thefunnel

There are lots of words in marketing.  Strategy, objectives, vision, goals etc. , but what is really required for marketing to be successful? One of my managers, a few years back explained this by saying, “there are five key questions, to which you always need to have the answer,  and if you do, it will help you to be successful  marketer”. These five questions, permanently stuck into my mind are:

• Do you know the size of the market, customer segments, customer buying cycles and the your current position in the market?
• Do you have clear priorities?
• Does your plans align with, and reflect the goals of the sales organization?
• Are there clear measures of success and failure?
• Do you have a vision of the most outstanding growth opportunity?

The most important thing for any marketing / communication plan! Way too often marketers forget the basics and jump straight into messaging or even tactics, when following the simple rule of segmenting – targeting – positioning – messaging. When positioning is done correctly there’s no doubt about what and who the product / service is for and what it’s uniqueness and value, out of which the messaging almost flows ”automatically”. Positioning is a very good acid test, and if not convincing enough the success rate diminishes. One other common mistake is trying to write a positioning statement like a message or tag-line. Fails every time.

The second problem relates to the brand and how to measure what customer value and why they buy. In working on my dissertation for my MSc, I created a “value model” for my research framework, and although this provided good insight into the buying decision, I’ve always been frustrated by not being able to put the model to “work” and make it more practical for everyday marketing. There are also other aspects to this same problem area that I’ve come across in various awareness / preference / customer satisfaction data. One of the most fascinating discussions I had with customers was when I did some research into what content customers value. I was talking to one extremely loyal customer who has always purchased a particular product (let’s call this product A) from us, and probably always will. In the conversation I asked him the question about why he doesn’t buy other (different category, but similar usage, for the conversation let’s call this product B) products from us. His answer was. “You are not the “B product company are you”! This is true, but not the rational answer that you would expect from an engineer (always rational, looking only at what will best solve their problems). His answer explains, why a company can score relatively well in awareness and preference research, and also in many cases being considered as an alternative for “a secondary product”, but when the purchase order is placed, it’s always for the competitors product. So here we have a company, ours, that scores high on all important brand and product attributes, for both products (A and B), but somehow despite scoring high, this customer decides to allways buy product A from us, but never buys product B. Same company, same sales person, same service department. The obvious question to ask in situations like this is, are we faced with managing several brands (by product category) instead of the one brand. The many brands theory also works the other way and would explain why our competitors haven’t achieved a bigger market share in the product A category although they’ve been trying for years. The business implications of this is that entering new product categories, although they are adjacent, on the same bench, for the same customer, is going to take a lot more work and longer that most people realize. It will also call for completely different marketing strategies and tactics. Generating a lead, issuing a quote or being invited to a do a demo is not enough, to declare a marketing success.