Please excuse this little rant. It’s just that it saddens me deeply to see small business owners do the right thing and invest in better marketing their business only to find they have nothing to show for it except, perhaps, a pretty website and business card. They came to me for help with their sales and we end up having to sort out their marketing at the same time.
Do not get me wrong. I am happy to do this. Sorting out the marketing basics is part of the deal. Its hard work trying to sell something your target audience does not want. The process often requires some kind of repositioning within the market place.
No, its the fact that they have wasted all that money with someone who does not understand marketing fundamentals. In the most recent case we are talking £3,000+VAT but I have had clients who had blown £12,000+VAT or more on a ‘marketing consultant’ who, it seems, has not even read ‘Marketing for Dummies’.
In the old days, and I am talking 1989 when I graduated from the MBA programme of Cranfield School of Management, we were taught about the ‘Marketing Mix’ and the 4 P’s of marketing by Professor Malcolm McDonald who is now well known in the marketing world. Even though we went into marketing in great depth and I went on to study marketing of services, the 4 Ps under-pinned everything. For your benefit, the 4 Ps are:
- Product
- Price
- Place
- Promotion
Each P is important in it’s own right but the marketing only works if you have them all working together. The underlying aim is to determine the positioning within the market in which one is operating. And there lies the real problem. These so called marketing experts are focused on the promotional activities without understanding the market and the positioning of their clients within that market. It’s like trying to build a house without foundations: Cracks soon appear.
There are plenty of really great marketing consultants and I would be happy to make a personal recommendation if you send me a message. Before spending any money on marketing, however, please do first check the consultant’s methods of delivering what you are paying for. If the marketing consultant does not, at the very least, go through some form of market appraisal then run like mad!! Unless, of course, you have plenty of money to burn!
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on Nov 13th, 2009 at 6:13 pm
Funny you should mention this. I was at a meeting on Monday to discuss marketing for an organisation to which I belong. One of the things the marketing consultant wanted to do was to work out the target for the marketing. The questions went much deeper than we were expecting. It can be rather hard to decide what your target market is. I guess the marketing consultant we met with was better informed than the one you referred to in your article!
I’m beginning to resolve that for me, and I hope Monday’s course will help me get it into a sharper focus.
on Nov 13th, 2009 at 6:42 pm
Richard,
I completely agree with you. It saddens me that so many people in marketing focus on the ‘how’ and forget the ‘why’. If you do that you are just putting lipstick on the pig. As you have explained, putting the basics of a strategy together is not hard and has been known for a long, long time, even back when I did my CIM diploma
.
Anyone providing marketing services, from an ad buyer to a web designer, should ask these questions as part of their brief. If they don’t, go elsewhere.
Colin Newlyn
on Sep 12th, 2010 at 10:58 am
The four ps go back before 1989. In 1980 Philip Kotler wrote a very sizeable book called ‘Principles of Marketing’ in which he included them in his Marketing Mix.
The book has been in print since then (and probably still is) and has been used as a standard text on many Marketing courses at all levels.
In this era of Social Media ‘changing the paradigm’ it is worth remembering that ‘the more things change, the more they remain the same’.
Andy Coote
on Feb 28th, 2011 at 11:19 pm
Interesting.
Seeking sales and marketing advice presents it’s own dilema. It’s not like having a production capacity problem is it? I mean, those who seek it, especially “small business” are often putting in imediate need for sales without an appreciation for what marketing really is and how it relates to sales.
What I mean is, if they knew, they wouldn’t be asking for marketing per se, they’d be much more specific in their requirement.
This confusion over marketing = promotion represents the blind leading the blind. I 100% support the notion, but it seems to be a paradox all of its little own.
Good advice is to hedge marketing directly against sales; the smaller the operation the more marketing is best placed when it is linked directly against the sales process.
Whoever added ‘Marketing’ on the end of ‘Social Media’ to create ‘Social Media Marketing’ should be taken to one side. Those little business cards, err, I mean ‘contact cards’ and the proliferation of diy templated websites seems to have created a market all in itself.
I like to hear of “route-to-market”. I’d like to think anyone delivering sales or marketing actually knows what it means to get a product to market instead of being a CIM diploma student or Sales Trainer.
This is my second comment on this blog.
What a great RANT. Keep it up.!!