Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

We talk to people all day long about marketing. Sometimes these conversations start off a little confusing or disconnected — like we’re talking about completely different things.

So I looked it up. Wikipedia defines marketing as “the process of selling or promoting products to customers to further enhance sales.” No, that’s sales promotion.

If you take away just one thing from this site, let it be this definition: “Marketing is the deliberate and systematic attempt to own a market.” Boom. That’s it. Now we can have a productive conversation.

Well, almost. We’ve put a few more important definitions together in our
How To Go To Market primer.

Positioning your product or service is probably a waste of time.

First of all, it’s hard. Saying specifically and succinctly what you are means saying very generally what you are not —  a difficult thing for those who talk to shareholders. That’s why taglines like The ultimate driving machine are so rare, while taglines like Quality in everything we do are so commonplace. (Yes, that’s a real tagline).

The solution: don’t even try. Instead, recognize that people don’t care what you say about your products. They care what your products say about them.

The ultimate driving machine says, “Hello, I’m the ultimate driver.” By contrast, Quality in everything we do says, “Hello, I’m satisfied by good-enough.” Amping up the enthusiasm doesn’t help:  The relentless pursuit of perfection simply says, “Hello, I’m an uptight, overly controlling, type A who is constantly disappointed by those around me.” (This is not how I want to be introduced at a party.)

So break out the “Hello, I’m _______” stickers and pass them around. When your team comes up with a statement your customers would be proud to wear, you may have something worth building a brand on.

Our good friends and marketing experts, Jamie Turner of the 60 Second Marketer and Reshma Shah, Ph.D., professor of marketing at Emory University, are putting the “social” in social media with their new book: “How to Make Money with Social Media, An Insider’s Guide on Using New and Emerging Media to Grow Your Business.”

They’re offering first-edition, autographed copies to the first 50 people who donate $40 to their charity, A School Bell Rings. The goal is to raise $2000 in donations for children in Tanzania, India, and Nicaragua.

The book alone is sure to be worth the investment; investing in the future of needy kids makes it even more so.

If you’d like to help or just learn more, here’s the link:

http://www.ASchoolBellRings.org/book

It’s easier than ever to satiate our needs and wants. There are more products in more focused categories delivering higher quality for less cost than ever. We’re less willing to offer our allegiance to any product when a better one is likely in the offing.

Product or category leadership is an increasingly specious objective. Simply deliver a superior product, and you’ll be rewarded with an onslaught of competitors and the pressure to make your product both cheaper and better — a battle for market share where margins are the casualty.

Those who do become leaders are increasingly hard to categorize. Apple Inc. dropped the word “Computer” from its name in January 2009. Rather than pursuing leadership through product excellence within the commoditized computer category, it pursued a strategy of bringing enrichment to people’s lives through creativity, music and self-expression.

Similarly, after Harley Davidson successfully petitioned the International Trade Commission for a 5-year tariff to protect its outdated motorcycles against low-cost Japanese imports, it did very little to make its products technically competitive. Instead it took the opportunity to make cartilage-compressing vibration and oil leaks an identifying part of the brand experience, and gave a market of Reagan-era white collar professionals something more — a culture they could proudly belong to — one that artfully melded Reagan’s 50s-era patriotism with an outlaw rebel persona.

We call the kind of loyalty enjoyed by Apple and Harley Davidson “brand significance.” Brand significance is not the result of branding. It is achieved by a combination of two, uniquely integrated accomplishments:

1. inventing a culture that brings meaning to people’s lives; and
2. providing a personally enriching experience that reinforces the culture.

The relationship between meaning, enrichment and significance can be illustrated as follows.

The company’s goal is to push its coordinates up and to the right by finding ways to make the brand more culturally meaningful (y axis) and personally enriching (x axis), resulting in the highest possible brand significance score.

The mechanisms for doing this work will be explored in other posts. First it’s important to see that significant brands go far beyond serving the needs of individuals and their current cultures. Equally important: brands should pursue this by design, not hope to get there by magic.

There was an e-marketer named Sam
Who didn’t know “opt-out” = SPAM.
His customers rebelled
And his goods didn’t sell
And now there’s nothing left of his brand.