10 Shortcuts
To Marketing
Success
by Mary-Eve Lacombe and James Heaton
When I say “Marketing is tactical and branding is strategic” I am
not saying one is better than the other. I am saying they are
different, they are complementary, and they should be used
together to achieve effective and lasting results. Marketing is
the tactical action of promoting a specific product or service.
Branding is the strategic foundation upon which great marketing
campaigns are built. Marketers sometimes ignore this. If a brand
is insufficient or weak, the marketing will have to compensate.
This can severely weaken the power, the persuasiveness, and
the efficiency of the marketing campaign.
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The Pull Strategy: Branding
Marketing carries forward your call to action: “Buy this car.”
“Make this donation to our annual appeal.” While this is
essential, it is branding that really makes your customers
care about you. Branding is what makes your clients
remember you. Marketing on its own cannot have this effect.
Having a strong brand that represents your company well will
make marketing that much easier and more effective for you.
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Define Your Identity
1
The first step in the branding process is to identify
who you really are and what you are really good at;
this is what you promise your customers. In order to
create a strong brand, it is not enough for your firm to
offer a product or service of quality. You must create
deep-seated brand associations within the consumer’s
mind, including attributes and attitudes.
Specific brand-related attributes alone do not influence
the consumer’s likelihood to buy your products, but
they do promote familiarity and differentiation. It is
the ideas and stories associated with your brand that
directly influence the consumer in the buying moment.
They are the determinants of whether consumers
react favorably to your brand or not.
Those implicit and explicit meanings a consumer
associates with your brand are what gives it an
identity and what represents your company in the
marketplace. The identity of your brand is visible
in every form of communication, beginning with
the name, the logo, and the slogan, but included in
absolutely everything they see, hear, feel or think in
relation to you. It is the Happy Ending in Disney, the
“Just Do It” in Nike, the Gecko in Geico.
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Position Your Brand
2
Communicate your strengths to the world by building
your brand and showing your competitive advantages.
Keep in mind that consumers have market experience
and are well informed. They know your competition,
perhaps even better than you do. Consumers need
to see what differentiates you from your competitors
and that this difference serves their needs better. This
difference does not have to be a product or service
feature, but can be something symbolic or emotional.
A significant distinction can be achieved even if only
one variable differentiates you from the competition.
It only has to be a personally meaningful variable from
the perspective of the consumer.
Apple became an empire and an incredibly
powerful lifestyle brand by focusing on the “easy
to use” computer. They also applied the concept,
“differentiate or die”. In addition to helping you
succeed in a competitive market, differentiation can
also be a key driver for brand loyalty. A unique, wellestablished brand will evoke trust, stability, quality,
and consistency, and it will bring these images to
the customer’s mind. In brand positioning, positive
differentiation and constant delivery of the brand
promise are fundamental. Easy-to-use is not a motto,
it’s a reality reinforced by every encounter with the
Apple brand. When this ceases to be the case, the
brand will begin to falter.
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Build Your Capital
3
In a successful company with a strongly established
brand, the brand capital (referring to an intangible
asset that summarizes the consumer’s perception
and awareness of your firm’s products and services)
becomes much higher than its brand value (the value
of your products as shown on the balance sheet). For
example, Harley-Davidson’s brand capital is estimated
to be 100 times more than the ledger’s value. The
capital is therefore determined by the consumer,
while the value is determined by the market. Put in
the sustained effort to build and protect your brand
capital.
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Communicate and Re-communicate
4
Once you have understood who you truly are, what
your brand identity is, and what message you want to
convey to your consumers, you need to communicate
this. The consistent repetition of your message
lays the foundation for brand recognition within the
minds of your consumers. If you convey your brand
message with frequency and absolute consistency,
it is far more likely to be heard, and it will also be
that much harder for your competition to tarnish or
erase this image from consumers’ minds. Advertising
and PR are traditional methods you can use to build
brand recognition, but your every communication,
interaction, and action, even if conducted in seeming
isolation from the marketplace, has an impact on your
brand.
A well-established, well-articulated brand will allow
you to set higher prices for your products and retain
customers more easily, and it can be used as a
platform to launch new products more easily.
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The Push Tactic: Marketing
Marketing without the benefit of a strong brand is very
much like swimming upstream. It can be done, but it’s a lot
of work. In an ideal marketing campaign, the power of the
brand is perfectly leveraged, and the brand is made stronger
in the process.
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Fix Your Goals
5
As mentioned previously, marketing implies tactics.
You have an ultimate goal in mind. As with any
other kind of plan, the first phase of an effective
marketing campaign would be to determine SMART
goals, understood as Specific, Measurable, Attainable,
Relevant, and Time-scaled goals. Before going further
in the process, you need to agree on the results you
are hoping for.
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Keep an Eye Wide Open on the
Competition
6
Similar to the positioning of your brand, you have
to position your product or service. In marketing we
refer more to the product or service’s features than
the symbolic and emotional features mentioned in the
context of branding. Your offer must be based on your
consumers’ desires and needs. A product positioning
statement is a short sentence or two that describes
how your product distinguishes itself from your
competitor’s. If your positioning statement is correctly
written, it will answer this question: Why is a rationallythinking consumer going to buy my product or service
rather than my competitor’s? You have to find the
key attributes that are desirable to your consumer,
and then communicate them. (Remember, behind this
product is a brand, and it provides emotional supports
for the purchase that actually precede and undergird
these rational ones.)
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Position your Product or Service
7
Every marketing campaign must be launched with
the consumers you wish to reach in mind. You have
to know who they are, what really matters to them,
what they are looking for, and how they are looking
for it. Having that knowledge, you can develop a
strategy to reach your customers more effectively
and less cost-intensively. Targeting a specific segment
of the market, rather than consumers in general,
leads to competitive advantages and superior sales
performance. Things made for everyone attract no
one. Things made for very specific consumer targets
attract many outside that specific target.
Keep in mind that you do not only have to be informed
about your consumers’ current needs and buying
patterns, but also about possible shifts in consumer
behaviors and preferences or newly emerging market
segments. Generally, your products are not going to
change anyone’s behavior, but behaviors do change
(as one grows older, for example) so you should be
sensitive enough to understand and respond to these
behaviors.
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Know Your Target
8
Just like you, the competition is constantly trying
to win over your consumers. Keep track of their
strengths and weaknesses, but do not obsess over
this. Your biggest competition should be your own
best past performance.
You may have something to learn from what the
competition is doing. They may give you insight
into your consumers that somehow slipped past
your attention. This is useful knowledge, but do not
slovenly follow what your competition is doing, even
if it looks to be working. Your actions must first and
foremost be true to your brand. Investing in research
and analytics of your competition is worthwhile, and
may lead you to discover unrealized opportunities
and identify fruitless efforts, sparing you some of the
costly process of trial and error, but this information
can also be misleading. You are not your competition,
and their solution is likely not going to be yours. Stay
true to yourself.
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Build a Relationship with Your Customers
9
Fundamental to marketing is the fact that it is far
cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new
one. The relationships that you develop over time
yield trust. The degree to which you maintain your
brand has a critical impact on this. Pay attention to
your clients’ needs and insights. Social media makes
your work in this regard much easier than it was a
decade ago. You now have access to your consumers’
thoughts, what they like, what they do not like. The
information you need is there, so use it wisely.
The ability to adapt is extremely important and is
practiced by all successful companies. A company
might, for example, see their product on YouTube
being used in a new way inspiring new innovations.
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Communicate in Line with Your Brand
Identity
10
Marketing is a form of communication, and it goes
both ways. On one hand it serves to build awareness
and reputation, or to position your firm or its product
or service relative to the broader marketplace, but it is
also an opportunity for dialogue.
If your brand is true and strong, word-of-mouth
communication is already helping you, and social media
is speeding up the process of communication among
your consumers. Make sure this is working in your
favor. The only way to do that is brand integrity.
Conversely, if you have unhappy customers, they may
become “terrorists” to your brand. Consumers now
place more importance on this type of communication
than the non-personal communications that you are
paying for (advertising, PR). So if you falter in the
challenge of upholding your brand promise, social
media can also work against you. Take the “United
Breaks Guitars” YouTube video. It has been seen more
than 13 million times. It’s a great example of brand
“terrorism”.
In sum, thoroughly planned marketing supported by
careful attention to your brand that supports it will
allow you to more effectively reach and hold onto
your target consumer. It will make it easier to build
awareness and ultimately increase your profit margins.
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Bonus Feature Marketing is Not Optional
* Find links to additional info by clicking on the grey text.
“There are only two things in a business that make
money – innovation and marketing, everything else is
cost.”
—Peter Drucker
Peter Drucker was many things. Fool, not.
Part I
MARKETING IS NOT OPTIONAL
Marketing is an essential tool for the success of all business and nonprofit activity. What matters is not what you do, what matters is that
you communicate what you do so that others will take interest in it, buy
it, support it, join it, and tell friends about it. In some non-profit quarters,
marketing was once thought of as a dirty word, associated with used car
salesmen and sleazy tactics. I address this issue and the reluctance to use
marketing in the blog post Not To Market is a Crime. As noted there, you are
being remiss in your duties to your cause if you do not market it.
Your mission is only as successful as far as it can spread and have an
impact. If you are indeed working to make the world better, you need to be
actively marketing what you do. If you don’t know where to begin with this,
then you should probably take one of our Branding and Marketing Discovery
Workshops. If you have spent a lot of marketing money in the past to
insufficient effect, ditto. What you should NOT be doing is NOT doing it.
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Bonus Feature Marketing is Not Optional
There are many strategies for marketing, and there are many means to
execute a marketing campaign. It can be expensive or not, effective or not.
And price and effectiveness are not necessarily inextricably connected.
See Find Your Trim Tab to find out more about how it is possible disengage
expense from effectiveness in marketing.
The point is that you have no excuse not to be doing marketing well. None.
Nope.
None.
Now get to it.
Part II
Effective Marketing and the Alternative
Let’s go back to management thinker Peter Drucker for a second.
He wrote an important little book that posits an organizational selfevaluation consisting of 5 questions: The Five Most Important Questions You
Will Ever Ask About Your Organization.
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Bonus Feature Marketing is Not Optional
Here they are in case you don’t have time to read it:
What is our mission?
Who is our customer?
What does the customer value?
What are our results?
What is our plan?
The answers to all of these, but critically #2 and #3, are crucial to devising
an effective marketing program for your products and services. They are
also at the heart of what our Discovery Process is designed to help you
clarify. Without them, your marketing dollars will likely be spent in tactical
experimentation. Tactical experiments can work, but they are not the
smartest use of a limited pool of marketing money. They are, in fact, much
better when conducted in the context of a strong strategic hypotheses
about who your core consumer really is and what he or she REALLY values
and exactly how your offer meets them there.
You owe it to the future of your business, your non-profit, your museum to
take the time to honestly answer Drucker’s questions. If you want help with
that so you can use your precious marketing money more effectively, and if
you don’t want to spend forever sorting this out, then I will take the liberty
of repeating myself—maybe it’s time you should read about our Branding
and Marketing Discovery Workshop.
Copyright Tronvig Group 2013
Tronvig Group
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