Sounds Business

Posts Tagged ‘marketing’

Just as we’re supposed to use only a fraction of our brains’ capabilities, so I’m convinced, working with businesses in major industries, that people get just a fraction of the results they’re capable of.

Few businesses come close to achieving their potential results.
That’s because businesses are not marketing from the heart. When I speak of the heart, I speak of that intuitive, emotional, feeling aspect of all of us.

No question: Emotion drives business success. Clearly, people in business have to be skilled and knowledgable about products, processes, and programs. But simply having rational knowledge is not enough to get big increases in results. We must have emotional knowledge too.

A fundamental truth of human motivation is that we define ourselves in terms of our emotions. Descartes didn’t quite have it right: it’s not, “I think therefore I am; it’s really, “I feel therefore I am”.

Yet most marketing strategies and programs focus on the rational — market share, target identification and validation, and customer needs analysis — and ignore the emotional. In doing so, such strategies ignore great opportunities.

To achieve quantum leaps in results that most businesses are capable of, let’s recognize that marketing as we know it has come to an end.

Such marketing served companies in relatively stable economies when businesses were like large ships, with captains giving orders to the mates, the mates to crews. But today businesses are in white-water canoeing races.

In rapidly changing markets, exclusively rational marketing can’t compete well.

What will replace marketing? To answer that, let’s understand what marketing is all about. It’s about one thing, growth. Growth happens through strategy and action.

Today’s marketing activities are superficially linked to strategy and have little to do with action. The result: businesses rattle along not hitting on all cylinders.

Strategy: We grow in business or ultimately die. So it behooves each business to have a strategy for growth.

We might develop a growth strategy. It might seem convincing on paper. It might interest security analysts. It might brighten an annual report. But unless people believe it passionately, wake up in the morning motivated by it, spend each day exciting others about it, see it as a key stimulant of their life, and zealously realize it in their work activities, then it is merely a recitation of dry postulates. It can only realize partial results.

When strategies resonate with people’s heartfelt needs, great things happen. History is replete with such strategies: Themistocles’ naval strategy for defeating the Persians; the Pilgrim’s strategy of attaining religious freedom by sailing to the New World; Jefferson’s strategy for realizing an America bounded by the Atlantic and Pacific; NASA’s strategy for putting a man on the moon before the end of the 1960s, etc.
And the history of business has its examples too: Ford Motor Company of the second decade of this century; IBM of the 1950s, Apple of the early 1980s.

There are three ways to get a motivational growth-strategy.
First, link it to what people feel strongly about.

Many leaders wrongly believe that just because they have taken the trouble to develop a marketing strategy, that strategy automatically excites others.

If you don’t root your strategy in the fervent convictions of employees and customers, you don’t have a motivational growth-strategy.

Steve Jobs‘ strategy for providing a powerful, versatile computer into the hands of average people around the world, fired the imaginations and the ardent actions of his colleagues and, ultimately, customers.

Second, raise the stakes. Follow Emerson‘s dictum: “Hitch your wagon to a star.” Distinguish between vision and motivational growth-strategy. A vision is the star. The strategy is how you will hitch your wagon to it. When people’s vision and strategy provide a higher purpose in their lives, their motivation is of a higher order.

Steve Jobs convinced John Scully to leave a high-level, fast-track position at PepsiCo and commit himself to the uncertainties of working at Apple by asking: “Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life or do you want to change the world?”
Third, make the strategy simple and short. Growth can be complicated, but people’s needs are simple.

Bill Gates wrote a strategy in longhand on a single sheet of paper when he founded Microsoft. He still has possession of that paper and is still following that strategy.

The processes of putting that strategy into action may take comprehensive descriptions. Still, those descriptions should flow from simple, brief motivational elements.

Action: Motivational growth-strategies aren’t plans, they’re action. Without people taking action, results can’t happen.

Rational marketing stumbles because leaders often view such marketing as some kind of magic dust that, sprinkled out, changes behavior. But only motivated people change their behavior.

In trying to realize marketing plans, top leaders often get jammed up in middle-manager meatgrinders. Those leaders can usually persuade their direct reports to participate in the changes.

However, the far more important task is to persuade middle-managers to lead change. Because traditional marketing ignores the emotional needs of middle-managers, needs that frequently illuminate ways to increase results, those managers can and will make mincemeat of even the best-intended, rationally consistent, and brilliantly-conceived marketing strategy.

Hey, this ain’t Black Hole physics! Getting results is simply about strategy and action: making a simple, powerful motivational growth-strategy happen in the many, little actions taken daily by skilled, motivated people.

Because motivational growth-strategies flow out of the hearts of people, rather than rain down from above, those strategies get those people championing actions that get big results.

The end of marketing is the beginning of success that can only now be dimly imagined.

If you’re forever hearing great things said about your work, yet not seeing these translate into sales and revenue, it could just be because you’ve fallen into the innovator trap.

The innovator trap is where we can end up if we confuse educating with marketing. Going out and telling the world about something completely new and revolutionary certainly stands a good chance of generating interest, but not necessarily any sales.

Certainly innovation can work as a marketing tool, but generally only with an audience who already know and trust you. I’m not suggesting that we only market in the mainstream with existing contacts, but we need to be aware of what works and what doesn’t and if necessary make some changes.

Often the changes involve little more than a slight dilution of our proposition – evolution can sell easier than revolution, at the outset. Once effective marketing gives us a foot in the door, we can guide our prospects and customers toward a brave new world.

Let’s look at an example. In fact it’s a real one from a conversation I had a while ago:

David had developed a product that revolutionises the way corporations store and access electronic information. In other countries similar systems were slowly being embraced and put to extremely good use. In his home market, however, things were trailing a little behind.

David was being invited to talk at numerous conferences and expositions, there was much interest. The joint was jumping. Well, it undoubtedly felt like that for a while, but when I caught up with him it was getting a bit tiring.

Sure there was a lot of interest, but not enough sales. David was educating and doing a great job of it. His family meanwhile were getting fed up with beans on toast.

So what would you do? Keep bashing away? Go into greater debt maybe? Put the house on the line?

After speaking for a while, we came up with this solution for David:

1. Look much more closely at what’s been learned

Take time to do some research – had he been educating or marketing?
Ask the tough questions and be ready for straight answers.
Talk to some of the people who invented the wheel in those other more advanced markets – What lessons had he perhaps missed?

2. Get clear on the options

How long could/should he give to your current path?
If he made a shift, what would or could that be?
Are there any real signs that the market is changing?

3. Think more like a marketeer and less like an innovator

If David looked at his revolutionary product as top-of-the-range, what’s a possible ‘entry level’ product? Something to get a foot in the door.
How could he modify his language to talk in terms that satisfy a current need, rather than focussing on a future ‘maybe-want’?
As soloists it’s fine to use innovation to get noticed, but it’s important we have products or services that our customers want to buy NOW. Little by little we can up-sell and do more of what we really want.

BUSINESS PROPOSAL

Starting your own business can be actual rewarding—you get to do what you love, be your own bang-up and acknowledgment alone to your customers. An important footfall in entrepreneurship is autograph your business proposal. A acceptable business angle clarifies your business idea, could be acclimated as a sales apparatus back apparent to abeyant clients, and may alike be requested by the coffer alms you a business loan.

Section titles can vary, but best proposals are burst bottomward into the afterward sections:

The Executive Summary is usually one branch that briefly describes who you are and what your businessidea is. Short biographies of the bodies complex in your business may be placed here, as well.

The Mission Statement capacity absolutely why this business is all-important and what you are ambience out to do.

The Product or Services area elaborates on absolutely what you are selling. Ask yourself “what’s so abundant about my idea? What makes it altered from added agnate products?”

The Market Analysis examines the antagonism in your field, account both trends and advance in your called industry. Supporting statistics and archive are vital. Sometimes an alfresco ability may be assassin to address and analysis this area for you.

Marketing and Promotion should be a huge allotment of your antecedent plan. What if you opened a restaurant and cipher knew? A solid business plan account the accomplishments you will booty to assure such a affair never happens can accomplish or breach a small business.