10 Shortcuts To Marketing Success.

by James Heaton

When I say marketing is tactical and branding is strategic, I am not saying one is better than the other. I am saying they are different and should actually be used together for effective communications. As I have written elsewhere: Branding is the strategic foundation upon which great marketing campaigns are built. Marketers ignore this at the risk of ineffectiveness. If a brand is insufficient or weak, the marketing will have to compensate. This can severely weaken the power and persuasiveness of the marketing campaign.

The Pull Strategy: Branding

Marketing carries forward your call to action: Buy this car. Make this donation to our annual appeal. This is essential. But it is branding that makes your customers really care about you. Branding is what makes your clients tell their friends about you. Marketing on its own cannot have this effect. However, if the brand is strong and represents your company well, marketing becomes that much easier and more effective.

Define Your Identity

The first step in the branding process is to identify what you are good at; this is your promise to your customers. Your firm needs to create a strong brand by offering specific features; a product or service of quality, but most importantly, it must create brand associations which include attributes, benefits and attitudes. Attitudes are the predispositions that will determine whether consumers react favorably or not to your brand when they are in the middle of a buying situation. Those associations in the consumers minds are the ones representing your company in the marketplace. The identity of your brand is visible in every form of communication beginning with the name, the logo, the slogan and the employees behavior. Surveys and interviews with customers, employees and managers can give you answers that will help you to find your strengths and determine who you truly are; but decisions need to be made by the management.

Position Your Brand

Communicate your strengths to the world by building your brand and showing your competitive advantages; the differentiation. Keep in mind that consumers have market experience and are well informed; they know your competition perhaps better than you do. This differentiation needs to be perceived by them as a difference; they have to perceive that this is what makes you unique; it can be symbolic or emotional rather than a product feature. It is possible to do so even if only one variables differ within the competition. Apple became an empire by focusing on the easy to use computer. Its what many marketers call differentiate or die. (Trout and Rivkin, 2000) Moreover, differentiation is likely to be a key driver of brand loyalty. A well-established brand will evoke trust, stability, quality and/or consistency and will bring that image to the customers mind. Constancy in brand positioning is fundamental.

Build Your Capital

In some examples of successful companies, the brand is so strongly established that the brands capital becomes much higher than the actual value. For example, the Harley-Davidson brands capital is estimated to be 100 times more than the ledgers value. The capital depends on the consumer. It is based on the consumers perceptions. Conversely, the value depends on the market. Capital is more sustainable than value but it is a longer process to build. Consistent with this affirmation, research from Allison and Kenneth (1964) demonstrates that a brands capital has an important influence on consumer perception. When asking students to evaluate a beer, they tended to evaluate it better when the brewer is named after their University.

Communicate and Re-communicate

The repetition of your message will contribute to brand recognition. The most successful companies are those that establish clear brand recognition. Repetition will make it hard for the competition to erase your image from consumers minds. In more traditional ways, advertising and PR are used to build brand recognition. A well-established brand will allow you to: Reduce costs; Determine higher prices for your product; Increase your profit margins; Launch new products successfully.

The Push Tactic: Marketing

Marketing without the benefits of strong branding is very much like swimming upstream. It can be done, but its a lot of work. In a perfect marketing campaign, the power of the brand is perfectly leveraged and the brand is made stronger in the process.

Fix Your Goals

As mentioned previously, marketing implies tactics. You have an ultimate goal in mind. As with any other kind of plan, the first phase of an effective marketing campaign would be to determine SMART goals. By SMART, we mean Strategic, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-scaled. Before going further in the process, you need to agree on the results you are hoping for.

Keep an Eye Wide Open on the Competition

Just like you, the competition is constantly trying to win market share. By doing some research, you can easily identify their strengths and weaknesses. In the next step you will use those weaknesses to position your product or service as the one best suited to the customers needs. A deeper analysis can also help you schematize their strategies and forecast what their next moves are going to be.

Position your Product or Service

Similar to the positioning of your brand, you have to position your product or service. In the marketing section we refer more to the product or services features rather the symbolic and emotional features mentioned in the branding section. Your offer must be based on consumers desires and needs. The positioning statement is a short sentence that describes how your product distinguishes itself from your competitors. If your positioning statement is correctly written, it will answer this question: Why is the customer going to buy my product or service rather than from the competition? You have to find the key attribute (Trim Tab) that appeals as the most desirable to your customer and communicate that.

Know Your Target

Every marketing campaign must be launched with the customer you wish to reach in mind. You have to know who they are, what they are looking for, how they like to shop and how they like to receive information. Your strategies to reach them must be based on that knowledge. It has been shown that targeting a segment of the market, rather than consumers in general, can lead to competitive advantages and, moreover, to superior financial performance.

Build a Relationship with Your Customers

A fundamental in marketing is that it is far cheaper to retain a customer than to acquire a new one. The relationship that you are developing over time will bring the consumers to trust you and perceive you as a credible source. The importance of having a wellestablished brand obviously has a big impact on this step. Pay attention to your clients insights. Social media makes your work much easier than a decade ago. You have access to their thoughts, what they like and what they do not like. The information exists, so use it wisely to adjust your offerings. The ability to adapt, is extremely important and practiced by all successful companies, seeing how consumers were using their product on YouTube brought them an innovation. There was a demand in the market for a product that hadnt even been invented; people were modifying the product themselves to respond to their needs. The company managers were awake and jumped on the brilliant opportunity this presented.

Communicate in Line with Your Brand Identity

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In the marketing mix, communication is the key component. It can be strategically used to build your notoriety, create consumer awareness or to position your firm or its product or service. If your branding is well done, word-of-mouth communication is already helping your organization. Conversely, if you have unhappy customers, the threat is that they will become terrorists to your brand. The consumer places more importance on this type of communication than the non-personal source that you are paying for (advertising, PR). Remember the United breaks guitars YouTube video? It has been seen by 12,200,000 people and its a great example of brand terrorism.

copyright Tronvig Group 2012

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