The Re-emergence of Product Line Marketing
A few years ago I wrote a post called The Decomposition of Marketing. The argument was that startup CEOs were increasingly breaking marketing apart — moving product marketing under product and moving demandgen under sales — in order to get strong leadership in both product marketing and demandgen without having to find the rare CMO who's genuinely great at both.
I think that trend has accelerated. And it's created a problem that nobody seems to be talking about.
Mind The Gap
Here's what happens when you decompose marketing in a multi-product organization.
In the fully decomposed organization, there is no traditional CMO. What you have instead is three distinct leaders: an SVP of Demandgen who reports to the CRO and is laser-focused on pipeline; one or more VPs of Product Marketing who report into the CPO (or product GMs) and own their individual products; and an SVP of Corporate Marketing — sometimes carrying the CMO title, sometimes not — who owns brand and communications.
Each product team has its own product marketer (or team leader), focused on their product's positioning, messaging, and launch. The CPO loves it because they no longer have to work (i.e., "waste time ") with marketing to build their story. The product marketers love it because they're not spread thin. The demandgen leader even likes it because they know who to work with on product-specific campaigns.
The problem is that you now have three product marketers, each telling the story of their individual product. Each one is perfectly capable of answering "why buy mine?" for their specific product. None of them is positioned — organizationally or politically — to answer a different question: why buy this product line, and where is it going?
That question falls through the org chart. And it matters enormously.
Because buyers — especially enterprise buyers — don't just buy products. They buy into a vision. They're making a bet on a vendor. They want to know: does this company have a coherent strategy, or did they just bolt three products together and call it a platform? Is this a company I can grow with, or am I buying the first of many painful migrations?
Nobody in the decomposed org is answering that question well. The product marketers are heads-down on their products. The SVP of Demandgen is focused on pipeline. The SVP of Corporate Marketing is telling the brand story — which is emotional, values-driven, and important — but it isn't a product story. Brand is about feeling. Product line marketing is about logic: why this set of products, why together, why now, and why us.
In a small startup, the CEO fills this gap. That's fine. The CEO should be the chief storyteller when the company is young and the product line is simple. But as the company grows, scales, and adds products, the CEO can no longer own this story in any operational sense. It becomes nobody's job. Which means it either doesn't get done or gets done by someone pinch hitting in the role (e.g., the VP of brand doing their best, one of the product marketing VPs moonlighting).
Given that this integrated story is typically more important to buyers than each of the product-specific ones, this is a problem. The thing that matters most to buyers is literally no one's day job.
This Isn't Theoretical
I've seen this gap in practice many times. In one case, a growing multi-product SaaS business with strong product marketers, great demand generation, and a real brand — but nobody whose job it is to walk a prospective customer through the logic of the product line: why these products together, how they reinforce each other, what the roadmap implies about where the company is going, and why that matters for a buyer making a three-year bet.
I also have a friend at a large enterprise software company who was recently given a role that, officially, sits somewhere in marketing strategy or marketing operations. But when you listen to what they actually do, it's product line marketing. They own the integrated product story. They work across business units to ensure the message hangs together. They work on cross-product expansion playbooks and sales analytics. They help the company answer the questions that no individual product team can answer alone.
I think they call it product ops or marketing ops or such. But it's product line marketing. Call it what you will, but the job needs to be done.
What Product Line Marketing Actually Is
Let me be precise, because the naming here matters.
Product line marketing is holistic, but it's deeper than brand. Brand is emotional and important, but it's not about product-oriented arguments. And while it certainly involves communications, product line marketing is not a pure comms role, like public relations. Nor is it product marketing in the traditional sense, because that's specific to a given product.
Product line marketing is the discipline of telling the story of a company's product portfolio: why these products belong together, what the vision is for the combined offering, how a customer should think about buying one versus two versus all of them, and why the holistic roadmap is going where it's going.
It lives between brand and product. It's more specific than corporate messaging and more strategic than individual product messaging. It's the connective tissue that most multi-product companies are missing.
Beyond the story itself, product line marketing should own some things that are inherently cross-product in nature.
The standard sales deck and demo. Someone has to own the pitch that walks a prospect through the whole portfolio story. If three product teams each own a piece of it, you don't have a deck — you have a Frankendeck. Owning the sales deck is obvious. What's less obvious is that product line marketing should also own the standard demo — because the demo is just the same story told with the product as the visual instead of slides. If the deck and the demo tell different stories, you have a problem. They should be the same narrative, expressed in two different media.
Analyst relations. Because product to analyst mapping is rarely 1-1 and because analysts themselves want to understand the integrated story, analyst (and influencer) relations should be in the product line marketing team. This also enables you to hire a top-class analyst relations leader and leverage them across products. It also centralizes basic but important things like contract negotiation, inquiry management, briefing and strategy day scheduling, and the general responsibility for squeezing every last drop of value out of the money you've invested. (Too many vendors write the big check and then fail to get value.)
Social media. Maintaining a consistent social presence is too important to leave to chance — and too expensive to duplicate across product teams. Individual PMMs can and should contribute to social conversations in their area, but owning and maintaining the social presence needs to be someone's actual job. Centralizing it in product line marketing delivers both economies of scale and consistency of message. The alternative — having each product team manage their own presence, or delegating it to a PR/comms person whose instincts are corporate rather than product — produces the kind of fragmented, low-signal output that gets tolerated but rarely drives results.
Why This Is Coming Back
Product line marketing isn't a new idea. At Business Objects back in the day, when we had a portfolio of BI products, someone had to own the story of how they fit together. Big enterprise software companies — IBM, SAP, Oracle — have always had versions of this role, even if they called it something else.
What's new is that the org structures that made product line marketing unnecessary — single-product companies, integrated marketing teams, CMOs who owned both message and demand — are now widely being replaced by decomposed structures. More companies are going multi-product faster. More are moving product marketing into the product org. And as they do, the gap grows.
The solution isn't to reverse the decomposition. Putting product marketing back under marketing doesn't necessarily produce better product marketing. The decomposition, in many cases, is the right call.
The solution is to recognize that decomposition creates a new need. When you break marketing apart, you need someone to hold the whole story together. That's product line marketing. Call it what you want. But make sure someone's doing it.
If you're running a decomposed marketing organization — or if you've recently moved in that direction — ask yourself who owns the following: the integrated product line story, the standard sales deck and demo, analyst relations, and social media. If the answer is "nobody" or "everyone sort of" or "we cover that patchwork by the product units," that's your answer. You have a gap. And the fix is to create a product line marketing function, give it a real mandate, and staff it with someone who can speak credibly to the whole portfolio.
The thing that matters most to your buyers shouldn't be nobody's job.
Have you dealt with this problem? I'd love to hear how you've solved it — or not. Leave a comment or drop me a note.
