The Competitive Advantage

April 12, 2012

Use the 8 Ps of Marketing when Setting Strategy

Our marketing classes in college taught us about 4 Ps of Marketing – the guiding tenets of Product, Place, Pricing and Promotions – to help create our marketing strategies and plans.

But the world – and marketing – has changed and that list now needs to be expanded to encompass new ways of thinking about and planning for marketing.  The four newest Ps include:

• People
• Process
• Permission
• Position

April 12, 2012

Integrate the 4 As of Marketing into Your Planning

We’ve all heard of the 4 Ps of Marketing – the guiding tenets of Product, Place, Pricing and Promotions – to help guide marketing efforts.  To help guide your ‘Promotions,’ there are the 4 A’s of Marketing.  In chronological order, they are:

1. Awareness
2. Attitude
3. Action
4. Action²

Awareness: “If you build it, he will come” only works in Kevin Costner movies.  In the real world, if prospective clients don’t know about your firm, how can they buy from you?  In their classic book, Positioning, well-known consultants, Al Ries and Jack Trout, submit that marketing is not a fight for ‘market share,’ but rather a battle for ‘mind share.’  That is, when a prospective client has a need for a certain product or service, you want it to be your product or service that they think of first.

April 12, 2012

Size Does Matter: 4 Approaches to Growing Your Business

Regardless of the industries we serve, the age of our firm or the number of employees we have… we all share one common goal.  We all want some greater level of market share and higher profit margins… and in nearly every case, achieving those goals starts with REVENUE GROWTH.

The initiatives you develop for helping to grow your business will most likely fall into one of four strategic categories… or more appropriately, one of the four “approaches” to business growth reviewed below:

April 12, 2012

The 12 Guiding Principles of Marketing (part 2)

This is the second part of a two-part article…

Principle #7 – Listen and learn… and be prepared to get out of your own way.

Just because you want to sell it, doesn’t mean that anyone wants to buy it.  Or better yet… you can only be successful when you sell what the market wants and needs.

Here’s an example… if you are a boutique qualitative shop specializing in ethnographies… and several of your clients start asking for bulletin board focus groups, should you start doing them?  Maybe… maybe not.  But you do, at least, need to think about it.  In business, you need to pay attention to the market and be prepared to respond to it – maybe in ways you weren’t expecting.

April 10, 2012

The 12 Guiding Principles of Marketing (part 1)

Of all the disciplines in our industry – the research itself, accounting, management, HR, etc. – ‘marketing’ is the least understood.  It is believed by many to be more ‘art’ than ‘science.’  It has a history of being perceived as “BS.”  Ask a dozen people to define ‘marketing’ and you’ll get a dozen different answers.  Now with the variety of social media available, it is even less understood.

The following Principles can help to explain marketing and its role in any organization.

April 9, 2012

Lessons Learned at a Restaurant

At the risk of preaching to the choir, I’m gonna tell this story…

Because you’re in the market research industry, I’m sure you’re doing some sort of client satisfaction study following each project.  Perhaps some combination of quant and qual… maybe with a little Net Promoter Score thrown in for good measure.  Then you track it and trend it over time to make sure you keep getting better.  Great!  Keep it up.

What I have found over the years, however, is that even if you get a decent percentage of your client satisfaction surveys returned, often they don’t include very much “actionable” feedback.  The clients will tell you if they liked or didn’t like your work, maybe give you some vague specifics (e.g. “Our Project Manager wasn’t very responsive.”), but that’s about it.  Not a lot to work with, is there?

April 2, 2012

The One Question You Need to Ask to Improve Your Marketing

On our website, we write about the Marketing Loop.  The Marketing Loop is the foundation for the process we follow in all of our marketing & sales plan development and coaching work with clients.

The idea of the Loop means that your marketing is planned and executed, results are measured, recommendations are made from what is learned and it’s done a little better the next time.  That is, it’s a process of continual improvement.

And the part of the process that seems the most difficult for nearly all organizations is ‘measurement.’  Why?  I think measurement is perceived as difficult because it requires nearly as much discipline as the execution of the marketing tactics themselves.

March 27, 2012

The Value of Patience

I found the following online a while back about the value of patience when it comes to marketing.  Very interesting…

1. The first time a man looks at an advertisement, he does not see it.

2. The second time, he does not notice it.

3. The third time, he is conscious of its existence.

4. The fourth time, he faintly remembers having seen it before.

5. The fifth time, he reads it.