I am sure you have read about these superstar start-ups that managed - so they claim - to become market leader and build their sales without a single Euro or whatever spent in marketing. Just got off the phone with a CEO of a - seemingly - quite promising US startup yesterday and - again - same speech. "You know we keep a zero marketing budget." Now I thought I need to clean up with this in a blog post and here it is.

What all these folks mean is that they are not spending heavily in marketing communications so are NOT placing ads in all kinds of media which would indeed be very costly. They might not have a Marcom Manager on board either. So if they look at their expenses they have sales/business development, R&D, admin and then a management category as well. The marketing is indeed zero. But as we all know there is truth, lies and accounting. Same here. Now let's look at what they are NOT counting as marketing using the above mentioned startup case:

• have employed a product manager that defines the GUI and all features - based on (I hope) customer requirements
• the CEO is heavily traveling - also abroad - attending one industry event after another giving talks on what they do
• they have a range of very detailed customer reference stories on their website
• one is even mentioned in the prestigious Harvard Business Review
• of course they have a big website, design was done by a graphic designer, and lots of content (30 pages, 1 Mbyte of text content!) related to their product market and product can be found
• the CEO is writing a blog with about 1-2 very long contributions every day

Now still convinced the marketing budget is zero? I count at least 3 fulltime people clearly doing marketing activties (just not marcom, but OK in high-tech B2B markets that's indeed not that often needed) which is 10% of the workforce for that startup. The CMO is the CEO and that is good since he indeed does a great job, with his know-how and personality, in representing the company outside. Just please don't continue telling the world you are not spending in marketing unless you want to give the impression that you actually don't know what marketing in high-tech really is. Others call it viral marketing but bottom line is, next to R&D, marketing (which even could include sales by some MBA schoolbook definitions) is the single most important activity to get your products and company known to the world, enabling you to make a living.