profit.