From Tweet thread.
Framework I’m thinking about:
Marketing Debt
Startups talk about tech debt and management debt (building stuff now for expedience that can’t last long term and will cost you down the road to rebuild on solid footing)
These are not bad. Or good. They are tools with costs and benefits.
Too little tech debt means you’re overbuilding and sacrificing speed for early core users.
Too much and you create an unpayable backlog and might go tech broke.
What’s Marketing Debt?
When your public reputation gets out ahead of your customer experience.
Every early good story or case study is a bit of marketing debt.
Why? Because 100% of customers not likely to get same result. That means those customers may get upset by this.
That’s a lurking reputational liability.
It’s ok for not every customer to be thrilled or get best results.
It’s needed to tell stories of great customer success.
But be aware of lurking marketing debt.
The bigger the gap between your marketing customer story and your average customer experience, the greater the marketing debt.
If you avoid any marketing debt at all, you’d tell no stories or only those of you’re least happy customers. That way no one would experience anything below your marketing.
But that’s not accurate or fair and great potential customers may not try.
If you go nuts and way overhype a few customers you brute forced to success in a non-repeatable way and hide the less dramatic stories, you’re racking up a backlog of new customers bound to crap on your reputation later for under-delivering.
So be mindful in your marketing how big a gap it creates (thus how big a liability) between expected and average customer experience.
Be mindful which stories to tell.
Be mindful what kind of customers to pick.
And be mindful of the little things like phrasing. “One customer even achieved X!” Accrues less marketing debt than “Use the product and achieve X”