Stop Marketing the Product You Wish You Had.

Customers buy the product you have, not the potential you see in it.

One of the more useful pieces of dating advice is not to fall in love with someone’s potential. You are not dating the fascinating, emotionally mature person they might become in five years. You are dating the person who is actually sitting in front of you.

Marketing teams could use the same advice.

It is tempting to look at a product, see everything it could become, and start communicating that future version. The idea is exciting, the positioning is stronger, and the campaign practically writes itself. Unfortunately, the customer does not receive the future version. They receive whatever the company can deliver today.

That is when a brand promise becomes an operations problem.

The promise has to start somewhere real

When marketing says that a product does something, the product has to do it. When sales promises a particular level of service, the company has to provide it. When a website says that an order will arrive within 24 hours, someone has to make sure that it does.

It does not matter whether the product is physical, digital or a service. The specific departments and processes will be different, but the basic principle remains the same: whatever the company promises has to come from something real.

Customer satisfaction research has described the consequences of getting this wrong for decades. Satisfaction is influenced by the gap between what someone expected and what they eventually experienced. When the experience falls short of the expectation the company created, disappointment is already built into the transaction.¹

That does not mean marketing should become boring or deliberately underpromise. Marketing can sharpen the value of a product, make its benefits easier to understand, and show people why they should care. It just cannot invent capabilities that the product does not have.

What happens when the promise comes first

Earlier in my career, I worked in product and commercial operations at a Berlin-based e-commerce company. I saw ambitious commercial deals agreed before the operational setup behind them fully existed.

The idea would be exciting, and the opportunity would be too good to miss. Once the promise had been made, product, technology, operations and customer service had to work backwards to create the reality required to fulfil it. Sometimes we made it work, but the route there involved unnecessary pressure, operational problems and quite a lot of people wondering how exactly we were going to pull this off.

The problem was not the ambition. Companies should try new things, pursue large opportunities and occasionally stretch beyond what is comfortable. The problem was the sequence. The external promise existed before the people responsible for fulfilling it had properly established what delivery would require.

Marketing should not simply arrive at the end of product development and write a few nice sentences. It should bring customer insight into the process much earlier. Sales knows what customers are asking for, customer service knows where they are becoming frustrated, and operations knows what the company can consistently deliver. All of that should shape the product and the way it is marketed.

But by the time the promise becomes public, it needs to be a shared commitment rather than one department’s exciting idea.

The customer experiences one company

Companies often treat the brand as everything that happens before someone buys. In reality, much of the brand experience happens afterwards.

Was the product what the customer expected? Did it arrive when promised? Was the package intact? Did the software work? Was the service delivered to the agreed standard? When something went wrong, did anyone help?

A 2024 study analysed almost 100 million verified Amazon reviews and identified 12 order-fulfilment touchpoints across delivery, packaging and returns. Experiences at those operational touchpoints directly affected the ratings customers gave, with negative experiences having a stronger effect than positive ones.²

The customer does not care whether a failure technically belongs to marketing, logistics, product or customer service. They experience one company, and the gap between departments becomes their problem.

Customer service can rescue an individual situation. A clear explanation, a fast solution, or a thoughtful response can prevent frustration from becoming a lost customer. But customer service cannot indefinitely absorb the consequences of promises made elsewhere. If the same complaints keep arriving, the company does not have a customer-service problem. It has a product or operations problem that happens to be visible in customer service.

The gap has a price

When the promise and the experience do not match, the cost does not stop with one disappointed customer. It creates returns, refunds, complaints, additional support work, repeated deliveries and internal rework. It puts pressure on employees who are trying to solve problems they did not create, while slowly damaging margins, retention and reputation.

Research from Harvard Business School found that a one-star increase in Yelp ratings led to a five to nine percent increase in revenue for the independent restaurants studied. The exact number will not apply to every industry, but it shows that customer ratings are not simply a cosmetic reputation metric. They can affect demand.³

This becomes particularly painful when the marketing is successful. More orders create more delayed deliveries. More clients create more inconsistent service. More users expose weaknesses in a digital product. Growth does not automatically destroy a company whose operations cannot keep up, but it makes every existing gap larger and more expensive.

There are few things more expensive than marketing that works for a business that cannot deliver.

The handoff is the work

Marketing, sales, product, operations, and customer service should not meet for the first time when something has already gone wrong. They need a regular way to exchange information about what the company is promising, what it can reliably deliver, and what customers are actually experiencing.

Research into marketing-operations alignment treats this coordination as something that has to happen at operational, tactical, and strategic levels. It is not one meeting at the end of a project or an approval box that operations gets to tick once the campaign is finished.⁴

That does not mean every department needs to approve every sentence. It means the people who understand the product and the delivery process need to be involved before the promise is made, and the people who understand the customer need to be heard while the product and processes are being developed.

Marketing brings customer insight. Product explains what exists and what is changing. Operations knows where the limits and dependencies are. Customer service shows where the experience is breaking down. When that information moves through the company properly, marketing can communicate something both compelling and true.

Processes are not the enemy

Processes are restrictions, but that does not automatically make them bad. A pointless process can slow people down and remove judgment. A useful one provides a framework in which people can make better decisions without starting from a blank page every time.

The same principle applies to the creative work I wrote about in the previous article. Designers need enough direction to understand what they are solving. Marketing teams need to know which claims are supported. Sales teams need to know what they can promise. Operations needs enough visibility to prepare for what is coming.

Those guardrails do not prevent ambition or creativity. They make it more likely that the company can turn a good idea into something that actually works.

The best process is not the most elaborate one. It is the one that makes the company’s promise easier to keep.

The Change Strategies position

At Change Strategies, we do not believe marketing should create a more appealing version of a business that only exists in a presentation. A brand has to be rooted in the product, the service, and the operational reality behind it.

Marketing can sharpen the value, make it visible, and help the right people understand it. Growth can create new opportunities and push the company to become better. But neither should depend on customers buying into a future version of the product while receiving the current one.

Market the potential internally. Sell the reality externally.

Sources

1. Richard L. Oliver, “A Cognitive Model of the Antecedents and Consequences of Satisfaction Decisions,” Journal of Marketing Research, 1980.

2. Yulia Vakulenko, Diogo Figueirinhas, Daniel Hellström and Henrik Pålsson, “The Impact of Order Fulfillment on Consumer Experience: Text Mining Consumer Reviews from Amazon US,” International Journal of Physical Distribution & Logistics Management, 2024.

3. Michael Luca, “Reviews, Reputation, and Revenue: The Case of Yelp.com,” Harvard Business School Working Paper, revised 2016.

4. Kedwadee Sombultawee and Sakun Boon-itt, “Marketing-Operations Alignment: A Review of the Literature and Theoretical Background,” Operations Research Perspectives, 2018.