My Marketing Sucks... Where Do I Start?

Many organizations' marketing efforts either do not exist or produce sub optimal results. There are many reasons for this.  For purpose of this post, we will start by looking at what organizations should to if their marketing efforts consist of hiring sales representatives and hoping that they have a book of business and can close deals.  Unfortunately this is a common practice and most often ends with a couple of superstar sales reps staying with the company for years and the rest falling to the wayside.

Any company (whether new or not) that does not have a real marketing department needs to start by doing 4 things:

• Identify what industry will best be able to find benefit in their product
• Identify the best list of target companies that can afford to buy the product
• Identify who within the target companies will use the product
• Define the most cost effective strategy of communicating value to the final user

Notice that I use certain words, like value, benefit, user.  Marketing is about communicating value.  Business is about providing additional value to a user.  No one will buy a product if they do not see an additional value or benefit for using it.  Great product capabilities, or functionality is not enough.  Google+ is an example that is very relevant.  Google+ offers a number of features that Facebook does not, but so far most people are not deactivating their Facebook accounts for Google+.  The issue of creating and communicating value is the most important issue to understand and master in marketing.  It doesn't matter if you are cold calling, spamming or going door-to-door, you have to provide additional value to the potential customer and communicate it well.  

The next thing on the list is identifying what industry your product will fit in the best.  If your company makes widgets designed for hospitals you may not want to be marketing to the Automotive industry. (Okay, that was an extreme example, but the lesson is the same).  Finding these markets, verticals or targets is not always easy.  I worked for a company that offered so many different software packages that it was very confusing.  Package A, with Feature D&M were best for Industry A, but Package D with Feature A&Z was best for Industry K - huh?

This was so complicated that the majority of the time the Lead Generation Reps would call a company on their list and try to talk to executives on a cold call to try and learn what they were looking for, and then find that package that best fit them - this is putting the cart before the horses!  A better way is to have a clearly defined list of features aligned with industry pains and trends.

Make no mistake about it, finding and understanding these pains and trends are extremely difficult and aligning them to your product is also hard.    If you are a small firm and just starting, you probably have an idea already and the next exercise can help to materialize what you and your team have in your heads into usable knowledge.  The Five Product Levels consists of the following levels:

1. Core Benefit:  What is the most basic benefit that my product offers?
2. Basic Product: What is the most basic form of my product that produces the core benefit?
3. Expected Product:What does the buyer expect from the product?
4. Augmented Product: How does the product exceed the expectations of the user?
5. Potential Product: What could our product be in the future?

These questions can give you a start.  Translating the answers into marketable material will take a little bit of creativity.  There are so many channels to use to push you value proposition to the world that is daunting at times.  My advice is choose one (or two), and master that.  Make sure it is measurable and produces results - quickly!  If your product is truly complicated, in a big-boy industry and selling to corporate giants cold calling can work. Just be sure to train your lead generation reps to get an interested contact on the phone with a knowledgeable and experienced sales rep as soon as possible.  Email marketing may work if you are smaller, but I would not start sending spam to corporations - their firewalls are too good to produce results.  Webinars can be fun, but it is really hard to make sure you have the right people there unless you cold call and personal invite each one.  Doing that, negates the need for a webinar because if there is any interest it is better to do a personalized one.

So, true to the nature of business, there are always more questions than answers.  Good executives are good, not because they have all of the answers, but because they can find them and figure out complex problems.  If your marketing sucks your activities and value proposition is most likely not aligned with what the market is looking for.  Figure that our (Product, Market Need, Value) and then realign and your results will improve.  If they don't, you should be working in marketing.

Stereotypes Are Bad! Or Are They???

It is generally known that stereotypes are bad. We are taught as young children and we teach our children that stereotypes are bad. As an undergrad at Keene State College, I majored in Social Science with an emphasis on Sociology. As you can imagine, I spent many semesters trying to understand the root causes of many stereotypes and how they were unfairly and unjustly applied to individuals and groups of individuals. It wasn't until I was in my fifth semester of my MBA program that I realized that the use of stereotypes were not all bad.

From my sociology days, it was apparent that stereotypes are largely true. Stereotypes are society's way of grouping (fairly or unfairly) people. There are many stereotypes that we use everyday. More importantly, stereotypes are used by businesses in almost every decision made. Auto insurance company charge a higher premium for certain drivers and even certain cars. Consumer Packaged Good (CPG) companies target certain products to certain groups of people, for a certain purpose. Marketing is notorious for using stereotypes. McDonalds is aggressively targeting the African-American population with recent ads by using a Rap song to promote their new Mango and Pineapple Fruit Smoothie (the stereotype that all African-Americans listen to Rap).

Stereotypes provide marketing people with a foundation of individuals that could possible be interested in their products. A value is then assigned to that group of people (based on the size of the market, economic demographics, spending habits, etc) which translates into how much a company thinks they can sell, or Expected Commercial Value (EVC). Many of our business processes would not exist if it were not for stereotypes. We wouldn't be able to target advertising to a specific group of people without using stereotypes. Although many stereotypes have changed, the majority of them have stayed the same. Take the recent commercials for Swiffer Duster. One commercial shows two women as dirt and mud on a kitchen floor waiting to meet the love of their life (a mop) and be swept off the floor. Another show a man as dust in between keys on a keyboard. Pretty clear where these two stereotypes are. How successful is the use of stereotypes? P&G shares rose 130% in Swiffer's first year.! P&G is the largest CPG company and reported $78 billion in revenue last year - I would say that is pretty successful.

Because of the negative connotation that goes with the word "stereotypes" it is politely relabeled as "Market Segmentation" in the marketing world. In Business-to-Consumer (B2C) as well as the Business-to-Business (B2B) markets segmentation is hugely important. Marketers are rewarded and more valuable depending how much knowledge they possess about their markets. This starts with getting a deep understanding of who your existing customers are:

• What do they buy 
• Why do they buy 
• What are the motivators (drivers) for purchases 
• How do they buy (bulk, on credit, impulse, planned and evaluations) 
• When do they buy (seasonal, life-events, delegated) 

The answers to these questions (and there are thousands more) are extremely important. These answers are then applied to existing stereotypes that are common in the market and products are marketed to those groups of people that fit the buying habits as well as the stereotypes. Get these wrong and your new product will not be successful. This is a huge challenge for marketers. A challenge that extends to new product innovation (NPI) as well as advertising and product launches.

Even before a product makes it to market, millions of dollars are spent on a concept that marketing is saying customers (or potential customers) want and R&D is saying is feasible (see my post in InnovAAAAAtion!). Add on millions of dollars in marketing, test case, product positioning strategies, graphic designs, packaging, distibution and many other complex functions of launching a product to the wrong market - you'd better get your resume ready!

Make no mistake about it, marketers are masters at understanding and using stereotypes to position products to the right groups of people.