Meaningful product tweaks enable incremental sales, and while most marketers don’t influence product, they can gradually change that.
“iPhone 17 Disappointment Triggers $112 Billion Apple Market Value Drop,” the headline read. Apple had just unveiled its new iPhone 17 line-up in trademark Cupertino style: slick videos, funky music, Tim Cook and team gliding on camera outside Apple’s glass-and-steel HQ – polished, but a little staged.
But even the best stagecraft couldn’t hide it: Apple missed AI.
Everywhere in tech, AI is the story. AI on the iPhone? It’s hit-or-miss – more miss than hit. Apple did the right thing by not mentioning it. Instead: better cameras, brighter screens, faster charging. And the star of the night: a slightly thinner iPhone Air.
Nice stuff – but not enough to thrill reviewers.
Customers couldn’t care less about what the experts said.
Pre-orders shot up. Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo reported Q3 iPhone 17 production targets were 25% higher than for the iPhone 16 a year earlier. In China, Apple Store slots sold out in minutes. And that $112bn “loss in market value”? Within days, the stock had bounced back. It’s early days and numbers may shift, but the start was stunning.
Apple had done it again: it made the iPhone just slightly better.
Portfolio power
Many marketers still underestimate Apple’s playbook:
Constantly improving stuff: In Simply Better, former London Business School professor Patrick Barwise and Sean Meehan show how great brands thrive not by flashy reinvention but by serving customers “profitably better than competitors do”. Both observed hundreds of companies worldwide. The most successful applied the Simply Better principle: small upgrades, year after year. Marginal in the lab, meaningful in the market.
Tapping into growing segments: iPhone revenues have been flat at around $200bn since 2022 – remarkable given the brutal competition. Services, meanwhile, have soared from $78bn in 2022 to $92bn last year, nearly 18% growth on the back of music, video and apps. My former McKinsey colleagues ran some revealing numbers. Tracking 416 companies for more than a decade, they found just 22% of growth came from market share gains. More came from M&A – 35%. The single biggest driver, at 43%, was portfolio momentum: the sectors, regions and segments you’re in. That’s where growth hides.
Apple plays both sides. It defends and builds. It keeps the iPhone alive with steady improvements. And it finds growth in adjacencies. That’s how you last.
Coffee beats lobster
To see the power of product, look at Tim Hortons and Red Lobster. Two chains. Same problem. Very different outcomes.
Canadians love Tim Hortons. The chain is a cultural icon.
But customers had drifted away – fed up with mediocre coffee and sandwiches. Rivals were using fresh eggs while Tim’s stuck with frozen patties. Revenues were dropping. The core was broken.
Hope Bagozzi, the new CMO, pushed beyond comms to influence the product. She piloted fresh coffee and fresh eggs. Customers raved. But Tim Hortons is a franchise system. The ‘right answer’ wasn’t enough. Franchisees had to agree. Many rounds of persuasion later, the network signed off. The upgrade worked. Customers returned. Revenues rose. Tim Hortons won back its core. Better product. Better experience.
Red Lobster went the other way. The seafood chain’s customer base was aging fast. Young customers shunned Red Lobster. Investors had stripped assets and loaded debt. Restaurants were tired. Then fish producer Thai Union bought control. On paper, it made sense: own the supply, own the restaurants.
But instead of fixing the core, management doubled down on gimmicks. They took a promotion – $20 ‘Ultimate Endless Shrimp’ – and made it permanent. Bargain-hunters flooded in. Overworked staff couldn’t cope. The core didn’t improve. Costs spiralled out of control. Eventually, Red Lobster filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.
The difference is night and day. Tim Hortons fixed the core product. Red Lobster papered over cracks. One grows. The other dies.
Marketers aren’t where the action is
Tweaking the product is the most powerful growth lever marketers have. It’s how Apple keeps the iPhone alive in a flat market. It’s how Colgate sells toothpaste year after year with tiny but meaningful upgrades. It’s how Dr Martens grew after switching from ‘storytelling’ to product marketing.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth. Most marketers aren’t involved.
Marketing Week’s latest Career & Salary Survey shows 89% of marketers control comms, 79% manage research and insights. Product, service, innovation? Just 49%. A global McKinsey study is more pessimistic: only 38% of marketers had product management responsibility.
Read that again. Less than half of all marketers are meaningfully involved in the thing customers actually buy.
That’s the gap.
Marketers didn’t suddenly ‘lose’ control of the product. In fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), they always had it. That’s how the profession was built: at Unilever, P&G, Colgate, the brand manager is the product manager. But FMCG is just one corner of the business world. Most marketers don’t work there. They work in services, tech, finance, B2B – places where product has always been owned elsewhere.
Yet, marketers play a role in the low influence on the product.
Think about it, CEOs ask marketers to do one thing: grow the business. Yet if you go to Cannes, you’d think growth means slogans, storytelling, TikTok stunts. Cannes is fun. But growth comes from getting the core offer right. Marks & Spencer, Marketing Week’s Brand of the Year in 2024, proved it. Profits jumped 22% last year. Not just from the (very good) Christmas ads. From revamping food and fashion, sharpening pricing, investing in better stores.
Product and promotion are twins. One without the other is a ghost.
Apple, at least, could never have story-told its way to growth.
Try this
Product ownership won’t flip overnight. Google won’t hand its code to marketing. Maersk won’t let marketers design container ships. But if you don’t own the product, you can still shape it. From years of working with CMOs, here’s what works in practice:
- Start small: Every marketer has one unfair advantage – the voice of the customer. Collect it. Not just feedback, but ideas. Track competitor moves, listen for tiny frustrations, capture the sparks of innovation. Build your own view of how good the product really is – and where it could be better.
- Bring the customer truths into the room: Don’t wait for a big stage. Share them in one-on-ones, in hallway chats – and, later, in meetings where nobody expects the marketing voice to show up. At first, it feels risky. Over time, it builds presence.
- Once you’ve earned a little standing, step up: Champion the upgrade that makes a customer smile. Fight for the small detail that keeps people loyal. Show, like the marketers at Tim Hortons, that you can add real value.
If you call yourself a marketer, no matter what your job description reads, don’t stay on the sidelines of product. You know customers. You have insights nobody else has. Get in there. You can do this.
And always remember: no ad will save a poor offer.
(From my Marketing Week column)
