a field guide, distilled from MIT OpenCourseWare · system by [email protected]
Marketing is getting the right offer in front of the right buyer, and knowing why it works. Here are the durable ideas from MIT Sloan's marketing courses, in plain terms, each one cited to the course it came from.
Price against the value gap, not your cost.
The number that matters is value created: what a customer will pay minus what it honestly costs you to deliver. Price negotiates inside that band. If a buyer would gladly pay 8k for an outcome and your real cost is 2k, the value created is 6k. Margin lives in widening the gap (better outcome, trust) or lowering your cost, not in marking up hours.The gap is an estimate until a real buyer confirms it, so treat any willingness-to-pay number as hedged. This is honest pricing: you are splitting a measured gap, not justifying a markup.Marketing Strategy 15.834-spring-2003
Test a strategy against three fits before you spend.
Any marketing strategy has to pass three checks: external fit (does it match a real customer need and the competitive field), internal fit (do your own resources actually support it), and dynamic fit (does it still hold as customers and rivals change). A plan that passes one but fails another is not a strategy. Most failed launches passed exactly one.Internal fit is where small firms win or lose. If your advantage is something a competitor can buy tomorrow, it is a temporary lead, not an advantage.Marketing Strategy 15.834-spring-2003
Positioning happens in the customer's head, on two to four dimensions.
Customers judge a product on a small number of dimensions, usually two to four, and how it sits in their minds beats its objective specs. Buyers often cannot assess technical attributes, so they buy the benefit, and physically similar products get perceived as different through name, history, and how they were communicated.List ten features and you are fighting on dimensions the buyer is not using. Find the two to four axes they actually weigh, found through customer research, not assumed at the desk, and own a clear spot.Entrepreneurial Marketing 15.835-spring-2002
First-mover advantage is real but oversold.
Pioneers tend to hold higher share and survive longer, but much of that is survival and self-report bias, and most pioneers lead their category for only five to ten years (Golder and Tellis). The durable edge is that buyers learn what good looks like from the first product they try, so their ideal shifts toward the pioneer and later copies look less distinct.Entering an established category, do not imitate the leader, differentiate on an axis they do not own. Pioneers fail by mis-forecasting: RCA's VideoDisc died because the forecast ignored that VCR rental changed what people would buy.Entrepreneurial Marketing 15.835-spring-2002
Buy research in proportion to what you do not know, and update.
A cash-tight operator should neither skip research nor over-buy it. The standard is discovery-driven: make small bets, measure, revise, rather than buying one giant study up front. Venture success is a chain of conditional odds (technical, then commercial, then market), so overall odds are low and research is how you de-risk each link.Match the method to the question. A genuinely new product has no history, so concept tests beat time-series forecasting. Cheap research that updates beats expensive research that sits in a binder.Entrepreneurial Marketing 15.835-spring-2002
Price lives between what they will pay and what it costs you. Widen the gap, then split it. After Marketing Strategy 15.834-spring-2003.
Own a clear spot on the few axes buyers actually use. If you are late, move into open space the leader does not own. After Entrepreneurial Marketing 15.835-spring-2002.