Marketing For Dummies, UK Edition

Ruth Mortimer, Gregory Brooks, Craig Smith, Alexander Hiam

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781119965169
• Edition: 3
• eBook ISBN:
  9781119966500
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

Smart marketing techniques to get your business noticed.

Plan a successful marketing campaign and move your business forward with this fully updated edition of an established bestseller. Packed with practical advice from a team of industry experts, this readable guide features all the latest tools and techniques to help you connect with new customers and retain existing ones. From choosing the right strategy and preparing a marketing plan, to igniting your imagination and producing compelling advertising, you'll be creating a buzz and increasing profits in no time.

Part I

Where You Are, Where You’re Going

In this part . . .

Management’s job is to see the company not as it is, but as it can be. Helping you recognise that vision is the purpose of this part. Whatever your current business or service is and does, this part helps you to imagine and plan what it may be best become in the next quarter and year. How do you do that?

You need, first, to understand your marketing programme – the integrated ways in which you reach out to motivate customers and win their loyal support. Next, we highly recommend that you come to grips with the big strategy questions in a marketer’s life – who are we and what makes us so special that our sales and profits deserve to grow? Finally, we also recommend that you write down your big picture insights to help organise and simplify later decisions about the details of marketing. A plan, even a simple one-page plan, can help you a lot as you make marketing decisions throughout the coming year.

Chapter 1

Making the Most of Your Marketing

In This Chapter

Focusing your marketing by understanding your customers

Clarifying what your marketing is trying to achieve

Leveraging your marketing with focus and control

Identifying your customer touchpoints

Maximising the appeal of your product, service or business

Even though you’re reading Chapter 1 of a book called Marketing For Dummies, you’re probably already ‘doing’ quite a bit of marketing, maybe without even knowing it. If you have a product or service that’s selling, know who your best customers are and what they want, and have plans to develop new products for them or to find more customers, then you’re already addressing some of the fundamentals of marketing. Many companies, and even some of the biggest ones, mistake marketing for advertising. But promotion is just one aspect of marketing; many of the other elements that go into doing good marketing are things that you may think of as essential and everyday parts of doing business, such as setting prices and getting your product into the hands of your customers.

You may be good at doing some or all of these things, but unless you’re co-ordinating all of these activities under a formal marketing framework, your efforts aren’t nearly as efficient or effective as they could be. Your marketing activity (by which we mean everything about your business that makes a difference to your customers) is crucial because it’s what gets your business from where it is now to where you want it to be. In this chapter, we go over lots of simple, quick steps you can take to make progress with your marketing activities.

Your Marketing Strategy: A Map to Success

Any marketing you do needs to be based on a marketing strategy, which is the big-picture idea driving your success. In order to make your marketing strategy happen, you need to work out how you’re going to achieve it, which involves writing up a marketing plan.

We like to use a simple analogy to stress the importance of doing all this in a co-ordinated way, which involves a destination, a starting point and a map. Your marketing strategy is your destination – where you want to be by a certain time. Your marketing plan is your map, which tells you where you are now, and sets the best course to get to your destination. This analogy is effective because it demonstrates the importance of getting everything working together. You can have a destination and try to feel your way to it, but you’ll get there quicker and more efficiently if you know where you’re starting from, what the most direct route is and what obstacles lie in your way. Our map analogy has a final part: you can plan the most perfect route to your destination, but unless you start putting one foot in front of the other you’ll never get there!

Knowing Your Customer

Many definitions of marketing have been created by experts with too much time on their hands. The Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM), the international body for marketing and business development, defines marketing as ‘the management process responsible for identifying, anticipating and satisfying customer requirements profitably’. Wow. We prefer our own, simpler version – ‘selling more stuff to more people’. We’re being a little unfair to the wordier version, because it does reflect one of the more important changes in modern marketing. You don’t get very far in business these days by just making stuff and then finding people to buy it. Instead, you’ve got to find out what customers want from you and then create a product to meet those needs. This view is the difference between being what the experts call product-orientated and customer-orientated.

Whether you’re product- or customer-orientated, however, the first and most important principle of marketing is this: know your customer. When you understand how customers think and what they like, you can develop products or services that meet those needs and come up with appropriate and appealing ways to communicate them.

The ultimate campaign

Old Spice aftershave is a brand with a lot of history that has recently been given a very modern makeover. As a result, it saw its sales double in summer 2010 by using a clever combination of marketing methods to reposition the 73-year-old brand as relevant for men today.

Old Spice’s owner, Procter & Gamble, began with a TV ad airing during the Super Bowl in February 2010. The very silly ad featured a bare-chested, attractive, deep-voiced man who promised women that he was ‘the man your man could smell like’. It spoofed serious, over-the-top fragrance ads with the man appearing on a posh boat, dripping in diamonds.

The company didn’t just use TV. The ad was uploaded to video site YouTube, where it was viewed by millions of people. The Old Spice man utilised social networks like Twitter and Facebook and offered funny updates about his manliness.

Five months later, when the Old Spice man already had a significant following, the company then got him to ‘answer’ his fans’ questions on Twitter and Facebook. The brand produced 180 videos of the Old Spice man answering real-time questions in less than two days.

This was a bold move in a traditional area like selling fragrance, where most ads tend to be beautiful, posed shots in glossy magazines. But it paid off. More than 35 million people watched the videos in their first week online and sales went up by 107 per cent in a month.

This campaign is notable because it was less about spending vast amounts of money on expensive TV ads and more about amazing strategic marketing, using multiple communication methods. It captured shoppers’ imaginations and made them reconsider buying a long-established product that had fallen out of favour. And the enormous rise in sales tells a story we can all understand.

You need to understand your customer on two levels: the rational, functional dimension of making a purchase decision, and the irrational, emotional dimension. Every purchase, whether of a fizzy drink, a software program, a consulting service, a book or a manufacturing part, has both rational and emotional elements. So to truly know your customer, you need to explore two primary questions:

How do they feel about your product? Does it make them feel good? Do they like its personality? Do they like how it makes them feel about themselves?

What do they think about your product? Do they understand it? Do they think its features and benefits are superior to those of the competition and can meet their needs? Do they think that your product is good value given its benefits and costs?

Sometimes, one of these dimensions dominates for the customer you want to sell to. In other instances, all dimensions are equally important. Which is true of your customers? Depending o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Introduction
• Part I: Where You Are, Where You're Going
• Part II: Creative Thinking, Powerful Marketing
• Part III: Advertising Everyone can Do
• Part IV: Powerful Alternatives to Advertising
• Part V: Connecting With Your Customers
• Part VI: The Part of Tens
• Cheat Sheet