Thermopylae Marketing LLC Resources for Professional Service and High Growth Enterprises Newsletters Each quarter, Thermopylae Marketing’s newsletter, TO THE POINT, shares insights and advice to make your marketing efforts more efficient and effective. For a free copy, simply click on this linkand send us your mailing address if you would like a printed copy of the newsletter, or your e-mail address if you would like an electronic copy sent to you. Below are the feature stories from our three most recent newsletters. Summer, 2004 issue of TO THE POINT BEFORE YOU START MARKETING, UNDERSTAND WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE BUYING Marketing is a process of education and familiarization, teaching your potential customers about your product or service. The goal is to convince the customer that what they want and what you are offering is the same thing. Close the gap between “want” and “offered,” and the sales cycle wraps up in a hurry. The problem is, some marketers don’t realize what their customer is buying. They focus too closely on what they are selling. A number of years ago I attended a sales meeting. For the better part of three hours, the group leader went over multiple aspects of a newly developed service offering. He covered price points, the great margin built into the product, how it would lead to additional add-on sales. He explained the rollout publicity campaign, marketing materials, a sales script and the intricacies of the contest that compensated the sales team for selling the service. The complete package. At the end, the group leader asked if there were any questions. Ever the fly in the ointment, I asked, “How do we know anyone wants to buy this?” He was flustered and had no good answer. In the end, the offering did not do that well. It was eventually withdrawn and re-released with a greater emphasis on customer benefits. I don’t tell this story to pat myself on the back for my insight. Certainly, my question had nothing to do with the withdrawal and eventual re-launch of the service. Rather, it was a great revelation for me. Embarrassed, I knew I had been on the other side of that presentation more than once in my career, confidently describing a detailed marketing plan I devised without any thought of the buyer. I made a promise to myself that day. I promised I would always try to look at what I was selling through the eyes of my client first. Everyone has heard the story about Henry Ford. He said people could purchase his cars in any color, as long as the color was black. It’s a popular starting point in marketing circles for a discussion of product differentiation or market segmentation. I think it says something about old Henry’s understanding of his customers. He knew they wanted to buy a reasonably priced, reliable form of mechanical transportation. He also knew the way to deliver that was to keep his costs low through mass production of cars with no options. His customers had to accept some tradeoffs, but he was fulfilling their most important needs. Certainly, the Ford Motor Company could not get by with one model and color of automobile now. There is more than reliability and cost wrapped up in the purchase of a car today. The proof is no further away than your own driveway. Price, miles per gallon, and capacity are factors on the practical side. For most people, appearance, color, status and your image of the brand are more important. Don’t believe it? Try selling a Buick to a teenage boy. Won’t happen. Better a wreck with a smooth line and a sharp color than a dull, dependable, old man’s car. Most of us don’t grow out of it, either. My point is the auto manufacturers “get it.” We have our choice of dozens of car brands, hundreds of different models, and literally thousands of option package combinations because they know they need to match up with what the customer wants as closely as possible, or someone else will get the sale. So, do you understand what your customers want, and what you are selling? It makes a big difference. Once, while training a young magazine ad rep on our publication I asked, “What do you sell? What is it our customers want to buy?” “Simple,” he replied. “Two words – ad space.” “No, what our customers buy is access to and the attention of their potential customers. The ad space is just the vehicle they use to capture the customers’ attention, in hopes of getting their message across.” I told him, “It really changes your approach. If you are selling ad space, you should be talking about page fractions, frequency discounts and the quality of our color printing. If you are selling access and attention, you should be talking about the quality of our readers and how well they match the buyer’s customer profile, their decision making responsibilities and the ability of our editorial content to get them to pick up the magazine in the first place.” Later in my career, working with professional services providers, it was sometimes difficult to get them to recognize what their clients were buying. “We sell our reputation and experience as a world class accounting firm with specific knowledge of our clients’ industries,” they would tell me. “Right,” I would reply, “But the clients are buying your blessing on their bookkeeping methods, and deductions to exploit in the new tax law. If we’re not selling peace of mind and some extra bucks in the bank, we are not going to get it done.” Some clients tell me they find it hard to market things with intangible benefits. It’s much easier, they say, to sell things with precise, easy-to-describe product characteristics. Really, it is not that hard to sell the intangible product – just understand what your client wants to buy in tangible terms. If you concentrate on what that client really wants from the transaction, you will find the marketing ideas flow much more freely. Now, can you figure out why all the Cadillac ads are set to Led Zeppelin music? Spring, 2004 issue of TO THE POINT WHY DO WE DISRESPECT TACTICS? I remember when I first lamented the relative importance people assign to strategy and tactics. More than thirty years ago, I sat in my Air Force ROTC class. The colonel who commanded the program at the university was lecturing us on the differences between strategy and tactics. He described his last post, with the Strategic Air Command. For just an instant, he took on a wistful expression. “I figured out a way to scramble six B-52s from the same runway in under 90 seconds,” he told us. Then his usual, stony mask returned. “But I guess that wasn’t strategic enough for SAC.” I felt bad for the man. He started as an enlistee in the Army Air Corps during World War II. He worked his way up through the ranks, eventually to develop critical, operational tactics for the US Air Force in the Cold War era. Now, in his last year before retirement, he was riding herd over a bunch of college boys who were there mostly to avoid the draft and the live ammunition being fired at our less fortunate brothers in Vietnam. You could tell he was not happy in his post. I suspect his “lack of strategic focus,” as evidenced by his slip during the lecture, had something to do with him being there. Why do we glorify strategy and look at tactics like an unwanted stepchild? I think it is the cachet of being a strategist. It’s what the high-powered executives at Fortune 100 companies do – strategize. Who would not want to be like them? Well, right now, with all the trials and headlines, lots of people, I guess. I tell my clients and the groups I address that much of the time and effort they expend in refining marketing strategy is misplaced. They are better served to focus on quality implementation of their marketing tactics. Some among my clients and audiences admitted to me that they postponed one or more planned marketing initiatives in the last year. The reason? They were holding off on implementing certain marketing tactics until they could complete a strategy review. Forget the review and get after the tactics. Unless there have been dramatic competitive changes in your field, more than likely the general direction of your current marketing strategy is still valid. Besides, I can say with absolute conviction that a somewhat flawed strategy executed with superb marketing tactics will trounce a perfect strategy, poorly executed, every single time. Honestly, there is no successful strategy unless its supporting tactics have been properly carried out. Before you invest time, effort and dollars on refining your marketing strategy, spend a little on perfecting your marketing tactics instead. Make sure you have done everything you can to help your current strategy succeed. Clean your mailing list. Research ad media to reach your target market more economically and with less waste. Improve the quality of your marketing materials. Update your website so there is something fresh for returning visitors. Rewrite your presentations to address every major, valid objection you heard from a client in the last year. Examine your sales efforts and re-target them toward the most lucrative opportunities. Teach everyone in your organization who is exposed to your customers how to treat those customers like solid gold. Not one of these activities can remotely be described as strategic. Yet, if you invest your time, effort and money in perfecting these and other tactical components of your marketing plan, your chance of success increases dramatically. Why? Because their importance is often overlooked while we busily develop new strategies. This is not to say you should neglect marketing strategy. You can’t. You have to respond to market changes. Pricing, brand development, product or service mix, market expansion, all these and others are urgent considerations to ensure the vitality of your enterprise. Just keep things in proportion. Ask yourself if you gave your current plan a chance before you discard it and head back for yet another round of strategy development. In fact, before you try to refine strategy, take a serious look at your tactics to make sure they are in proper alignment with your strategy. Look beyond the questions of how you are executing the tactics. Instead, ask if they mesh with the larger picture. Determine if they are receiving the financial support they need to be successful. Only after you are sure that you have done enough to be successful with your current strategy should you seek to change it. The cost of changing strategies is just too high. Market momentum is lost. Don’t make changes lightly. Winter, 2004 issue of TO THE POINT YOUR BUSINESS OBJECTIVES, MARKETING STRATEGIES AND TACTICS MUST ALIGN It’s almost an epidemic now. Everywhere you look - large company, small company - local or international - you see the breakdown between company business objectives and the fundamental execution of marketing tactics. A major U.S. automobile manufacturer bought hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of advertising on this year’s college football championship game telecast. The spots featured an end-of-year sale and special financing options. The closing line of the spot was a call to action: “See your local dealer for details. Sale and special financing end January 2.” Unfortunately, the spots were being aired on January 4. The other night, I entered my neighborhood bar and grill with a coupon I received in the mail earlier in the week. It offered a free appetizer with the purchase of two entrees. When I presented the coupon for credit, the waiter informed me that his manager would not honor it because it was for one of their other locations. I calmly pointed out the fine print on the back of the coupon that listed this location as one where the coupon was honored. Pretty soon the manager was at my table, red-faced and apologetic. What’s going on here? What we are seeing is a fundamental disconnect between business objectives, marketing strategy and marketing tactics. And more often than not, the fallout is far worse than the embarrassment felt by my local bistro’s management. It is a permanent loss of market share and customer or client good will. And it is happening everywhere. Why? Because we are a nation of strategists who too often want to leave actual execution of the strategies to someone at a lower level. Not wrong, but if you are failing to adequately communicate those strategies to your people, like the owners of my local bar and grill, then odds are that similar mishaps and embarrassments are in your future. Taking care of the details may be one of the hardest parts of implementing any marketing strategy. If you have good people working for you, they are probably pulling off little miracles every day that you never notice. But even top performers can fall into old habits that take your marketing tactics further and further from your proscribed goals. That’s why it is important to run a periodic reality check. Sit down with your staff and outside vendors. Communicate current business objectives and proposed strategies and make sure your marketing tactics (branding, advertising, publicity, promotions, etc.) make sense and support the strategies. Also make sure adequate resources have been committed to getting the job done. When business objectives, marketing strategies and marketing tactics are in perfect alignment, no effort or expense is wasted. You are unlikely to ever reach this perfect state of equilibrium, but it makes sense to push for it. It may take some outside help to achieve the levels of efficiency and effectiveness that you want. Many issues like retraining, elimination of “pet” projects and the identification of underperforming individuals can be best identified and remedied by someone from outside the organization. Often a “fresh pair of eyes” is all it takes to jumpstart your efforts and revitalize your practice development activities.