Mar 28, 2010 | Management, Sales
The only way to win is to attack, you can prevent being beaten by defense, but as any football coach knows, defense will not win.
Same in business, you need to understand your strengths and weaknesses compared to the opposition, and exploit the strengths, whilst covering for the weaknesses.
Having an intimate understanding of the key customers, those who will spread the word of your product or service is as good as having the opposition playbook
The only way to get a crystal clear picture of the oppositions position is to experiment, continually ask the questions of them by experimenting, testing, & understanding their response, be restless, and inquisitive, probe, analyse, question, form and test hypothesis. Sounds a bit like the scientific method, and continuous improvement.
Mar 16, 2010 | Marketing, Sales
For fifty years, good marketing meant efficient use of advertising funds, driving distribution, segmenting markets, usually on socio-economic status and usage patterns, development of brand awareness and purchase intention, a flow of range extensions, and staying out of trouble.
The last 10 years have seen a sea change, and none of the above really counts any more, because everyone knows how to do it, marketing has become commoditised, and being just as able at “marketing” as everyone else leads to punishment in the market.
What is needed now are genuine insights, new connections, stuff that cannot be copied, customers who are advocates of your brand, and true creativity, not just another colour.
Lip service has been given for many years to the concept of “Customer Value Proposition”, but it was in the context of mass marketing, and mass markets where it evolved. The concept is still valid, it is just far more difficult to execute, as it needs to be applied many times to market segments, often approaching one customer only.
Failure to recognise the new individual focus of marketing, and reacting by enabling a conversation between yourself and your customers, will lead to punishment in the marketplace by way of increasing irrelevance.
Feb 28, 2010 | Change, Management, Sales, Strategy
How many times have we heard this as a smart front line operator expresses frustration with the attitudes of the executive suite, the redundancy of the business model, or the strategy being pursued, as again, the “bosses” appear to fail to understand the coal face drivers of success.
The most common cause of this cry is becoming the rapid commoditisation of many markets, and those that see it first are usually on the front lines. Suddenly, long term customers are turning away, a new competitor emerges, and the only tool the troops have left is price, and they are pushed to do more with less.
Short term responses to a fundamental change in the business model necessary to be commercially sustainable won’t get you far, at best it will put off the inevitable. You need to ask yourself a couple of key questions:
- How can I differentiate my commodity product to a smaller market, instead of being all things to all people?
- How can I solve a problem someone has with the existing commodity product and service?
- How do I deploy my resources to make it happen, recognising , often this will mean adding a different type of resource.
Feb 22, 2010 | Branding, Marketing, Sales, Small business
What will be the continuing impact of the development of housebrands by retailers, and the current heightened value awareness of consumers? Most FMCG suppliers lose sleep over the retailers undermining their profitability by hogging shelf space with far cheaper imitations of their brands, brought to market overnight without much concern about the long term health and development of the category, but delivering short term profitability to them at the expense of their suppliers.
This apparent duplicity, retailers demanding innovation and category building activity from their suppliers, whilst undermining their ability and willingness to invest has to have its limits. Clearly, the old mass market model of branding is over, but what has replaced it?
Increasingly I see the evolution of focused brands and retailers serving the more niche markets, and segments of larger markets where something different is being delivered to customers. Retailers are enabling a new breed of supplier with deep category expertise to emerge at the expense of the older mass market model, and they are in turn fuelling the growth of specialist retailers.
Feb 18, 2010 | Change, Management, Marketing, Sales
As publishing goes electronic, and the hype about the Ipad, Kindle, and other reader technologies, evolves, and drives behavior changes, publishers need to consider how they are going to market, as most consumption of books is still generated by seeing it, physically in the bookstore. This is particularly true in the case of gifts, which is a very large part of the book market. As stores go out of business, how do publishers replace the awareness of a new book, the “feel” of it from the shelf, the pleasure of the interaction at point of purchase?
Amazons Kindle generally allows the first chapter to be downloaded before purchase, but will that be enough?
As in most other retail categories, the probable answer is that the generalist, mass market shops will decline radically in numbers, partly replaced by both specialist retailers who carry a depth of range of a particular genre, huge mega stores in cheap locations, and perhaps hole in the wall retailers with a printer/binder where you can order and print off the book, or part of the book wanted on the spot.
Whatever happens, the status quo has been busted wide open.
Feb 17, 2010 | Management, Operations, Sales
The gate keeper role is progressively becoming redundant as web tools evolve to offer many other avenues to get “inside” a prospective customer.
The most aggressive commercial gatekeepers have traditionally been in the acquisition roles, and finding ways to butter them up, or get around them consumes huge resources in many organsations selling B2B, and using the model successful last century, getting to know the purchasing manager, taking him to lunch, sending his kids a birthday card to show you care, and so on.
Nowadays, these people are almost redundant, the most they usually do is fill in the purchase order, and ensure delivery, they rarely now make the decision to buy yours, or the others.
The task now is to identify the decision maker, and market your product benefits to him/her, building the value of the benefits, by identifying what your product delivers in terms of three parameters:
- The sales benefit delivered.
- The cost benefit delivered
- The productivity benefit delivered.
If you are not delivering at least one of these three, preferably two, why would they waste their money buying from you.
