Marketing Courses for Christmas!

Give the gift of marketing expertise this Christmas! 

Based on thirty years of experience crafting strategy for more than 200 brands, these are links to seven online marketing courses that I am offering through learnformula's The Marketplace. They are extremely reasonably priced from $10 to $15 each (US). They include videos, exercises, templates, worksheets, links to relevant online blog posts and articles and quizzes to test your knowledge. These courses are guaranteed to increase anyone's understanding of brand management and marketing.

Give the gift of marketing expertise this Christmas!

• Positioning Your Brand to Win
• Tapping into Human Needs
• Brand Research
• Developing the Brand Plan
• Brand Identity & Architecture
• Out-of-the-Box Marketing Techniques
• The Importance of Color in Brand Identity

Marketing Today

This is based purely on my observations and personal experiences. I believe the way marketing works today is different from the past, and not just in strategies and tactics, but fundamentally. Yes, one must still start with an understanding of the customer and one must still deliver a unique value proposition to that customer. But the advent of the Internet, social media, AI and data analytics has changed everything. 

Here are the two approaches to marketing that I believe work today. The first is not that different from what worked in the past but I believe it is even more necessary now when many more traditional approaches are far less effective or have ceased working altogether - word-of-mouth, referrals, peer-to-peer marketing and returning satisfied customers. This is all about human-to-human interaction. No wonder the very popular Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the extent to which one would recommend a particular product or brand to a friend or colleague. It is a measure of attitudinal loyalty but it also gets to the core of what works today, person-to-person influencing. 

The second approach relies on an active online presence, AI and data analytics. I can personally vouch for the fact that if you allow your online "likes," "clicks," and purchases to be monitored, you begin to receive offers of products that are increasingly tailored to your particular needs and desires. This pin-point accuracy in individual targeting was not possible even a decade ago. The purchase rate is much higher when every online ad features something that you highly desire. 

What has gone by the wayside? Cold calls. Unsolicited mail. Unsolicited email messages. Unsolicited text messages. Dialing for dollars. People you don't know asking for "just a minute of your time." We are receiving too many of each of these types of communication every day to consider any one of them for more than a fraction of a second. My routine is to delete as many email messages as possible as quickly as possible and if I recall that I deleted something that I was expecting or could be interested in, I have to go back to the deleted folder to move it back to the inbox. And, as a business owner, I get no less than five solicitations a day from lead-generation companies that want to make cold calls on my company's behalf. I can't imagine being a chief marketing officer today. That person's administrative assistant must spend most of the day running interference with all of the cold callers out there. 

So my advice for the future is to focus on peer-to-peer marketing and using data analytics and AI to get to your potential customers. Yes, there still is room for television, radio, outdoor and other traditional advertising approaches and I am always a fan of publicity and guerrilla marketing, and if you are a food product, free product trial still works, but try focusing on peer-to-peer and data analytics. I believe those are the future of marketing. 

Business Hours & Convenience

 

One of the drivers of customer brand insistence is accessibility. I recently encountered a local bookstore with these hours. It is a new store and I love books so I wanted to explore it. Despite driving by the store a few days each week, I have not yet gone by at a time when it was open. I have now given up on the store. Unless the brand offers a highly demanded item or items not available anywhere else, inconvenient store hours will completely take it out of the consideration set. People do not have a high tolerance for inaccessibility, especial in the era of Amazon.com and a myriad of other 24/7 online stores that can ship overnight. 

Clearly, this is an extreme example of ridiculous hours of operation, but I have encountered many other places with similarly strange hours. If you don't uniquely offer the next big thing, don't handicap your business with limited or strange hours. And even if you are uniquely offering the next big thing, you would do much better to offer as much accessibility and convenience as possible. 

I suspect the bookstore I am citing will be out of business within six months, if not sooner. 

Pricing Research

If you are trying to get a sense of what price to set for a product or service, there are three questions that will help you make a more informed decision:

• How much do you think this product or service costs?
• What would you being willing to pay for this product or service?
• What is the most you would be willing to pay for this product or service?

Different customers will answer this differently. In fact, there may be customer segments that value the product or service differently or who have the ability to pay more or less for the product or service than other customers.

In pricing a product or service, you must always consider your costs and the value of the product or service to the customer. Generally, unless you are pursuing a "loss leader" or a razor-razorblade pricing strategy, you must price your product or service somewhere between the cost and value assuming the cost is less than the value. 

You could explore and influence reference prices, that is, other prices that inform perceptions of your product's or service's price. You could create a price segmentation scheme, that is charging different prices for different customer segments, to maximize revenues and profits. And, if you are just entering a market with your product or service, you could pursue a penetration or skimming pricing strategy depending on what you are trying to accomplish. 

There are many other considerations when pricing a product including price elasticity/sensitivity, price thresholds, bundling/unbundling, sales terms, payment methods, subscription model versus outright purchase, etc. 

Having considered some of the other components of pricing strategy, these are still the most important customer questions to inform your pricing strategy:

• How much do you think this product or service costs?
• What would you being willing to pay for this product or service?
• What is the most you would be willing to pay for this product or service?

Make sure to ask these questions before you set your price. 

Who Should You Hire to Help You with Your Branding?

When hiring someone or some organization to help you with your branding, be sure to know what you are seeking first. Some people think of a brand as a name or a visual identity. Some think of it as a set of messages and communications. Some think of it as an exercise in finding the optimal positioning. Some see it as synonymous with competitive strategy. And some see it as a holistic approach to business that includes all of these things plus IT, HR, customer service and technical support alignment. What are you looking for? What will solve your problem?

Are you trying to increase sales, increase profitability, increase brand awareness, increase brand preference, increase brand trial, increase brand usage, encourage new uses for your brand, target new customer segments for your brand, increase emotional connection to your brand, increase brand loyalty, increase customer retention, overcome a crisis, freshen up a dated brand, extend the brand into new categories, change brand perceptions, reposition your brand, solve a brand problem or something else?

Once you have figured out what you are looking for, then it is time to reach out to individuals or organizations that can meet this need. If you are only looking for a visual identity, brand identity firms and most marketing agencies can help you with this. What you need is a graphic designer who is experienced in brand identity design and brand guidelines development. If you want accompanying messages and communications, you need a good copywriter too. But, if you want these messages to powerfully convey a unique value proposition, you will need in-depth customer research and an experienced brand strategist. If you are looking for help with brand strategy, especially as it intersects with competitive strategy and business model strategy, you are also likely to need an MBA with concentrations in marketing strategy and competitive strategy. And if you are seeking a complete approach to branding, you will want to hire a firm that specializes in this. 

For the comprehensive approach to branding, you will need the following skill sets: a business/marketing strategist, a marketing researcher skilled in qualitative and quantitative brand research, a graphic designer skilled in brand identity design and brand guidelines development and a talented copywriter. And it wouldn't hurt to have someone skilled in inside-out branding, someone who can put a CEO's hat on and view your enterprise from that holistic, higher level perspective.

In summary, you need to know what you are trying to achieve, what deliverables you are seeking and what skill sets can get you what you want. Some marketing agencies have all of these pieces, while most tend to be strong in graphic design and marketing communications and weaker in customer research and brand and business strategy. A common mistake is to hire the wrong person or organization to help you with your branding needs.

I once participated in a municipality's branding project RFP process that demonstrated a complete cluelessness about this. When the municipality emailed answers to the questions the agencies had asked regarding the RFP, more than 50 organizations were on the distribution list and they ranged from individual graphic designers and copywriters to marketing research companies, brand strategists, social media companies and full-service marketing agencies. It was clear that the municipality didn't know what it was seeking, nor did it know who to go to to find it. Once I saw that, I excused my company from the process, as I am sure other sophisticated marketing agencies did. 

The bottom line: You need to know what you want and who can provide it for you. And you need to be thoughtful about this before you begin the search process.

Four Simple Tips to Help Your Marketing

Over the years I have learned some simple, common sense tips to improve marketing outcomes. These are not 'rocket science.' They are just simple things you can do to improve your marketing outcomes.

1. Whenever you conduct customer research, ask this simple set of questions at the end of your research: "Where do you go to get information about products in this category?" "To whose advice do you listen?" "To what websites do you go?" "What publications do you read?" "What conferences do you attend?"
2. Whenever possible, but especially when interacting with the public, make sure you capture each person's name and email address. You would be surprised how many people forget to do this even at marketing events. And know that it is always better to have the prospect's contact information than making sure they have yours. One way to make sure this happens at conferences, trade shows and events is to require the person's name and email address as a cost of entry to your presentation, activity or booth.
3. In any online communication, suggest that the recipient share the communication with or forward it to friends and colleagues who also might be interested in your product or service. This simple prompt will cause many people to do just that, forward or share your communication with friends and colleagues. You can also add "share" buttons to the the post or email message to make it even easier to share.
4. Whether it is in an email message or an online ad, make sure there are multiple places a person can click that will take him or her to the intended action. I will likely be a combination of words, images and buttons.

Online Branding Education

I have created two new online brand management courses: (1) Positioning Your Brand to Win! and (2) Brand Research. If you have a couple hours to spare and want to dive deeply into these two topics, click on the links to begin your education.