Product-led growth: a secret marketing asset

A valuable product will do more for growing your brand than flashy campaigns ever will.

Product-led growth is about designing product experiences so your customers can achieve what they came for. But beyond taking user empathy seriously, it's also about iterating on the product experience so you can best deliver on your promised value.

Peloton just released a new product today, Peloton Guide, and it’s a perfect example of product-led growth. The company recognized the booming interest in their strength classes and developed a product with machine learning to help their users work out in a way that's personalized to them.

Peloton is a branding genius, but their consistent (and big) product improvements show that they’re leading with their product. This is huge for their marketing efforts.

When a company embraces product-led growth, marketing has the fuel to create outstanding go-to-market strategy, strengthen customer retention, and turn users into brand champions. In other words, marketing can center their strategies around the product to acquire and nurture customers and help grow the product's reach and reputation.

Two other points on Peloton’s new product launch:

  1. They announced that existing members can get a free app upgrade to use Peloton Guide--and not just for themselves but for up to five family members/friends. That helps open up the flywheel to users who are considering whether to go for it or not. Peloton is also throwing in a free heart rate monitor when you buy the product. Freemiums like this show that they intend for the product to market itself through a positive user experience. If that works, they’ll have lower customer acquisition costs than if they relied on traditional marketing/sales efforts. 

  2. On the social media post for the new product (screenshot below), they had many of their instructors, all of whom are influencers with hundreds of thousands of followers each, blowing up the comments with stoke. Creating buzz through your own influencers is a kickass strategy.