How to Market a Product No One Understands (Yet Everyone Needs)

Let’s start with the truth: if you’re marketing something revolutionary, you’re already at war.

War against confusion.

War against apathy.

War against the glazed-over stare people give you when you pitch.

Because the second your product leaves the comfort of “understood” and enters “WTF is this?”, you lose the lazy marketer’s toolkit. There’s no category to ride on. No search terms to piggyback. No buyer awareness to lean into. You’re out on your own. So you better know how to fight.

Here’s how you win.

Stop Explaining. Start Translating.

Your job is not to teach the textbook. It’s to make people feel something before they understand everything.

Too many founders fall in love with “explaining” — the tech, the science, the process. The customer doesn’t care. They don’t want to join a lecture. They want to know why it matters to them.

Great translation means dropping your jargon and turning the abstract into the tangible.

“Our product reduces carbon emissions through molecular filtration”= Snooze.

“This tiny box makes the air in your house cleaner than a mountain summit.”= I get it. I want it.

You don’t need to dumb it down. You need to human it up.

 Make It About the Enemy

Confusion dies in the presence of contrast. People understand what something is by seeing what it isn’t. And they understand you when you position against what they already hate.

This is especially powerful when your product is solving a problem they don’t know has a solution.

Don’t say: “We’re a new kind of decentralised payment architecture.”Say: “Tired of banks double-dipping into your wallet? We’re the system that cuts them out.”

Find the villain. Paint the pain. Then frame your product as the weapon that puts control back in their hands.

Use Metaphors Like a Sledgehammer

When the product is hard to grasp, metaphors are your marketing cheat code. They act like a Trojan Horse—slipping something new into a shape the audience already trusts.

Spotify could have said “streaming digital audio files in real-time via a cloud-based server.”Instead, they said: “All the music. No CDs.”

If your innovation sounds like magic, don’t be afraid to lean into it. But anchor it with metaphor, or you’ll drift into the land of tech-babble no one wants to visit.

Metaphor = meaning at scale. Use it early, use it often, and never in the fine print.

Admit It’s Weird

Here’s the kicker: people love weird. They love new. But only if you own it.

There’s a powerful moment when you say:

“Look, this isn’t like anything you’ve seen before. It might even sound strange. But here’s why it matters…”

That honesty disarms. It builds trust. It also makes you sound human—rare in the echo chamber of sameness that most brands live in.

Own the weirdness. Don’t apologise for it. Embrace it, then connect it to something they do care about.

Ditch the Case Study. Tell a Conversion Story.

No one’s going to trawl through a five-page PDF about your ‘disruptive innovation strategy’.

They want to see someone like them go from “WTF is this?” to “Why didn’t I buy this sooner?”

That’s a conversion story. And it’s gold.

It sounds like this:

“We met Sarah. She’d been running her store the same way for 15 years. She tried our tool reluctantly. Two weeks later, she was texting us at midnight saying she’d doubled her sales and ‘can’t live without it’.”

Specific. Emotional. Undeniable.Tell ten of those stories before you tell one more “use case.”

Prototype the Experience. Not the Product.

When nobody understands what you’ve built, the fastest way to get traction isn’t to talk more - it’s to show less.

Hear us out.

You don’t need to demo every feature or walk through every detail. That leads to overwhelm. Instead, prototype the feeling your product creates.

Can you create a 30-second interaction that makes someone go “ohhh, now I get it”?

That’s your magic. Bottle it. Lead with it.

Choose Your Early Adopters Like You Choose Your Allies

You don’t need the masses to love it yet. You need the right few.

When Tesla launched, they didn’t try to explain electric torque to your mum. They sold to early tech adopters and car nerds who would pay attention, pay up, and talk loud. The rest followed later.

So if you’re pre-category, pick your wedge. Go narrow. Go deep. Get your first 100 true believers, not 10,000 passive “likes.”

If your product is confusing to the wrong people, that’s not a failure. That’s filtration.

Forget "Educating the Market" - Make Them Care or Go Home

Let’s be clear: “educating the market” is a death sentence unless it’s tied to action. If your entire strategy is “run awareness campaigns and hope they figure it out,” you’ve already lost.

Education is what teachers do. You’re a marketer. Your job is to sell change.

If they don’t get it, that’s on you.If they don’t care, that’s on your story.If they don’t act, that’s on your ask.

The market doesn’t owe you understanding. You owe them a reason to care.

Final Word (Not a Fluffy One)

If you’re marketing something no one understands, good. That means it’s probably worth something.

Just don’t expect clarity to arrive on its own. You have to fight for it. Shape it. Sharpen it. Punch through the noise and make people feel it - before they even know why.

And if you want a team that lives for that challenge?

You know where to find us.

Want help shaping your confusing, category-breaking, beautifully weird product into a story people will pay attention to?

Let’s make them get it - and want it.

Complex product? Messy category? Perfect. That’s where we thrive.

👉 Book a free 1-hour strategy session with Magnetise.