The marketing was already happening

Two sisters in Amman are making sunglasses for small children. They have a sample frame, a supplier for the lenses and a long list of things still to decide. Asked how they plan to sell them, one of them says they will get to the marketing once the product is finished.

I understand what she means. She means the posts, the photographs, the paid reach, the part where strangers hear about the glasses. That part can wait. It probably should.

But the marketing is not waiting for her. It is happening now, at the kitchen table.

It is in whether the arms survive being sat on by a four-year-old. In the name printed inside the frame, and whether a parent can say it out loud to another parent. In the price, which tells a mother which shelf in her head the glasses belong on before she has held them. In the case, and whether it shuts with one hand while the other holds a child. In what happens when a hinge snaps in the first month and she writes to ask.

And most of all in the one detail that makes a parent at the park ask another parent where those came from. That question is the only advertising that reliably works for something like this, and it is either designed in now or it is not there at all.

Promotion comes later, and it can only amplify what the product already says. Treat marketing as the last step and the money goes on telling people about something that gives nobody a reason to talk.

By the time the glasses are finished, the marketing will be finished too, whether or not anyone was paying attention to it.