Launching a product is like launching a rocket. The audience sees only the spectacular liftoff, while the success of the mission is determined long before the launch button is pressed. The same principle applies in marketing. Most failures happen not after the product enters the market, but at the strategy development stage. We spoke with Product Marketing expert Liliia Beliaeva about why companies keep making the same mistakes, how to distinguish a strong GTM strategy from a set of attractive slides, and what role AI and data play today.
- Hello, Liliia. Why do so many GTM strategies prove ineffective even before launch?
- Hello. It's a pattern I see constantly, and it almost always traces back to the same root cause.
Most companies start GTM with tactics rather than strategy. They decide "how we will promote it" before answering "who needs this and why." They measure launch success by reach, impressions, and likes instead of looking at the only criterion that really matters: Whether people pay for the product. Everything else is an activity metric, not a business metric. A strong GTM strategy begins not with the question "What are we launching?" but with "Who benefits from this, why, and are they willing to pay for it?"
- How often do companies launch without a deep understanding of their audience?
- Far more often than is commonly admitted. Companies think they know their audience because they conducted several interviews or looked at data in a dashboard. But that is not the same as understanding.
True audience understanding is when you can describe not only who the audience is, but also what they feel at the moment they are looking for a solution. What is their inner monologue? What holds them back? What have they already tried? In D2C, this is critical because you have literally three seconds in the feed for a person to feel, "This is about me," and around a dozen competitors with a similar product. When that understanding is missing, companies launch with a universal message for everyone. It does not offend anyone, but it does not resonate either. The result is expensive traffic, weak conversion, and the feeling that "the product is good, but something is not working." That "something" is a lack of audience understanding.
- What signals show that a GTM strategy was built incorrectly even before launch?
- There are a few red flags I've learned to spot early.
First, a vague audience profile. If the description of the target persona fits into one sentence made up of adjectives, it is not a profile; it is a demographic group. D2C requires behavioral context: At what moment in life a person starts looking for this product, what led them there, and what they have tried before. Without that, any message will miss the mark.
Second, positioning has been written before a real competitive analysis has been done. Many people confuse positioning with messaging. Positioning answers the question: Why are we the obvious choice among all alternatives, including "doing nothing"? If this has not been worked through, all messages will sound similar to competitors.
An effective way to check this is to take the criteria by which your audience actually chooses a product and assess how well each competitor, including you, covers each of them. Where all market players are already strong, competing is difficult and expensive. What is more interesting is what no one has yet addressed well - that is where a real differentiator can be found.
That is exactly what we did at Mira when launching the Ultra4 Kit. The entire hormone-tracking market was focused on women trying to conceive. It was an obvious, validated segment, and all competitors were working with it. But large-scale audience research showed us a different picture. Women in perimenopause and women with hormonal imbalances were fast-growing segments with huge unmet demand, and the market was only beginning to move in that direction. We entered those segments ahead of competitors and built a separate strategy around each one, with personalized messages, triggers, and channels - instead of using one universal approach for everyone. These segments are now built into the company's core growth strategy, and the launch itself became the most successful in Mira's history.
Third, the wrong choice of channels. Spreading yourself across too many channels at once without sufficient resources is a sure way to underperform in all of them. Effective channel allocation works like an investment portfolio. The largest share goes into what is reliable and proven, a smaller share into what is growing, and a very small share into tests with an uncertain outcome. Every strong channel was once someone's experiment, but not every experiment becomes a strong channel.
Fourth, there are no success metrics before launch. If the team cannot say exactly what numbers will determine success 30 days after launch, then there is no strategy. There is only an activity plan.
- What is more important: A strong product or strong positioning?
- Both, but in the right sequence.
A strong product without positioning remains invisible. I have seen this more than once. The product solves a real problem, the team believes in it, but the market does not notice it because no one has explained who it is for, why it matters, and why now. In D2C, this is especially critical: There is no sales team that will come in and explain everything personally. If the message does not land, the person simply scrolls further, and you lose them.
But positioning cannot save a weak product. It can drive the first purchase. Repeat purchases and retention, however, are what turn a company from a one-time spike in sales into a sustainable business with real room to grow. Without them, unit economics may formally add up, but there will be no foundation for scaling.
That is why I think of this as a system in which the product is the foundation. Positioning explains to the market why your product solves the problem and for whom. GTM turns this into real sales through the right channels, with the right message, for the right audience. Pricing reflects the perceived value of the product, and it works both ways. A price that is too low undermines trust just as much as a price that is too high creates a barrier. All four elements are connected, but if the foundation is weak, the rest will not save it.
- How has the development of GTM strategies changed under the influence of AI, data, and consumer behavior?
- AI has indeed changed the way GTM strategies are built, first and foremost in terms of speed.
Customer research, competitor analysis, segmentation, positioning, channel hypotheses, an initial messaging framework - things that used to take weeks can now be drafted in a few hours. But I see this not as a ready-made answer, but as a starting point that you adapt to your own context.
Another technique I use is asking AI to critically review an already prepared strategy: To find weak points, contradictions, and unanswered questions. This accelerates the "hypothesis - test - conclusion" cycle and helps avoid falling in love with your own ideas.
But I would look at AI more broadly: Not only as a tool for building strategy, but also as one of the fastest-growing acquisition channels. People are increasingly searching for products through AI rather than search engines - by some estimates, one in three consumers already uses AI at the product discovery stage. This is an emerging discipline called Generative Engine Optimization, and the way your brand is represented in those answers already influences purchasing decisions.
- Can a strategy be "saved" if it is already clear at the preparation stage that the chosen approach is wrong?
- It can, and the earlier, the better. Fixing a strategy before launch is a matter of time. Fixing it after budgets have been spent and the wrong brand perception has already formed is an entirely different story.
But "saving" does not always mean finishing what has already been started. Sometimes the right answer is to stop and rethink everything from scratch. Continuing to move in the wrong direction simply because you have already started is one of the most expensive mistakes in marketing.
This is exactly why the PMM entry point matters. When I joined Mira as the first PMM, one of my first decisions was to become involved in the product process from the very beginning. Not to receive a finished product, but to shape it together with the team. This meant that marketing was embedded in the product process from the start. The needs of priority segments identified through customer research helped shape the product roadmap, while pricing decisions were grounded in a clear understanding of what customers were willing to pay.
When PMM comes in afterward, they promote what already exists. If the product solves the wrong problem, at the wrong price, for the wrong audience, no campaign can fix that.
- What three steps before launch reduce the risk of GTM strategy failure?
- First, talk to real people instead of relying only on data about them. Before building a strategy, you need to conduct live interviews with potential buyers. Qualitative interviews provide what dashboards and surveys cannot: Living context and insights that are impossible to predict in advance. The key question here is not "Would you buy this?" but "Tell me about the last time you faced this problem." Asking about a specific past moment, rather than a hypothetical future, surfaces real behavior instead of polite answers. The answers almost always change the initial hypotheses. And this is not a one-time activity before launch. Research should be a continuous process.
Second, conduct an honest competitive analysis and find a real differentiator. Not the one that looks good in a presentation, but the one that matters to your audience at the moment of choice. This means looking at yourself and your competitors through the customer's eyes and finding the gap where you can become the obvious solution. This also includes the alternative of "doing nothing," which in D2C is often the strongest competitor.
Third, define success metrics before launch, not after. Not "increase awareness," but specific numbers: How many sales are needed, and what LTV-to-CAC ratio makes the unit economics work. This makes it possible to quickly make iteration decisions and immediately separates marketing as an activity from marketing as a business function.
All three steps are about one thing: Making decisions based on reality, not hypotheses. Before launch, a mistake costs time. After launch, it costs money and reputation.
This article was written in cooperation with Daniel Ashkenazi