Have you ever...?
Paid through the nose for an expensive brochure without any
clear idea of how you will use it?
Most companies have - it seems obvious that you need a brochure to
tell your clients what to do, but if you take a strategic marketing
approach, you will be forced to question your motives, and in
particular what you are going to do with that pile of leaflets
behind your desk.
Spent a lot of money on market research when it might have
been less expensive just to launch the product?
It's great to know what your customers want... but that
pre-supposes that THEY know what they want. Think about the Sony
Walkman. If a market researcher had asked you in the 1960s whether
you would like to walk to work listening to taped music through a
tiny couple of speakers that go inside your ear, you'd have said
they were mad. Strategic marketing can help you decide when the
customer knows best and when YOU know best.
Wondered which of your promotions have been effective, and
which have been a waste of time?
Big companies are quite good at checking this... But not as good as
they like to pretend. You can't always work out the answers to this
problem but at least you should know that in advance, or you could
be pouring money down a hole whose depth you can't even guess at.
Strategic marketing will help you discover which campaign can
produce monitorable results and the best ways of carrying out the
monitoring.
Wondered what jargon like segmentation or positioning is all
about?
Every profession likes to develop its own shorthand jargon. Most of
the time it's just to make us sound clever, but some of the time
the concepts are really useful. Segmentation means chopping your
marketplace up into groups of people who read the same magazines -
then you can devise different adverts for different groups. Easy
really isn't it? And when you have found the segment that's big
enough to hit, you need to work out where your product should be in
relation to your competitors (cheap or pricey, luxury or economy
etc). This is called positioning. There you are: two bits of jargon
explained in a few short lines. (We'll get shot by our professional
body).