137. Three-body marketing 🙍♀️🙍♀️🙍♀️
A framework for solving marketing's three big questions
I share a weekly update on ways to be a better marketer, brand-maker, team-builder, and person. If you enjoy this, you can share some love by hitting the Substack heart button above or below.
Hi there 👋
This week, I began a six-week course on multichannel marketing, put on by the team at Reforge. I’ll be sure to pass along some learnings as we implement any of the new strategies at Buffer. The Reforge class got me thinking: Are there any trainings you’re a big fan of?
I’ll add one more: The courses at SuperHi are fantastic for project management and visual design / branding.
Let me know any of your favorites, too. I’d love to add ‘em to my list.
Wishing you a great week,
~ Kevan
~ Anna Quindlen
Here are 4 cool things I found this week
1 - The founders library: articles & resources for high-output leaders
3 - How to calculate the Magic Number for SaaS companies
4 - And for fun: Flash Forward podcast 🎧 featuring questions like …
What would happen if space pirates dragged a second moon to earth?
How would diplomacy work if we couldn’t lie?
Three-Body Marketing 🙍♀️🙍♀️🙍♀️
A framework for answering marketing's three big questions
The three-body problem is an orbital mechanics scenario in which you attempt to explain how three bodies of mass interact with one another, like two stars and one planet for instance.
I came across the idea from the title of a highly-acclaimed science fiction book of the same name (not because I am a physicist at all, lol).
But the concept reminds me a lot of how I perceive marketing.
I see three bodies within marketing, all interacting with one another in a beautiful dance. Together they answer three of the biggest marketing questions:
❶ Brand marketing — Who you are
❷ Product marketing — What you sell
❸ Growth marketing — How you sell it
The order of the bodies in the diagram above is purposeful. For the most successful marketing teams I’ve encountered, the process moves from brand to product to growth.
You have to begin by defining who you are. [Brand Marketing]
We do this at Buffer through brand strategy exercises that help determine the reason why your brand exists in the first place and the type of positive impact you hope to have for your customers.
I’ve talked about this a bit in previous newsletters.
Emily Heyward defines brand as “why should people care.”
The single most important question we ask in our first conversation with founders is not how their business works, or who their competition is, but what the problem is that they are solving for people.
The Ogilvy agency uses the Big IdeaL: the intersection between a cultural tension and your brand’s best self.
Once you know who you are, you can tell a more compelling story about what you sell. [Product Marketing]
This is where positioning comes in.
There are a ton of templates for product positioning. I like to use this fill-in-the-blank exercise (below) because it clearly articulates what your product is, who it’s for, and how it benefits customers. Those are all really important elements that can make the rest of a product marketer’s job a whole lot easier.
Finally, after defining who you are and what you sell, you can figure out how to sell it. [Growth Marketing]
This is where the fundamentals of growth come in. To a certain extent, there’s a high degree of go-to-market (GTM) strategy at this stage, although I tend to believe that all three components — who you are, what you sell, and how you sell it — are essential to a solid GTM plan.
These three bodies are not mutually exclusive either. You can have activities that touch them all. You can have channels that cover multiple parts. You can have people who work across pillars even.
Often times, brand, product, and growth are a Venn diagram, and your team and your team’s activities live somewhere in the overlaps.
For instance, a blog can be a representation of who you are (brand marketing) as well as a growth channel for awareness, acquisition, and demand gen (growth marketing).
A product launch can help position your company (product marketing), it can help sell to new customers (growth marketing), and it can speak to who you are as a brand (brand marketing).
Especially for early teams, the setup tends to be holistic, encompassing all three bodies in a single group. But as you scale, you might start to see these disciplines for brand, product, and growth become more apparent in the way you organize.
Bonus: Three-body marketing can be the framework by which you build out your marketing team.
Not only can you use three-body marketing to think holistically about how you answer the three big marketing questions, you can also use this framework to practically build your team. In fact, I’d venture to guess that many, many marketing teams are already organized in this way whether they use this terminology or not.
Take the Webflow team for instance. They have
Growth / Demand Gen
Content
Product Marketing
Operations
Considering the content team does a lot of the brand strategy and storytelling work, their team matches three-body marketing almost perfectly (operations is an internal layer).
Our Buffer team works like this:
Product marketing
Brand marketing
Lifecycle marketing
We use the term “lifecycle” rather than growth since growth is something that many teams at Buffer — product especially — desire to influence.
(Of the three bodies, growth marketing in particular might end up looking a lot different depending on the company you’re at. For instance, the term “growth” may be reserved for a product team, or it may be that marketing’s contribution to growth is more on the demand-gen or acquisition side.)
Or take this setup from a much larger SaaS org:
Demand-Gen
Content Marketing & Comms
Performance Marketing
Customer Marketing
Event Marketing
Product Marketing
There are six teams here but even still they fit into the three bodies: Demand-gen and performance marketing are growth, customer marketing fits within product marketing, and content and events are part of brand.
Does the three-body marketing framework ring true for the way you organize your team? (Or the way you plan to organize some day?)
It’d be great to hear your thoughts.
Thanks so much for reading. Have a great week!
— Kevan
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