How to Market a Product and Attract Customers

To market a product well, stop asking how to promote it. Zoom out and answer a prior question: which group of people has a problem this product solves, and what words do they already use for that problem? Marketing that attracts customers matches an offer to a defined want. Promotion only amplifies whatever is already there.

That is the short version. Here is the longer one, and the reason I am writing it is that a student sent me two questions this week:

“How does a marketer market their product well to attract their customers? And what is the first step when I want to start a business, what will I consider first?”

I am answering the second question first because its answer changes the answer to the first one. Most people ask the marketing question far too early, and that mistake is costly.

What is the first step in starting a business?

The first step is not the idea, the capital, or the business registration. It is finding one person who pays you. Not a friend who says “support kita” or “ok yan.” Someone who hands over money for something they wanted before they met you. Until that happens, you do not have a business. You have a plan, and plans are the cheapest thing in the world to produce.

So what do you consider first? Three things, in this order.

1. Whose problem do you remove, and are they already paying to solve it? If people are spending money on a bad solution right now, that is a stronger signal than an untouched market. An empty market is usually empty for a reason. Go find the money that is already moving.
2. What can you afford to lose? Not what you hope to earn. Every projection you write will be wrong, so the number that actually protects you is the downside: cash, months, and your name. Decide that number before you spend, not after.
3. What is the smallest version of this that produces a real transaction? One unit, delivered by you, to a stranger. Then watch what breaks.

How I tested before I registered

That third question is how Piersson Strategic Management Services started. I consulted for small businesses for free. No company, no permit, no pitch deck, no rate card. I did the work and watched whether it mattered to anyone, and I kept doing it until I was convinced the demand was real and worth pursuing. Only then did I register when the risk was low. New businesses live in a world full of uncertainty.

Registration is not the beginning of a business. It is what you do to protect one that already exists.

I want to be precise here because this is the part where well-meaning advice can turn into a legal problem for someone. Testing an idea before you formalize it is ordinary practice. Operating an unregistered business indefinitely is not, and the exposure is real:

• Business name. Under Act No. 3883, as amended, you must register a business name before you trade under any name other than your own. Registration through the DTI Business Name Registration System is scoped by territory, from barangay to national, with a documentary stamp tax on top, and it is valid for five years. DTI’s own FAQ makes a point people miss: a business name certificate gives your business a legal identity, but you still need a mayor’s permit to actually operate.
• Tax. Section 236(A) of the Tax Code, as amended by RA 11976, requires every person subject to internal revenue tax to register with the appropriate Revenue District Office on or before the commencement of business. The Ease of Paying Taxes Act also removed the ?500 annual registration fee, which BIR confirms in its own EOPT flyer.
• The relief most first-timers never hear about. If your total assets, excluding the land your operation sits on, are not more than ?3,000,000, you may qualify as a Barangay Micro Business Enterprise under RA 9178. Section 7 exempts a registered BMBE from income tax on the income arising from its operations. You register with the treasurer of your city or municipality, not with DTI, and the certificate runs for two years and is renewable.

The honest sequence is this. Test small and quietly while you are still learning whether anyone wants the thing. The moment money starts moving repeatedly, register, because at that point, you are protecting something worth protecting.

This section explains how the rules work in general. It is not tax or legal advice for your specific situation, and the fees and windows are subject to change. Confirm with your RDO, your city hall, and your accountant before you act on a number you read on a blog, including mine.

How to market a product so customers actually come

Now, the first question. When people ask how to market a product, they usually mean “what should I post, and where.” That is the last ten percent of the work.

It helps to be clear about what the word actually means. The American Marketing Association defines marketing as the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. Philip Kotler puts it more usefully for an owner-operator: marketing is about identifying and meeting human and social needs, and one of the shortest good definitions is meeting needs profitably. For me, it is simpler than that: generating value. Value comes from showing the right people the right product at the time they need it.

Read that again and notice what is missing. Posting. Boosting. Content calendars. Those are delivery and communication, which are two of the five verbs. If the offering has no value to a defined group, the other three verbs have nothing to carry.

Here is the sequence that actually attracts customers.

1. Name one customer, specifically. “Everyone who eats” is not a market. “Office workers in Ortigas who want lunch under ?150 delivered before noon” is a market. Specificity feels like shrinking your opportunity. It does the opposite, because a message aimed at a small group lands, and a message aimed at everyone slides off.
2. Find the one problem they will pay to remove. Ask them. Do not infer it from your product. The gap you are looking for is where the offers already available fail to satisfy their want.
3. Use their words, not yours. Read how your customers already describe the problem in comments, group chats, and reviews of your competitors. Then say it back to them almost exactly. Most marketing fails because the business describes the product while the customer is searching for their problem, and the two never meet.
4. Go where they already gather. Do not build an audience from zero if you can borrow one. Existing Facebook groups, existing sellers, existing foot traffic and an existing supplier’s client list. Attention is the expensive input, so start where it is already pooled.
5. Make one promise and keep it every time. Not five features. One thing you are reliably better at. Reliability is usually what converts a first purchase into the second one, and the second one is where the money is.
6. Measure one number. Of the people who saw it, how many bought? Not likes, not reach, not views. Those feel like progress and cost nothing to collect, which is exactly why they mislead. If a hundred people saw your post and nobody bought, the post is not the problem. The offer is.

How to attract customers when you have no marketing budget

This is the version of the question most Filipino owner-operators are actually asking, because most Philippine businesses are very small. Of the 1,241,476 business establishments counted in the DTI MSME statistics for 2024, 1,236,908 are micro, small, or medium enterprises, and 1,125,476 of those are micro. Nine out of ten registered businesses in this country are microenterprises. Advice built around an ad budget is advice built for somebody else.

With no budget, three moves carry almost all the weight.

• Sell to the people you can already reach. Effectuation research calls this starting from the means in your hand: who you are, what you know, and whom you know. Your first fifty customers are almost always inside two degrees of you.
• Serve the customers you have well enough that they come back. Retention is not a soft metric. In their 1990 Harvard Business Review study Zero Defections, Frederick Reichheld and W. Earl Sasser found that cutting the customer defection rate by five points raised profits substantially across industries, by roughly 30 percent in an auto-service chain and about 85 percent in one bank’s branch system. The widely quoted “5 percent retention increases profits by 25 to 95 percent” line is a later paraphrase and not a figure any single primary source states, so treat the range with care. The direction of the finding is solid even where the popular number is sloppy.
• Make referral a deliberate act, not a hope. Ask. Most small businesses never do. A satisfied customer who is asked directly, once, at the right moment, refers at a rate that no organic post will match.

A worked example: the sari-sari store that sells rice (and Red Horse)

Take a small neighborhood store in Carbern Village, Los Baños, Laguna. I wish Aling V were still here today. I still remember her calling me Piolo, because according to her, I am handsome. If she asked me now how to market her sari-sari store, this is what I would tell her. For context, she sold the same instant noodles, the same shampoo sachets, the same soft drinks and the same Red Horse as the four other stores in nearby kantos within walking distance.

The generic answer is a Facebook page. The useful answer starts one step earlier.

Her defined customer is not “the village.” It is the household that runs out of rice at seven in the evening, after the palengke has closed and before payday. It is also the household that realizes at nine in the evening that it needs two more litros of Red Horse. Those households have a specific problem, and it is not price. It is timing and small quantities.

So the offer becomes: rice by the kilo, repacked, until nine in the evening, delivered within the subdivision for twenty pesos. For those who are drinking, ice-cold Red Horse delivered with the ice. One promise, kept every night. The message uses the customer’s own words, which is not “quality rice at affordable prices” but “naubusan ka ng bigas? Hanggang alas-nuwebe kami bukas.” Or “bitin sa Red Horse? ’Wag mag-remorse, hanggang alas-nuwebe kami, with ice pa, boss.”

The channel is the subdivision Viber group where those households already talk to each other, not a new page with zero followers. The number she watches is not the group members. It is how many households saw the message, how many ordered in the first week, and how many ordered again in the second.

The mistake underneath both questions

Both of the student’s questions have the same failure scenarios waiting to happen, and it is worth naming plainly.

Be a detective, not a fortune teller.

A fortune teller writes a forecast and then spends real money defending it. A detective treats every line of that forecast as a question and goes out to collect evidence. Your first year in business is not an execution problem. It is an investigation. The founders who survive are the ones who change their minds quickly when the evidence says to, and the ones who fail are usually the ones who were most confident on day one. I have written about this at length in Be a Detective, Not a Fortune Teller, and about what happens when you market before you have validated anything in Product Market Fit: Validate Before You Market.

Frequently asked questions

What is the first thing to do when starting a business?

Find one paying customer. Before the idea is polished, before capital is raised, and before registration, confirm that a specific person will pay for what you are offering. Everything else in a business plan is an assumption until a stranger’s money tests it.

How do you attract customers to buy your product?

Match the offer to a clearly defined group, describe the problem in the words those customers already use, and place the message where they already gather. Then make one promise you can keep every time, because repeat purchases and referrals do more work than reach.

Do I need to register my business before I can sell anything?

You need to register a business name before trading under any name other than your own, and you must register with the BIR on or before commencing business. Short, informal validation with a handful of people is testing. Once transactions repeat, register.

How much does DTI business name registration cost in the Philippines?

The fee depends on the territorial scope you choose: ?200 for barangay, ?500 for city or municipality, ?1,000 for regional, and ?2,000 for national, each with an additional ?30 documentary stamp tax. Registration is valid for five years, and late filing incurs a 50% surcharge. Verified on the DTI BNRS FAQ on 29 July 2026; confirm the current schedule before you file.

What is the cheapest way to market a small business in the Philippines?

Direct conversation with people you can already reach, followed by deliberate referral requests from customers you have served well. Both cost nothing but time, and both produce a clearer signal about whether the offer works than any small-scale paid campaign.

How long before marketing starts working?

If the offer fits, the first purchases come quickly, often within days of talking to the right people. If months pass with effort and no sales, the usual cause is the offer or the audience definition, not the volume of promotion.

Where to go next

If you want the underlying concepts rather than the field guide, the marketing management concept library covers the frameworks this article compresses. If your question is really about getting a business off the ground in the Philippines rather than marketing one, start with Paano Magsimula ng Negosyo.

To the student who asked: start small, start this month, and let ten honest conversations tell you what a year of planning cannot.

References

• American Marketing Association, “What is Marketing?” The current official definition, accessed for this article.
• Philip Kotler and Kevin Lane Keller, Marketing Management, 14th edition, Pearson, 2012, Chapter 1. Source of the “meeting needs profitably” framing.
• Frederick F. Reichheld and W. Earl Sasser Jr., “Zero Defections: Quality Comes to Services,” Harvard Business Review, September to October 1990. The primary source on retention economics.
• Act No. 3883 (Business Name Law), as amended, and the DTI Business Name Registration System FAQ.
• Republic Act No. 11976 (Ease of Paying Taxes Act, 2024), amending Section 236 of the Tax Code, and the BIR EOPT flyer.
• Republic Act No. 9178 (Barangay Micro Business Enterprises Act of 2002), Sections 3 and 7.
• DTI MSME Statistics, 2024 data, drawn from the Philippine Statistics Authority List of Establishments.