Utility Marketing

Marketing primarily operates through abstractions.

Customers construct mental models of products and services through product abstractions produced by Marketing: messaging, brand systems, content, and more. It enables them to simulate product use and outcomes in their minds.

Utility Marketing introduces products in the marketing mix. It reduces reliance on mental model construction by replacing abstraction with interaction.

From Tell, to Show, and now Deliver.

Marketing first described value through stories, positioning, and messaging. Words assigned definitions and meaning to products.

The emergence of media made it possible to progress from description to demonstration. Graphics, images, and videos provided customers with visual evidence.

AI is setting the foundation for the next evolution. Telling and showing are no longer sufficient for discernment. Synthetic content is being manufactured at scale, and faster than ever before. What previously signalled meaning is no longer meaningful. Customers need new ways to distinguish substance from representation.

Utility Marketing is one way to compensate for the dilution of meaning and credibility of the content we create. It indexes on experience and outcomes over “show and tell” abstractions.

Product as the New Proxy

Utility Marketing delivers value through derivative, constrained, or complementary products. These products are separate from the core offering. Their objective is to stage, simulate, or extend core capabilities.

The utility delivered by them is what attracts, engages, and converts. They redirect customer response from “this exists” or “I want this” to “I can get value from this”.

Packaging Product in Products

Utility Marketing assets are designed to be used, not consumed.

We can think of them as previews, samples, or activations. They should provide just enough utility to be valuable, and not enough to leave customers wanting more. Interacting with them should inspire, prompt, or directly convert to core product use.

In practice, this might look like:

• Creative microsites

• Interactive mini-games

• Embedded widgets or feature modules

• Templates or remixable assets

• Workflows, prompts, or skills

• Reproducible outcome artifacts

• Mini application

• etc.

Some examples of in the market include:

• ElevenLabs packaged audio model in creative microsites (Music Player), blog embeds (AI SDR), and proprietary applications (EL Reader).

• Paper shared Shaders that can be previewed, remixed, and used in its canvas environment.

• Suno produced a Holiday Gift a Song campaign as a creative trial (bonus: "get inspired" section features playable song widgets).

• Sephora developed a Smart Skin Scan app to support product selection.

• Framer published Framer Essentials Store using its Framer Commerce infrastructure as a functional case study.

• Clay launched Claybooks as GTM workflow guides and templates to be opened and explored within Clay.

and a few more to imagine:

• Snapchat releasing a “Pokemon Go” style phone game as a simulation of its Spectacles experience.

• Duolingo creating a limited edition microsite with a multi-lingual AI Duo character to practice with.

• Twitter (or X) building a search interface to enable anyone to surface profiles, content, and media to expose platform density.

In all of these examples, a prospect can access and get value from the material without being an active user or customer.

The challenge is to make these products, services, and experiences compelling enough to capture attention and drive engagement. This is where the creative foundation of Marketing is important. Making it frictionless, useful, and beautiful will convert better.

From Impressions to Interactions

The integration of Utility Marketing implies strategic and organisational shifts:

• Marketing teams become product extenders

• Marketing materials become functional, not displays

• Content strategy becomes capability strategy

• Success metrics shift from impressions to interactions

• Distribution is optimised for utility, not virality

Utility Marketing is not a substitute to other Marketing functions. Brand Marketing illustrates value, Content Marketing describes value, Product Marketing demonstrates value, and Utility Marketing delivers value. They combine to cover a larger “mental surface area” for customers, each operating at different levels of abstraction.

The New Economics of Utility Production

Utility Marketing has been facilitated by a shift in production economics. Functional marketing assets can be designed, developed, and distributed at low marginal cost. AI displaced the need for Engineering and Product teams to get involved. Marketing can independently generate mini-applications, dynamic landing pages, interactive tools, and other product derivatives at scale.

Utility Marketing no longer has to be treated as one-off projects that require too much overhead to coordinate and execute. It can operate as its own function without compromising GTM velocity.

The Great Reversal: From Premise to Product, to Product to Premise.

The next era of marketing will not be about saying more and more compelling things. It will be about delivering capabilities before we speak.

The more we can position ourselves as utility-deliverers upfront, the more we can earn customer trust, and the more we can craft the stories we want to tell. Only once trust is earned will our stories be listened to.