A brand is a promise.
A brand is a promise, and what is it that your brand promises? If you answered, “To consistently deliver my brand’s unique brand benefit to my target customers,” you are correct.
I often hear from workshop participants that they are attending the workshop to hear about the latest, newest, hot trend in marketing. Although one needs to keep their professional knowledge current, embracing the latest trend won’t make you a good marketer. Eventually, people will figure out that the latest trend isn’t a cure-all for their marketing problems. Good marketing is about getting everything, not one thing, right.
As an example, a few years ago CRM was the hot tool in marketing. Never mind that not everyone agreed on what was being abbreviated with the letters CRM, Customer or Consumer / Relationship / Management or Marketing, CRM was the hot tool. While it is true that retaining current customers is much more efficient than trying to gain new customers, CRM does have two pitfalls.
CRM Pitfall #1: Return to Targeting Guide #8: Don’t confuse your current customers with your target customers: No one can execute a marketing plan perfectly. Perhaps you have a product or service offering that appeals to customers who are not your target customers. Possibly some of your distribution attracts customers who are not your target customers. Or you have an offering that’s priced too high or too low for your target customers. Regardless of the reason, your brand is going to attract buyers who are not your target customers. This is the result of real world imperfect execution of marketing tactics. The extent to which your current customers are target customers is a function of how close you are to perfect tactical marketing execution.
CRM Pitfall #2: Your brand needs to continuously attract new target customers into your customer base. CRM focuses only on current customers. If you only focus on maintaining current customers, what will happen? Those customers will age and eventually die. Where will you brand be when your buyer’s average age is 67? Very close to extinction.
So, the learning point of this digression is that good marketers concentrate on getting the basics as close to perfect as possible. Recall Positioning Guide #2: In writing your brand’s summary positioning statement, don’t deviate from this form: “To (your target market), (your brand) is the brand of (category definition) that (unique brand benefit) because (benefit supports).” Positioning Guide #2 gives you all the basics that you need. Your brand fundamentally is a promise to consistently deliver your unique brand benefit to your target customers.
The basics include Positioning Guide #8: “In consumer marketing, your brand’s unique brand benefit should specify how your brand will satisfy the internal wants/needs of your target customer” and Positioning Guide #13: “In business-to-business marketing, a brand’s unique brand benefit should be economic.” In consumer marketing, your unique brand benefit should satisfy some internal want/need of your target customer. In business-to-business marketing, your unique brand benefit should address saving your customer money and/or reducing their costs.
How can you deliver that promise through your product line? What assortment do you need? What kind of distribution do you need to deliver that promise? How do you communicate that promise? Lastly, how much will your target customers pay to get your brand’s unique brand benefit?
A brand is not a bewildering array of options, product features, product benefits, and services. During my career, I often heard colleagues say, “We need to educate the customer.” In consumer marketing, if you try to “educate” customers on all the details of your offering, you will confuse them to the point that they won’t know what your brand does for them. Stick to repeating how your brand satisfies their internal want/need using product features, product benefits, and services as benefit supports to make your benefit believable. In business-to-business marketing, your customers don’t care about your product features, benefits, and services. They want to know how your brand will help them save money and/or increase revenues so keep repeating the economic benefit your brand delivers.
This is the last of my marketing product/service guides. When I started this blog over a year ago, I said that the body of knowledge making up soft, social sciences, such as marketing, is comprised of principles or guides. Unlike physical laws, one can readily find exceptions to principles or guides. Although they generally hold true, they don’t always hold true. How often do these principles or guides hold true? Pulling a number from mid-air, say 80% of the time. The guides that I’ve published over the past year have been the product of my 40 years of studying and practicing marketing. Many have been published in some form or another.
So my question for you is … do you have any product/service related experiences that you consider to generally hold true? If so, leave me a comment explaining the details. I would really like to expand my list of guides so help me.
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