Is your marketing one P?

Reading “Ten deadly marketing sins”from Kotler, reminded me once again the truth about how marketing is being done in most organizations.

Is your marketing a one P? is the question you should ask yourself when reviewing what you’re dealing with. Marketing is NOT selling, as Peter Drucker and Prof. Levitt would say, marketing is to make sales irrelevant!

Today, after 50 years understanding marketing and its theory bases, most companies still think of it and act as a sales and promotion discipline - final chain of the P’s. They continue to make up the rate of unsuccessful new products launched high; don’t understand what their customers truly want, need and value; and wonder about how their competitors surpass them without advertising budgets. 

In a marketplace becoming extremely demanding at all levels, there are higher chances of failure with this mentality. If you don’t exercise the marketing of understanding and identifying your market segments, gather deep insights on their behaviour, beginning your insights before a product layout and next to driving strategy, and define your whole planning based on your market and analysis, you probably gonna keep up with the high rate of unsucessful products.

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Brand tags

Noah Brier created brand tags here. Basically, you put a word or a phrase that pops into your mind when you recognize a brand. The results are surprising.

Perceptions change from individual to individual, but similarities leads us to qualify the marketing efforts brands are doing, and possibly assess till what point they are doing it good or not. Below are some examples. I have classified them in A (main tags), B (secondary) and C (others relevant).

Note: it could be not completely accurate due to the dynamic tagging everyday happening in the website

“Absolut”

A: Drunk and vodka; B: Ads, alcohol, bottle; C: Cheap, clear, cold and drink

“Budweiser”

A: Beer, american, cheap, king of beers; B: Bud, crap, drunk, water; C: Cool, frogs, gross, tasteless, weak

“Red Bull”

A: Energy, drink, vodka, wings; B: Caffeine, hyper, yuck; C: Gross, gives you wings, red, speed, stupid sugar

At a glance we can assess that Red Bull is doing the best in branding and differentiation. Consumers think on the core brand message: Energy. With consistency, Red Bull clearly is seen through what the product itself can do, and what the brand represents, building a well focused and consistent message.

On the other hand, Absolut and Budweiser relate to a bunch of strong rational thoughts, most negative when compared with the efforts they are doing on brand building. Both are quoted “cheap”, which in the case of Absolut is contradictory, and a association of being “drunk with alcohol” is probably not the one reflecting the pleasure and taste of the drink itself communicated in the ads, which btw, are quite reminded in both cases.

There is a million of conclusions to take from this exercise, being this website a powerful tool for the brands to identify themselves in the marketplace and assess the messages they convey. To conclude, below there are some examples of best tags aligned with the brand identity.

Apple: Cool, innovation, love, awesome.

Amazon: Book, everything, smile, convenient, cheap, fast.

Sony: Quality, reliable, expensive, innovation.

FedEx: Fast, quick, reliable, arrow, efficient, overnight, [Tom Hanks].

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Hard for bad sales

Recently, European Union released a community law stating that companies who call consumers home telling they won a prize (always not true), have to keep their promises now and really offer what they are saying. Moreover, if consumers buy a product in conditions stated as “under pressure”, they have now one year to make their claims and get a refund.

Even difficult to implement, is a step further on fair practices and to end aggressive push strategies by these companies, usually, cosmetics, insurance and healthy products.

Once in a email to a marketing guru, I asked him what he thinks about hard sales practices, and the answer was simple: Mass market is still not over. Furthermore, recently I read an article from another well known strategist that hard sales concept shouldn’t exist, instead people should name it “bad sales”.

True, these companies could earn fast money, could achieve monthly sales targets by pressure, insistence, scrutinizing people, and in the end, kill their brand.

If you want to go through this path, you should consider the following: whether you are a huge corporation with a monopoly over the market and you can relatively play with your brand equity; or if you not that “big”, you better think what is going to be your next business when you totally annihilated your current brand.

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Collateral targets

Targeting which market and segments you going to address to, is a well defined discipline in marketing. What I still didn’t heard is about the “collateral targets” – just invented the term (I guess!)

For instance, when you see a MacDonald’s restaurant, people within very different ranges of ages and classes (mentioning superficial segmentation) go there to eat. The most divergent segment I saw, is the 60-70’s years old consumer. Taking in account that MacDonald’s targets specifically children and young teenagers, this example is clearly what I mean with “collateral target”: People who don’t identify themselves with the brand and clearly step away from the brand core target, yet feel attracted by its concept and offering, possibly constituting a potential profitable segment.

The key thing here is to assess the value of this collateral segments. Do they make such impact that the brand should adapt itself to new realities, or are these range of consumers attracted because the brand identity goes on a appealing positioning to them (even different from their lifestyle), so that the brand should maintain consistently its current positioning even with this segments at side.

In the case mentioned above, is obvious the most valuable segments are the ones MacDonald’s is addressing to, even though, when considering other million brands, probably there are a bunch which should reconsider “where” they are and “who” they are addressing to.

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Managing people

Buckingham and Coffman write on what great managers do differently when managing people to achieve great results and enjoyable work. The authors are based on their observations from more than 80,000 interviews conducted by Gallup organization during past years.

Nowadays, various studies mention job satisfaction is around 50% to lower values depending on jobs, locations, and other factors.

The most common, is that you get into a plain office with plain people, they might present a gloomy face every time stepping in office, show little patience communicating with each other or third parties, get into long conversations about their private life, ’seat – sleep’ when possible, chatting over phone or msn about cosmetics, make a happy fest when superiors are not in office, and check out the latest developments on the singer x who married the actress y along with an update on how bad their jobs and supervisors are.

This doesn’t mean they are not good professionals, hence means they have notably poor leaders.

Satisfied employees tend to be more productive, creative and committed to their employers. A quick look on Google exemplifies how attracting talent and having the freedom for creativity with orientation for results, can make a successful organization perform greatly with both happy employer and employees.

To conclude and add up the above mentioned, one great finding by Gallup organization published in Buckingham and Coffman book, says:

“If you’re losing good people, look to their immediate supervisor. People leave managers not companies”

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