If You Can't Fix It, Feature It

This has been my most basic marketing dictum since I first heard it many years ago. It's a simple concept, really: When there's something negative about your product, find a way to turn it into a positive. (Always assuming that you can't just fix the problem, or perhaps the fix is too difficult or expensive.) This process helps you focus your marketing; gives you a defense against competitors pointing out this weakness (since you just turned it into a strength); and provides yet another reason to buy your product.

I'll use as an example something from the ancient history of the company I co-founded, Hero Games.

When we couldn't afford to reprint our boxed Champions RPG (because the box cost too much in addition to all of the booklets inside), we switched to a perfect-bound book instead. This meant moving away from the standard RPG of the time, which was a box with separately bound rules, adventures, a map, and dice. The move improved our profit margins, but how would the fans respond? We positioned this as "all the materials in one convenient book" and emphasized the feature of compactness and ease of use. It worked; the perfect bound version of the game sold well, and over the next few years it became the industry standard for RPG rules.

An all because we couldn't fix it... so we featured it.