Make product first, add marketing second?

Seth Godin’s column today asks us to rethink when businesspeople start to think about how to reach customers and ambassadors for a new product or service. As Godin writes, things have changed:

In the Mad Men era, we added marketing last. Marketing and advertising were the same thing, and the job was to promote what was made.

In the connection era, the marketing is the product, the service and most of all the conversations it causes and the connections it makes.

Of course, today’s “connection era” is the truly two-way world of Web 2.0, where customers and other audiences for a company expect a respectful conservation, not an old-school hyped up ad pitch.

And with so many more options for products and services available to them, and so many companies that are already doing communications the new way, potential buyers have every right to be picky.