How would you describe the difference between solution marketing and product marketing?

I believe that product marketing's core mission is to maximize value realization and conversion rates across all key user personas which in turn helps the business achieve revenue targets. Solution marketing is a component of product marketing that demonstrates value by outlining an end-to-end technical solution to a problem.

If you think about platforms that become core infrastructrue (examples include customer data platforms (CDPs), database-as-a-service (DbaaS) and integration-platforms-as-a-service (iPaaS)) then it's not enough to just tout the features of the platform. You have to show and tell how your platform fits into the technolgy stack that an organization is leaning towards or already has. 

An example of solution marketing is a use case blog that provides details on how an organization can evolve from batch to real-time customer data analytics with mParticle and Amazon Kinesis or a use case blog that shows how to use Redis with Kitura, a server-side Swift web framework. 

Product Marketing: Product Marketing encapsulates your product's core positioning and messaging. It is the most concise definition of the pains, benefits, differentiation, and value that your product provides to your ideal customer profile.

Solution Marketing: Solution Marketing takes product marketing messaging and makes it relevant for a horizontal or vertical use case. Solution marketing tends to involve some translation of pains, benefits, differentiation, or value that makes it relevant for a persona or vertical.

For example, one of Amperity, a Lakehouse CDP, core Jobs-To-Be-Done is data activation. At its core, Data Activation is sending data from Amperity to another destination. If I was solution marketing this capability, I would use different language and context. For example:

• Paid Media Marketer - Automate list uploads directly to ad platforms

• Data Engineer - Reverse ETL data from your Lakehouse to any destination without copying data

• Retention Marketer - Hydrate your email marketing tools with CLV attributes

At its simplest, I think product marketing typically focuses on "What does this product do?" whereas solutions marketing typically focuses on "How do they come together for you?"

Taking a step back, I think the need for solutions marketing arises when a company transitions from a single-product company to a multi-product company. At this stage, you typically begin to run into situations where different types of customers require an expanding number of different permutations of products, services, and integrations. This requires a different approach from many traditional product marketing roles.

So, what's different?:

• Focus: Solutions marketing is typically focused on a specific audience (industry, line of business, segment, geography) whereas product marketing is typically focused on a specific product or service.

• Approach: Solutions marketing is product-agnostic, starting from the customer use case and mapping multiple products, services, and integrations to that use case. In contrast, product marketing is product-specific, starting from the product and mapping it to the pain points it solves.

• Company Stage/Product Mix: Solutions marketing is typically only needed at multi-product companies. Product marketing remains critical at both single-product and multi-product companies.

• Internal Alignment: Solutions marketing often aligns most closely with Sales and Marketing, with Product Management as a secondary internal stakeholder. Product Marketing often maintains the closest relationship with Product Management, while also maintaining relationships within Sales and Marketing.

That said, it's important to not overrotate on the differences. Some things that are really important to remember:

• Solutions Marketing and Product Marketing need to be joined at the hip.

• Both need to focus on customer outcomes and great storytelling.

• Both need to be connected to Sales, Marketing, and Product Management - just to varying degrees.

Ultimately, when done right I think Solutions Marketing and Product Marketing are highly complementary functions, meeting distinct needs at a multi-product company.

In my opinion, all Product Marketers are Solution Marketers, whether or not they specifically have the word “Solution” in their title. PMMs don’t call it a day and head home after simply writing down what a Product does; every PMM knows that understanding personas, their jobs to be done, and how the product can help them do it faster, better, cheaper is a table-stakes part of the job. That said, today, many Product Marketing organizations are using “Product Marketing” vs. “Solution Marketing” the way the terms  “Inbound PMM” and “Outbound PMM” were used 5-10 years ago: having Product Marketers work with the Product org on pricing/packaging and adoption and having Solution Marketers work closely with Sales and Go-to-Market teams on Messaging, Sales Enablement, Campaigns, Content and Events.