How To Find Your Way Back After Falling Prey to Feature Creep
Tags: Website, Messaging, Focus, Startup, Marketing

How To Find Your Way Back After Falling Prey to Feature Creep

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash

Today, I received a note from Nik, the publisher of Better Marketing. He notified us that he and his team were reigning in the scope of his publication and returning to its original focus on marketing. They had gradually been expanding into more self-development pieces and had become less focused on their core topics in the process. I applaud this decision, despite publishing my own lifestyle pieces in the publication. Here’s why.

Getting Off-Message Is a Cardinal Sin in Marketing

I’ve been the director of marketing for three SaaS enterprise software companies, all in rapid growth mode. In software development, ‘feature creep’ takes place when a dev team or management starts adding things to the functionality that don’t support its core function.

The best example of this I know of is Microsoft Word, the venerable word processing application. Decades ago, it started off as a simple but capable authoring application for writers. Because of the need to constantly launch upgraded versions to maintain market dominance, over the years the application became burdened with endless bells and whistles. It got to the point where it was incomprehensible. Those of us who had used Word since prehistoric times bemoaned the loss of innocence (usefulness) that this created. I often wished I could go back to its early simplicity. Fortunately, Google Docs came along and duplicated that basic word processor. It is my go-to these days (I’m using it right now!).

Google Docs made the smart decision to avoid feature creep by allowing additional features, but only as add-ons that the user could add if they needed them. They rarely make changes to the app itself. The only one I’ve seen lately is the ability to add a running word count via a checkbox. (I’d actually like to see this as a default setting, if anyone is listening.)

The Homepage Conundrum

Marketing feature creep occurs when marketers can’t resist promoting every bell and whistle in their product. The place where you really see how this hurts core messaging is when it appears on the homepage— in the form of rows of feature boxes, endless scrolls, and repetition, with each move to the next level below the fold. I understand the notion of repetition in marketing but it only works for one core message. But how do you refocus on the core? And what exactly is a core message?

Get in the Driver’s Seat

Refocusing marketing always involves one simple change in perspective. You must become a potential buyer. And you must imagine the basic problem that the buyer is seeking a solution for, at the time they reach your site. Feature creep almost always occurs when certain events take place:

The product developer, designer, or owner has something new to them that is cool, in their eyes

Someone in upper management latches onto a feature and falls in love with it

Customer support gets three requests for new functionality and starts pushing for it

You fail to stay close to your customers

Marketing feels the pressure to be ‘creative’ or keeps doing new stuff because…

When a product or service is developed initially, it is always focused on a specific solution to a specific problem that the company has identified as viable, financially. Product/market fit. As long as that fit is still viable, the core purpose of the product should not change. And the core message, on the front-end of your marketing interactions (home page, email campaigns, ads, conference presence, etc.) should be incredible consistently across all interaction points. Only when the market needs change — on a fundamental basis — should you revamp that core message.