Marketing

Grab, Clear, Concise, Big, Idea, Action

Forget marketing.

Build community, not empire. It is not an activity, it is a way of being for a company: a living style.

Internalize these six words and aim the darts at the board:

1. grab the audience's imagination;
2. be abundantly clear and consistent;
3. while remaining concise;
4. and big enough to make a difference;
5. have a well conceived idea to support it;
6. call for an action from the audience.

The business has to make sense and have a purpose. If you plan a me-too business, you will still need clear differentiators. Sense and purpose make meaning and, as author of the Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki says, you need to "create a product or service that makes the world a better place." The authors of Making Meaning explain that we have moved on from solely demanding the functional and economic benefits of product, through the emotional and status benefits of brand to the meaning benefits of a focus on experience of what we buy.

They identify fifteen meanings: accomplishment, beauty, community, creation, duty, enlightenment, freedom, harmony, justice, oneness, redemption, security, truth, validation and wonder. Take time to work through the nature of your product or service and figure out the extent to which it makes one or more of these meanings.

Take advantage of using the Meaning Match Grid to test your own business, product or service in terms of its meaning. It will make your marketing an easier task.

Remember, marketing is not what the the marketing function does alone. It is what the whole company does in every function. If the accounting function behaves in ways that are inconsistent with the claimed character of the company, the corporate voice will sound jangled. Each function can add weight to the message that the voice carries or can scupper the best intentions of the marketing people.

Naming

Naming the business or product is a task that is going to be close to your heart. Like your own name, you are going to have to live with it for a while. You will want the name to:

1. be memorable and distinctive
2. be visually striking and sound good
3. convey a sense of what you do
4. convey meaning to your community.

Do some namestorming—name brainstorming. Use friends and colleagues to participate. Build a shortlist. Test for domain name availability; remember if your choice is already registered, and provided that the registrant is not in your business, you can find a way round the problem. Add an article, a hyphen, a suffix, change the word order, but go for a .com domain (and then buy the .net, .info or others that might be bagged by a cyber squatter and offered for sale to you later). Check your State Secretary for registered business names (use the National Association of Secretaries of State,NASS Contact Roster to find yours) or the USPTO for trademarks and you could use CSC to check for you, even worldwide.

Branding

The next step is not so much a step, rather a continuous process. It's branding. The average American mentions a brand name 56 times a week (according to word-of-mouth marketing firm Keller Fay)! It's not just a matter of giving your products or services a brand to identify them, but engendering understanding of the philosophy behind what you're offering.

You want to position your business clearly so it can be identified with specific qualities of the company and its products or services. The branding has to be embodied in everything that you do, not just what it says on the label.

There is a popular buzzword in management these days: 'alignment'. Make sure that everything is both aligned—repeated. A brand's attributes need to be delivered clearly, reinforce credibility, connect emotionally, stimulate action and reconfirm the connection.

Pay special attention to marketing your website. It should form a central role in your marketing strategy.

Engagement

In this age of interconnectivity and relationship, it has become vital to engage authentically with the communities and individuals with whom you do business. Mass marketing is for the birds. Working with customers has become a twp-way street. They have a lot to tell you as well as you wanting to attract their attention. You have to listen. They have many means of telling you.

Canadian singer Dave Caroll had his guitar damaged on a United Airlines flight and customer services stonewalled for over a year, so he wrote a song United Breaks Guitars and posted it on YouTube. Between July 6 and August 2 it had 4.5 million views and over 20 thousand comments. The song aired on BBC. Songs 2 and 3 are in the works. You cannot hide behind stone or any other walls. Countless press stories ensued; Carroll was on the map and United’s response: donate $3,000 to a nonprofit on Dave’s behalf.

Does anything more need saying about engagement? Or in this case, disengagement.

Customers can and will tell you what products to offer and how. The myriad web routes me that they live next door. Not just collectively, but individually. You should take a look at a very helpful book, if you do not believe me: The Age of Engage.

A critical way to engage your customers and all with whom your come in contact is your website: a key to building relationships online.

Keep watching the radar

You don't always have to be first to market. But don't get left behind in the rush. A fast follower can often learn from the early fallers in the race.

Do you have a way of knowing about customer buying behavior? How good are you at understanding customer buying motivations in your marketplace? (the meteorological weather scan on the left is from Environment Canada).

One of the simplest ways to keep track of what's going on is to use Google Alerts to monitor a developing news story, watch for comments of your brand or company, keeping current on competitors, getting the latest lowdown on your industry sector or keeping tabs on people whose opinions you value.

There is no excuse for not undertaking customer surveys these days, They can be done for free or very little money—on line. I recommend using Zoomerang.

There are a number of ways to keep your feelers twitching. For instance, rather than chuck all your promotion budget at one medium, go for smaller marketing tests and see which ones prospects respond to. It's what I call incremental marketing.

With the Internet, you have many tools to scan horizons near and far. If you search 'trends' you will find trends by sector, by geography, from 'good' sources like McKinsey Quarterly or Business Week. There are several trend watching newsletters worth exploring, like Trendwatching or Springwise and its network of 8,000 spotters who scan the globe for smart new business ideas, delivering instant inspiration to entrepreneurial minds. Then there's the newsletter from Worldchanging, a non-profit media organization with a global network of independent journalists, designers and thinkers covering the world's most intelligent solutions to today's problems.

Convergence and disruption

While you may not be in the sectors referred to below, be in no doubt that you will need to keep your eye on convergence and disruption in your own sector.

The convergence of Pathology, Radiology, and IT, for example is one of the advances in healthcare that is transforming diagnostics, imaging, and informatics to create more precise diagnostic tools. Take a look at what Biomagene and Omnyx are doing.

An example of disruption is LG and Netflix development of a set-top box for consumers to stream movies and other programming such as YouTube from the Internet to HDTVs – bypassing the need to use a personal computer. Another potential disrupter is Wizzit, a secure and efficient cell phone-based payment system (essentially a savings account and ATM card) for the unbanked and underbanked people of South Africa.

Marketing strategy

Marketing theory will tell you that marketing should be built around the four 'Ps': Product, Place, Price and Promotion. Don't confuse marketing with sales—that's what you do with the results of marketing. It is easier said than done and happily that is why there will always be room for the entrepreneur to do better than others in the market.

You can simply rely upon flair and there are many businesses that have been built that way. or you can take a more disciplined approach and work through the four 'P's systematically. A helpful tool for you is the Marketing Strategy Grid.

This exercise is going to take you through clear thinking about issues from product positioning to distribution channels. You will have sorted out your business model. By asking the questions in the grid you can test the robustness of your model.

The numbers that need to concern you are the product revenue goals (and the pricing of course) and the budget that you are going to devote to the implementation of the strategy. Focus on the customer's eye view. to ensure you pay attention to the value proposition.

As you answer the questions posed in the grid, it will become apparent that the marketing plan naturally forms a part of a business plan. For a startup though, what's vital is that the document is usable.

The marketing texts will ask you to think a lot about and measure your competition. Competitors are there, of course, and it's as well to know who they are, but don't get too hung up on them. I had a bank branch manager in France who had never heard the name of the worldwide bank from which I was getting two full percentage points more interest than on his deposit account. His credibility with me was never high, but at that point I stopped even thinking about asking his advice.

However, it is more important, especially at startup, to focus on creativity, rather than market share or stealing sales from the competition. Create your own marketspace. The world is an abundant place not one of scarcity. If you are entering a cut-throat market, you better be ruthless yourself!

"There are treasures beyond compare in the ocean. If you seek safety stay ashore." (a Sufi saying) Look at Blue Ocean Strategy: 'blue ocean' is unoccupied, unlike the crowded 'red ocean'. Build your business from the ground up first—then think about the competition. If you build it on the basis of what's already out there, you may give up for fear of not matching up. If you work up your product based on the strengths and weaknesses of the competition's offerings, then you'll confine yourself to the parameters they've set, rather than setting the boundaries for yourself.

Avoid over extending your product range. You'll hear a lot about 'meeting and exceeding customer needs'. While I recommend that you give more in use value than cash value, if you fall over backwards to offer complexity in the hope of 'customizing' your product for every taste, you may build in too much cost and defeat your own object.

'Mass-customisation' was the marketing cry a while back—in other words offer to build individual products for individual needs. However, too many choices can bewilder the customer enough not to buy. I had a favorite Parisian eating place called L'Entrecôte Bordelaise—they only did steak with a perfect bordelaise sauce. You could choose how you wanted the steak cooked. Period. There was a choice of salads, wines and mouth watering deserts. That was it, plus top quality beef of known origin, impeccable service, comfortable decor and a great welcome. It was always packed—with only one main dish on the menu.

Tactical Marketing To-dos

There are better places than WorkSavvy to go for help on detailed marketing tactics, but there are some essentials:

• Keep repeatedly in touch with all your contacts and clients. Starting and running a newsletter or magazine is one way to go;
• Carry a marketing element into every manifestation of the business—my piece on incremental marketing will help here;
• Make sure everyone in the business understands the imperative of delighting the customer in a deep way and delivering it in all their dealings with prospects, customers and the community at large;
• Focus on mindshare through every marketing tactic: finding space in the attention economy is like being heard over the cacophony of a busy Manhattan street.
• Create dialog. One-way communication does not cut it anymore. We all have too much to say and can always find another way. Try active listening.
• Build communities. Remember that they can be close (local) or far (website) and your marketing will be based in many of them. It's about engendering the sense and experience of community rather than specific structures or locations.
• What can you offer for free? In the interest of community building (and selling) you have lots of stuff you can give away, sometimes it does involve the family jewels, but think of the family bonds that result.

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