After more than two decades working for all stages and sizes of tech firms throughout the Silicon Valley, I can admit to being biased about how these companies approach marketing. But there is something to be said about the commonalities across this industry and is different from more traditional industries. Here are just a few things that have stood out to me.

First, there is almost never a marginal cost for what is being marketed. Often, what is being marketed is software or some other high-tech offering, like payment services (Stripe) or a new platform (Twitter). In all of these scenarios, the thing being marketed has zero cost for the next (i.e., marginal) customer. All of the cost of these products is borne upfront with product development. Things like engineering time and R&D. This sets up an interesting marketing dynamic, because there is almost limitless supply, so the focus can be entirely on creating demand. Sure, there is a cost to serving each additional Facebook user. There is the cost of electricity and the servers that need to be added to the platform, but this is nothing like the costs that accumulate for consumable goods. Therefore, the focus in Silicon Valley marketing is always growth. Whatever it takes and by whatever means. And all the metrics the marketers care about is how fast and efficiently that growth is happening.

Second, the industry shifts quickly so marketing needs to keep up. In my 20+ years of being a part of marketing in the Valley, I have been part of seismic shifts to how humans interact and consume technology. I have seen the start of Amazon, the birth of mobile, the launch of the iPhone, big data, cloud computing, and the gig economy. Just as tech started to falter in the years just after COVID, we started to see growth reignite through AI. Every time you think the best days of Silicon Valley are over, there is some massive new wave of innovation that changes the game – again. 

The implications of this constant change to marketing are profound. We need to figure out the best way to communicate something new. Or the best way to communicate how something is different on top of it being new. We have to figure out new pricing models and gauge some feel for what something is worth, when there are no benchmarks to work from. And perhaps most important, we have to figure out which customer is right for a new product or service. Who gets the most value of this new thing that has been created. These are marketing challenges that affect many different industries, but lives at an extreme in Silicon Valley.

Third, there is a constant focus on disruption. Most tech founders you meet in Silicon Valley are focused on disruption. There is a maniacal fixation on exploiting areas that are broken within existing industries that are large and well-defined. This is what Uber did with taxi cabs, or what Slack did with email, or what Turo did with rental cars. The list goes on and on. But the theme is the same: How can we dramatically improve something that people already spend money on. This focus on disruption sets up an interesting marketing challenge, because as a marketer, you are trying to change someone’s existing habit and behavior. You are trying to convince the prospective customer that the way they have been doing things is not working, and you are the one with a solution to offer. This sets up a lot of benchmark and comparison messaging, which is different from how many other products get marketed, which is to describe how something is better or worst than alternatives that are different versions of the same thing. In this way, the marketing challenge can be larger, but come with a bigger payoff if done correctly.

Fourth, budgets are small but need to compete against large ones. One of the biggest levers for tech marketing (and this is especially true for start ups) is the dependence on Word of Mouth marketing. Some call this viral (to make it seem more glitzy; a case of marketers marketing to marketers), but whatever you call it, getting users to tell other users about a product is key to success. And the simple reason for it comes down to dollars and cents. New companies – even those that are well-funded – simply dont have the budgets to compete against large, established encumbents. Moreover, if the offering is totally new and without pre-existing competitors, the start up needs to bear the cost of customer education, which is often even higher than simply generating awareness. This is not financially viable unless there is a strong word of mouth flywheel that powers the business and gets customers for free. This dynamic can actually be frustrating at times for the Silicon Valley marketer because we spend all of our time and energy building perfect marketing campaigns, only to be outdone by a customer video no one ever thought to create. Of course, any business benefits from word of mouth marketing, but I don’t think there is the same high dependency on this as in tech marketing because of the factors I mentioned. 

Fifth, some of the biggest rivals to one another are neighbors. One additional factor is that in Silicon Valley, you see a lot of employees switching jobs frequently. Adding to that dynamic is the fact that many of these people know each other, have tight networks and are swapping jobs at companies. What happens, then, is a lot of companies will employ the same people over any given timeframe. This can be seen if you analyze the number of engineers who have worked at both Google and Facebook over the course of their careers. This factor is further magnified when you see that the employees with the most shared experiences are at the leadership level. Marketing leaders from Intel, as an example, will be hired to lead a similar function at AMD or Nvidia. Of a VP from Adobe will be hired into a similar department at Intuit. What happens, then, is that the strategies start to look the same. Truly original ideas start to die, and most marketing starts to blur together. One need look no further than the websites of enterprise websites to see that the creative elements and site structures look almost identical to one another! This has ultimately resulted in what can only be described as “The Silicon Valley” marketing playbook that is hard to deviate from. 

Suffice it to say, for all its pros and cons, Silicon Valley is a magical place and the marketing behind that magic is worth analyzing. Hopefully, this is a helpful overview for those less familiar of what makes the Valley such an interesting place to be a marketer.