Three Keys to Winning Marketing Strategy

The four P's of marketing are:

• Product
• Price
• Position (distribution)
• Promotion

Usually depicted in a ven diagram with four overlapping circles.

They were originally introduced by Harvard advertising professor Neil H. Borden in 1964 in his article The Concept of the Marketing Mix.

These four key elements have been at the core of marketing strategy since then.

Today, the four P's (alone) don't work.


The new mix for marketing strategy is:

1. Your secret sauce
2. Buyers' purchase decision process
3. Buyers' demands

1. Your Secret Sauce

Why do your current customers buy from you? Do you really know? We've found most companies get this wrong. They think it's product or price and it turns out to be speed, reliability or something else much deeper.

What your customer's value about you is your secret sauce. You must find out what this is and focus on promoting it.

2. Buyers' Demands

Buyers are in control. Still holding on? Think you can control the message? Get over it. You can't. What you must learn is what buyers are seeking. What do they want? For most, it's content. They want answers to important questions. If you provide the answers, buyers will find you.

3. Buyers' Purchase Decision Process

Finally, you must understand the buyers purchase decision process. It consists of:

1. Discovery
2. Information
3. Endorsement
4. Proof/Demo

Where does the buyer go for each stage of the process and what are they seeking? This process determines media channels and influences content.

Bringing All Together

Once you know your secret sauce, your buyers demands, and your buyers purchase decision process, you can know formulate a marketing strategy that will have a much higher success rate than if you simply used the four P's.

Strategy: Lost in Translation?

Senior executives complain they don't understand why their managers can't execute. While managers complain that senior executives don't understand what it takes to win in the real world. Result: Failure to launch...anything.

The victim of this communication breakdown is strategy.

What's happening here?

The secret lies in the narrow-focused world of the manager. Much like Larry the Cable Guy, the manager lives in the world of "Git'r done!" And the pure workload for the manager has been doubled in the past 10 years. Managers are working with much smaller staffs, and being asked to perform more work. For most of them, their day never ends. With their Blackberry's they're connected 24/7. Their role has been reduced to simply moving rocks as fast as they can.
Senior executives still believe managers are thought leaders, innovators and organizers.

On the flip side, the world of the C-suite has grown more complex. Winning strategies integrate market dynamics with product development with manufacturing with distribution with marketing. When a senior executive explains their strategic priorities to a manager, the manager is trying to figure out how much more work that means and how they're going to get it done.

The marketing manager doesn't understand the manufacturing manager's world. What's worse, managers no longer are learning. They don't have time. Senior executives have become the learners. They introduce new ideas to their managers. 10 years ago it was the managers responsibility to bring new ideas to senior management. Not anymore.

This is not a lack of communication. This is a complete systemic breakdown. No one has time to "run the business". Everyone is spending all of their time just getting things out the door.

Why can't companies innovate? They have no time.

How Companies Are Solving the Problem

One of the ways senior executives are addressing this problem is with outsourcing. Not to India, but to specialized service firms that are focused on "program development and execution."

Outsourcing has largely been limited to tasks. But now companies recognize they need specialists to fill the gaps between C-suite strategic objectives and their "tactical" managers. These specialists bring the following value to the company:

• Strategic expertise
• Awareness/command of new technology and techniques
• Ability to construct tactical programs that will fulfill strategy
• Ability to define specific tasks for each key area within the company
• Ability to supplement expertise and workforce where and when needed
• Performance measurement

Be aware: Your accounting firm cannot do this. Nor can your consulting firm. This takes strategic expertise. Individuals who take an enterprise-wide view of strategic priorities. Individuals who think like the C-suite, who see the connections between market dynamics, finance, manufacturing and product development--and can create a solution that reduces risk and increases success percentage.

If you feel lost in translation. You need to find one of these firms quickly.

How to Interview Your Customers and Find Out What They Really Want

You can't hardly hit a blog or business feed without hearing about the importance of understanding your customer. And to do it, you've got to talk to your customers and find out what they want.

Seems like pretty straight forward stuff, right? Not true.

Harvard Business professor Clayton Christensen says the current tools on which business relies for understanding customers are no longer relevant because they are not designed to uncover complex demands.

Any type of research that asks customers direct questions fails to uncover what the customer can't describe or simply does not understand. Focus groups, quantitative surveys, and even voice-of-the-customer all rely on the customers' ability to describe what they want.

But when it comes to the emotional and social aspects, customers don't know what they want. At the very least, they don't know how to describe what they want.

So how do you find out? Here's how to interview a customer and uncover what they really want:

1. Be Their Psychiatrist - Do not drive the questioning in an attempt to get them to "tell you the answer" -- because they won't. They don't know the answer. Once they identify an area of frustration, stop talking and listen. Let them talk. When there is a lull, use words of encouragement to keep them going such as "How is that impacting you?" or "Do you think it will ever change?"

2. Don't sell--ever - The reason marketers struggle getting good information from their customers is they don't listen; they sell. The minute a customer begins describing a problem, our brains shut off and we go into "sales mode" and begin convincing the customer our product can solve that problem. These are not sales calls. If you start selling, you'll learn nothing.

3. Do not make it a product issue - Avoid your instincts to drive the conversation to your product. Let it happen naturally. If it's a product issue, they'll get there all by themselves.

4. Focus on their world - It's not about you, it's about them. You need to understand the full scope of the job the customer needs to get done. Your product only plays a small part. Sorry, you're not that important.

5. Focus on how they use the product and why - They hire your product to do a job. Focus on the job they're using your product to do. What works well and what doesn't work so well--or what isn't working at all. Remember, there's a huge difference between how well your product performs the job it's designed to do verses how well it performs the job the customer needs it do.

Is it important to talk to your customers? Absolutely. It's critical to your success. But you have to do it right or you'll learn nothing and perpetuate the same old practices.

Better, Faster, Cheaper

The following is from Mount Union College website.

I met Sam Bowers at a TEC meeting in De Pere, WI in 2007. His innovative perspective was incredibly enlightening. The rise of social media has accelerated his predictions. I pinged Chris Brogan on Twitter yesterday when he was commenting about weak customer service at a bank. I told him opportunistic profiteering is dying. The collapse of the financial markets was inevitable because they were the most visible symbol of opportunistic profiteering.

The rise of social media coincides with the rise of the empowered buyer. We're burning our loyalty cards and we're not going to take it anymore!

As marketers, we need to pay attention:


According to Bowers, president and founder of the Service Sales Institute, we are moving from the industrial revolution into the second major phase in modern business known as a “technology revolution” which will alter and change the world.

“Today we are using more and more technology to produce more and more output at an ever greater quality,” said Bowers. “We are going to see better, faster and cheaper explode in the coming future of business.”

Bowers believes that because of the advancement in technology, robotics and computers, the way companies do business is changing because the customers themselves are becoming better and smarter buyers.

In addition, Bowers stressed marketing as the key in today’s business world because buyers are doing their own research. The Internet has supplied buyers and customers with enough information to make better decisions and to find comparable products at a lesser cost.

“Businesses are being faced with the ever increasing need to improve productivity while lowering costs,” said Bowers. “In a world where selling is disappearing, the most important business skill of the future is marketing.”

The old style of forming relationships and relying on a reputable sales staff to drive business decisions is becoming a thing of the past.

“Technology and the use of the web is altering the way companies bring products or services to the market and marketing is drawing potential buyers to the product or services,” said Bowers.

According to Bowers, e-commerce is the next step.

“Customers have access to better technology and more information and demand alternative sources,” Bowers added. “Customers are driving businesses to e-commerce. They are looking for evermore increasing sources that can give them what they want at the lowest possible price.”

Bowers concluded that the future is now and he challenged the students in attendance to stay up with technology

“Companies are going to rely on and need today’s students to move them into this new age of technology in order to survive,” said Bowers.

Bowers has also been president and chief operating officer of multiple divisions of a company he helped grow from $7 million to over $465 million, and an economics professor. He has spoken to thousands of chief executive officers and numerous associations as well as conducted hundreds of strategic planning and positioning meetings for corporations.

The Smith Lectureship in Business was established in 2001 by C. Richard Smith, a 1953graduate of Mount Union College. The purpose of this Lectureship is to bring business professionals to the Mount Union College campus to share their knowledge and experience with business students, faculty and others from the campus and local community.

How to Market in a Down Economy

An economic downturn typically spells trouble for marketing budgets. If your marketing budget gets slashed, what can you do to keep sales leads coming? Here's a few tips:

1. Shift to Social Media - A recent study by Cone Inc. found 83% of Americans said companies should not only be present in social media but interact with the consumer using social media. If you believe social media is not happening in your market, now is the time to reconsider. Plus, social media is essentially FREE.

2. Create a Content Strategy - In the social media world, content is king. Social media guru David Meerman Scott said recently that the new marketer will need journalistic skills. The reason is the new marketer will spend most of their time creating content (e.g. writing news stories). A content strategy establishes your company's or brand's messaging platform for the content to be created and published. In the social media world this content needs to deliver value rather than promote. For example, how-to's. Share your knowledge and expertise. Another key aspect of your content strategy is leveraging SEO. You want to be sure your content is focused to drive specific keyword search phrases to your blogs and website.

3. Assign a Content Manager - If your marketing budget gets cut, you will have staff looking for something to do. Choose the strongest writer and make them your content manager. They will be responsible for creating and publishing your content.

Remember, social media is FREE. The other advantage is social media is inbound marketing. That means you spread content throughout the social media world and those buyers seeking solutions will find you. Even in a down economy, there are buyers. You don't have to worry about finding them, with the right social media program, they will find you.

In tough economic times when your budgets are being cut, social media is a great choice.

The Future CMO -- a Publisher?

NOTE: This is from ADWEEK. Please be sure to visit their site.

Why understanding an old craft is crucial to mastering new techniques
Oct 1, 2008

-By Joe Pulizzi

Considering technology has enabled marketing to make use of once implausible platforms -- mobile phones, interactive displays and even virtual worlds -- who would have guessed that the next generation of CMOs would need an in-depth understanding of a trade that goes back to the days of Benjamin Franklin? The answer: not many. Even so, publishing is the driving force behind today's most successful brands.

Even the word "publishing" sounds old-fashioned, so it's understandably difficult to fathom how the process could possibly be revolutionizing the marketing techniques used by the largest organizations in the world.

Publishing and Trust
Do you know IBM's most important marketing objective? According to Ed Abrams, vp of marketing for IBM, it's to "create and develop trust with technology decision makers."

Eduardo Conrado, corporate vp of business and technology for Motorola, is singing the same tune: Motorola's most important goal is to "become a trusted partner and resource to customers."

But how are they meeting this objective? By publishing online content, Webcasts, Webinars, videos, educational newsletters, white papers, content microsites. The list goes on. In order to create an environment of trust, marketers must develop valuable, relevant and compelling content on a consistent basis. That's publishing -- and now, marketing.

The challenge for corporate marketers is that most do not have the skill base or a clear understanding of the elements required for publishing.

Marketing Is Publishing
If you have any doubts as to whether marketing is morphing into publishing, just compare, side-by-side, the products of any media company and the communication tactics used by major marketing organizations. They are almost identical. The only difference is how they are measured. While media companies measure each product with an individual P&L, marketers measure their tactics through customer growth and retention.

While this is great news for non-media companies (advertising agencies and agency-side content providers) and client-side CMOs, it also explains why most media companies are hurting. The media's main competition is no longer other media companies; it's past clients, companies like yours.

This is a recent but rampant and steady shift. Up until just a few years ago, corporate marketers were still primarily dependent on aligning their products with media brands to distribute their overall message to their target audience. Now, they're cutting out the middleman (that would be traditional media) and communicating directly to their customers.

There are two major elements primarily responsible for this shift: Search engines, which have democratized the playing field, and technology, which is so cheap that there are essentially no barriers to publishing the messages you want to your target buyers.

The Publisher's Skill Set
While the metrics, the marketing knowledge and the concepts of integrated marketing are still extremely valuable, the differentiator between the haves and have-nots of leading marketing executives comes down to the process of delivering valuable, relevant and compelling content on a consistent basis.

What are the defining traits of publishers? And how can your average CMO adopt them to do his or her job more effectively? In short, CMOs need to think like publishers and understand concepts such as:

-- The ongoing informational needs of the buyer (outside your products and services).
-- Anticipating the informational needs of buyers and presenting cutting-edge industry trends (again, not product- or service-related).
-- The art of storytelling and its role within the organization.
-- Audience development tactics that rely on in-depth knowledge of buyer personas.
-- Content tactics that cut through the marketing clutter and gain readership.

The CMO publisher allocates resources much like a media company would, including:

-- Aligning an expert content network of journalists and custom publishers.
-- Developing an editorial plan and content schedule.
-- Leveraging employees to be part of the content-generation process and positioning them as industry experts.
-- Creating an online, in-print and in-person content strategy as part of the integrated marketing program.

It Comes Down to Trust
Most leading organizations still leverage traditional media, and will continue to do so for a long time to come. During this "transition" period between traditional and alternative media strategies, big brands such as IBM, Siemens and Procter & Gamble are beginning to leverage vast amounts of traditional media to market their own content. IBM pushes buyers to their DNA portals. Siemens promotes to their Siemens Answers content program. P&G integrates both traditional and nontraditional marketing efforts toward sites like HomeMadeSimple.com and BeingGirl.com, which have both been big wins for the company.

These are publishing efforts that are designed to engender buyer trust. The new rules of marketing dictate trust over all other objectives. Trust leads to long-term relationships. Trust leads to the purchase. Trust leads to online and offline word of mouth.

Without publishing consistent and valuable content to customer segments, trust is hard to come by, even with a revolutionary product or service.

The Opportunity Is Now
Although organizations across the globe are starting to catch on, we are still at the beginning stages of the publishing and content marketing revolution. The average company spends about 30 percent of its total budget on the creation and execution of its own content. Over the next few years this number will grow to 50 percent. This means that more emphasis will need to be on best-in-class publishing methods and less on traditional measurements.

In today's climate, a majority of Americans are more inclined to trust business than they are government or media (source: 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer). That means you start off with the deck stacked in your favor: your customers want to trust you. By publishing your brand message in the form of useful information, your company and brand are in a position to become "the trusted information resource" and to create lifelong brand loyalists. Those that don't will be left on the outside looking in, and by that time, a publishing mentality may be too late.

Joe Pulizzi, author, speaker and evangelist for content marketing, is founder of Junta42 Match, the leading custom content marketplace, and author of Get Content. Get Customers.