The Product Delusion: Why the Best Product Rarely Wins

Everyone loves the idea that the best product wins. It’s clean, comforting, and almost always wrong. This week on Lab Grown Marketing, Peter and Jon take on the product delusion — the belief that product superiority alone guarantees success.

In From the Feed, the guys use a timely media moment to revisit an old debate: why better products so often lose to better distribution. It’s a familiar pattern, and one that keeps repeating itself across entertainment, tech, and now AI.

Then, in Million Dollar Data, Jon shares new synthetic research exploring where the product delusion actually lives inside modern organizations — and who’s finally starting to let it go. The results might surprise you, or they might confirm everything marketing has been quietly complaining about for years.

Finally, in Synthetic Salon, Peter and Jon sit down with a very on-brand guest to talk defaults, familiarity, and why being easy to choose beats being objectively better. In a world where products are increasingly copyable, the real advantage shows up somewhere else entirely.

Product matters first. Everything else matters most.

02:40 — From the Feed: Netflix, HBO, and the Myth of Product Superiority
23:42 — Million Dollar Data: Who Still Believes the Product Delusion?
31:05 — Synthetic Salon: Defaults, AI, and Why Distribution Always Wins