Success in today’s markets requires marketers to step up and leave their traditional tools behind in favor of new approaches made necessary by heightened competition and changing customer demands.
Certain practices need to stop; others need to start.
1. Don’t expect your traditional marketer’s kit bag of same-old methods to produce breakthrough results. They won’t. New times demand new techniques. Leave behind flogging products, trying to compete on product features and believing technical capabilities will make the difference.
2. Lose your obsession with mass markets. There is no such thing as an "average" customer. Every person is different in some way. Discover their differences; market to each of them.
3. Resist the temptation to use price as the vehicle to win. It won’t; it’s not a viable long-term strategy. Price moves can and will be copied by your competitors. Price competition drives profit margins down and does nothing to build customer loyalty.
4. Cut the crap – the non-strategic and no-longer-relevant marketing programs. In order to make room for "the new," purge old practices that have limited value in the long term. Falling in the crap category are: price promotions (produce no long-term competitive advantage), new customer acquisition programs (encourage churn and anger existing customers who are denied the same offers) and customer appreciation events (mostly satisfy lookyloos who want deals rather than rewarding existing customers).
5. Expunge “best in class" from your vocabulary. Benchmarking to copy someone else is a catch-up tactic and does nothing to take your business to a higher level.
6. Swing your attention from getting better to being different. Separate yourself from your competitors. Be distinctive and unique. Make competitive moves that create the ‘wow power’ to vault you beyond the herd.
7. Don’t make incremental changes to products to make them appeal to a broader market. This round-the-corners marketing makes a product less appealing to people who purchased it because of its edges or special features.
1. Ask, “How can we be different?”The marketer’s challenge is to determine how you can separate your organization from the competitive herd, not be an improved part of it.
2. Devote copious amounts of time to answering the question, "Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?" Create your ‘only’ statement as the expression of your uniqueness: "We are the only ones that ... ."
4. Morph to an experience-centric philosophy. Create experiences that deliver happiness to the people you serve. A product makes us happy for a limited time only; a memorable experience stays with us forever. Emotion marketing represents a huge opportunity.
5. Discover the secrets and innermost desires of your target customers to unlock their marketing potential. While the herd remains in the needs-oriented world, you will stand out and be noticed.
6. Establish customer learning as a core competency in your organization. Be "always on" to learn what your customers desire every time they touch your organization, whether it’s a personal contact or a visit to your website.
7. Develop packages for your high-value customers rather than offer them individual products and services. Learn their broad holistic desires; seamlessly integrate multiple products to yield a broad value proposition that is difficult for your competitors to match.
Effective marketing strategy is just as much about letting old stuff go as it is about talking new stuff on; make sure you stop as well as start.
