Your Marketing Up in Smoke?
Last weekend here in Halifax, Nova Scotia, merely a few kilometers from my home, a massive forest fire broke out. It was like nothing ever seen in this area in my lifetime. The fire consumed over 2000 hectares of forest and two homes. Given the number of homes in that area of the city it is truly a testament to the fire fighters that they were able to save as many as they did. The burned area was somewhere in the range of 15 km long by 3-4 km wide. It raged for over 3 days and evacuated over 5000 people from their homes.
Marketing Fires
Ever had your marketing efforts go up in smoke and chaos break out in your company as a result? I had an instance in my career where I gave 100% on marketing a new product offering with no success at all. Career-wise, it was one of the most exhausting and frustrating seasons I have ever gone through. It seemed everywhere I turned, there were fires…fires from the competition, fires from customers, fires with sales reps…and it seemed impossible to put them all out. In the end, we sold almost nothing and the product development, marketing, and sales loses were huge.
In most cases like this, there are one or more causes of the failure that have nothing to do with your marketing efforts. I am not trying to shed the blame here either. In my case, there were some serious product development flaws and shortcuts that resulted in a seriously inferior product. If a product comes up short by miles in comparison to the competition, not even the greatest marketing and sales efforts can compensate.
Tuned In or Tuned Out?
I am currently reading an advance copy of a new book called Tuned In (publishing June 27th) by Craig Stull, Phil Myers, and David Meerman Scott (I’ll do a compete review of the book in the next week). Early in the book the authors write:
Rather than focusing on buyers and their problems, the organizations that struggle to resonate in their marketplace are the ones that develop offerings from the inside…tuned out companies try to develop products exclusively within their own walls, based entirely on what they already know. Then they try all sorts of gimmicks and buy expensive advertising to take the dissonant ideas out into the market.
This perfectly describes what happened when my product marketing went up in smoke. We did indeed throw a ton of resources at marketing and selling a poorly developed product that should have stayed in development for at least two more years. The company rushed the product to market against numerous suggestions and warnings to wait. The lesson for you and I as small business entrepreneurs is to make sure we listen to our target market customers when we are developing our product or service offering. This is as important a marketing process as an R&D issue. If we have not properly done our market research, if we do not know our potential customer’s needs, and if we do not know why our competitor’s product’s are thriving in the market, we can not possibly disrupt things with our entry into that market. You need to be tuned in to your customers.
Please do your research, tune in to your customer’s needs, and you will have a better probability of your marketing succeeding because your product or service will resonate in the marketplace.
Picture courtesy of: Willem Waltman
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http://www.WebInkNow.com David Meerman Scott
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http://www.MarketingIntegrity.ca David
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