Positioning
Tribute to Jack Trout
What position do you occupy in the mind of your customer?
There is a joke circulating in top management circles, saying “I know that half of my marketing money is wasted, but I don’t know which half.” Is this really a joke? In most cultures there is a proverb stating that there is never smoke without fire.
Our observation of large and small businesses in various industries and countries indicates that most companies waste money because they work from nonexistent or weak marketing foundations.
Marketing foundations, or fundamentals, are about differentiation, positioning, and focus on sending a consistent message to the market.
The challenge for all companies, products and services is to stand out in crowded and noisy markets.
Henri Aebischer
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Audio Branding
Breaking the Sound Barrier
Few people will deny that the five-note Intel jingle in all direct and co-op advertising is a strong differentiating feature of the company’s brand. And the Windows’ start-up and shut down melodies remind millions of users every day that Microsoft is here to stay. But is sound the prerogative of large corporations?
Few companies actually use sound as an integral part of their brand expression. And when they do, many chose only well know jazz, rock or classical pieces that can’t be copyrighted in association with their brand. We think that these firms pass a huge opportunity to stand out in the long-term, This can be done at very reasonable cost and, therefore, also concerns small and medium enterprises.
Black Holes and TLAs
Tribute to Albert Einstein
The other day we received an e-mail attachment called “BS Bingo” (where BS is the acronym for a common word describing, among other things, the droppings of a major member of the Bovidae). This bingo card is used during boring meetings by cynics who check how many of the fashionable business terms are used and re-used by the speaker.
It is true that we all tend to abuse and wear out expressions that become meaningless and hollow. Examples include best practice, client focus, competitive advantage, sustainable differentiation, win-win, value added, 24/7, 360, and so on.
Yet, simple words or phrases are important to help us grasp complex phenomena or concepts and communicate about them. Very few people really understand what was the big bang or how black holes behave.
Marketing Turns
Tribute to Jo Siffert ***
Marketing is on course for a complete shambles. At the top, many companies pay only lip service to customer focus and fail to integrate marketing in their corporate strategy. Without a clear direction, they engage in sterile price wars or commit worse marketing blunders. In the ranks, marketers have fallen in love with the Internet and use related technologies to swamp customers with an increasing quantity and frequency of irrelevant information and irritating communication.
We can’t keep doing more of the same, increasing the quantity of ads, press releases, mail shots, electronic messages and so on because this is raising the noise level in which the whole communication is drowning. After manufacturing, administration and other business components, it’s marketing’s turn to start a quest for quality.
Technology has helped manufacturing to evolve from the mass production inflexibility of the Ford Model T to the mass customisation of Dell computers. Parallel efforts have significantly increased the quality of most products. The focus on quality has improved several business functions, including general administration. The Enron fiasco will probably force improvements in the standards for auditing and for the ‘creative’ aspects of accounting.
So far, marketing has missed the turn towards quality
*** *** Speaking of ‘turns’… Jo Siffert was a racing car driver who was born in my hometown and who was (and still is) one of my heroes - see http://www.grandprix.com/gpe/drv-sifjo.html
Marketing Changes
Marketing is quite difficult to define. So, few people understand what it is. Ask ten people what marketing means and you’ll get ten different answers with a bias towards the highly visible aspects of consumer marketing. Their answer depends on their point of view on a very vast domain spanning from high-level objectives in a corporate strategy to minute details of implementation tactics. Introducing new breeds of high-technology products in an embryonic market is quite different from promoting consumer commodities in a mature category. Explaining the benefits of a revolutionary technology has little to do with designing a new package for grocery items. Determining the right price for a service is far away from organising a hot line for customer service.
Many companies also have problems understanding and organising marketing. We all know by now that change is a ‘constant thing’ in business. Yet, in the last thirty years, the organisation of the marketing function hasn’t changed very much in many corporations. This is quite paradoxical given that a key change is the U-turn from product focus to customer focus.
It is surprising to see how few marketers really understand that marketing is, above all, about communicating with people.