1. Unlearn what you know about marketing plans. Common marketing plan wisdom says: “Shiny is good. Formatting is good. Clever deployment is good.” Instead, successful marketing is not about doing something clever but rather about communicating something meaningful in a way that reaches your audience.
2. Stick to media that’s worked, but save room to experiment. Experiment with one or two new ideas but don’t break the creativity bank each time. It never works. Don’t feel like you’ve failed because you chose tried-and-true marketing ideas like newspaper ads and press releases and branded schwag over something more outrageous.
3. Create an Idiot’s Guide. Marketing plans tend to be about ideas and justification first and about “how will we actually do this?” a distant last. Justification is important but should play a brief role up-front while the bulk of your plan should be devoted to a PLAN. Create a step-by-step, no-brainer, “complete idiot’s guide” to doing what you need to do. Make it so simple that you could delegate it to your kid on “take your child to work day”. Put in the phone number of the person to call who will actually print your branded schwag, along with the location of the high resolution logo file you’ll need to send to them. If your marketing plan includes topical marketing like blogs and press releases, write the subjects into the plan.
4. White paper, staple, done. Skip the slides, skip the expensive coil-ring binding. Print it on white, 20 pound bond 8.5 x 11 and blast a staple through the corner. Save time and money and put your efforts into deploying your plan.

The perfect marketing plan is a dog-eared, coffee-ring-stained, highlighted, notes-in-the-margin, sticky-noted document that is used daily and never leaves your desk.

The perfect plan can be handed off to someone else with the comment: “I stopped on page 11. If you can start on page 12 and just follow the instructions, we’ll have more business than we can handle next year.”

That’s a perfect marketing plan. I get goose bumps thinking about it. Do you?

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What I mean instead is tapping into your customer’s negative zeitgeist. Aka, what keeps them up at night?

Anyone worth their weight in salt has had nights where professional concerns keep them awake. Or worse, make them bolt upright out of a deep sleep going “aaahhh!!!”

I’m not talking about fear of losing your job (although if you’re an employment site, this is relevant to what you do). I’m talking about the stuff that makes someone worry about meeting the specific objectives of their job. You know, all the things they have to write about in their employee review.

For example, when I was in sales for a brief, shining, terrifying year, I worried about making my quota. I worried that, come the end of the month, everyone else would report all the deals great and small that they’d closed and me, I’d have a big, fat zero. I would’ve been a ripe target for anyone who could show me a fruitful system for cold calling or an easy-to-swallow guide to the psychology of prospective customers and how to structure your pitch. (I was also 22 and too young to be wearing a big ol’ suit and hawking telephony products for Pacific Bell but that’s another story…)

Whether you’re a B2B or B2C* company, you can—and should—be able to imagine your customer’s greatest fears and the areas of their job responsibilities they’re concerned about. And you must show understanding and empathy along with your solution.

This is not about scare tactics and fear mongering. Forget all that. It’s short-sided and will only serve to tarnish your professional reputation and brand. Let your competitors try that route and fail.

What it is about, however, is a way to cut to the chase. What does your customer really, really need in order to do their job well?

Sure, you can throw in all the demographics you could ever handle—age, income level, education, region, etc. That’s all good information.

But the truth is, I go for psychographics every time. Psychographics marketing means tapping into what your audience is thinking and feeling. Psychographics goes beyond demographics to tap into the lifestyles, behavior and attitude of your audience to build a more detailed picture of who they are. While a lot of psychographics focuses on lifestyle choices that may or may not be relevant to B2B marketing, you don’t have to focus there. The point is to focus on their perceptions. What is this person thinking about? What do they believe? What do they want?

What are they afraid of?

Since so many advertisers concentrate on demographics, using psychographics marketing not only gives you critical insight into more important questions of motivation, it also can help you stay a step ahead of your competition.

By way of example in the B2B space, I have a high-tech client who creates fabulous digital experience solutions. One of the big topics floating around right now (which you’ve probably heard about) is Apple’s announcement that they’re not going to support Flash on their mobile devices. See Steve Jobs’ Thoughts on Flash for details.

If I’m CTO for, let’s say, a major insurance company considering my next big solution to help mobile insurance agents file applications in the field, I’m worried about which technologies to throw my hat in with. What if we choose a cul-de-sac and have to rebuild in a year? What’s our competition doing? How do we future-proof?

As a marketer, your job is to ease my mind by way of making me aware of your solution. Are your marketing efforts doing that?

Something to sleep on.

* Don’t think this applies to B2C? Imagine the 50-something exec who’s worried about balancing job responsibilities against taking care of her own aging father. That’s exactly what customers of a a health care client of mine had on the table. Is something similar on your customers’ minds?

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A couple centuries of that kind of branding effort is a hard habit to break. Today’s social media marketing, however, has shifted how consumers interact with brands and, as a result, brands need to break the habit and communicate in a different way. Once upon a time, media was one-way, from the brand to the consumer, so control of the message remained firmly in the hands of the brand. Your brand. Those days are over.

Today, consumers work with, interact with, manipulate, and augment brands. They’ll put videos of your brand’s messages on YouTube, dissect branding messages on blogs and Twitter, post brand images on Flickr, and all of this get pushed through the social web—into sites like Facebook—where commenting and “Liking” can sway perceptions.

Today, thanks to the web, it’s less about your brand and more about how people interact with your brand that can make or break your message. So, how can your brand give up control over its message while still communicating your message effectively? Here are three ideas:

1. Perform thorough market research. Make sure your message will resonate with your audience and not take on a life of its own. Avoid the Motrin Baby-wearing commercial fiasco that upset moms and spawned parody commercials and a mountain of angry responses.
2. Keep your message consistent yet fresh and prolific. A continued volume of message production can help to keep people watching for more rather than growing bored with the same old thing. Burger King does this well with their variety of commercials featuring that creepy mask-faced king. You’ll still get people talking about your brand but you’ll be changing the story from “this again?” to “what’s next!?!”
3. Participate. Don’t produce marketing messages and just release them to the world. Be part of the message. Run an active, engaging Twitter account and YouTube channel and blog and Facebook fan page. Rather than flipping the “on” switch and walking away, participate and engage your audience. Welcome protagonists and antagonists equally and respond respectfully to detractors with a dose of understanding, as in, “you make a good point…”

Today’s social web demands that you give up some control over your message but it doesn’t mean that you’ll give up the impact your brand can have. Consumers can interact and disseminate your brand message for you if you’re willing to loosen your grip a little, and tighten up your creative thinking—and your social media strategy—a lot.

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Here’s the deal. If you need a copywriter, you don’t need an article about 10 tips on copywriting. Like, if you need a heart surgeon, you don’t need an article about 10 ways to perform a vascular suture. You need someone who’ll get in there, assess the damage, fix it, and make you better than you were before.

Better. Stronger. Faster.

(For those of you who didn’t grow up in the 70s, that’s a Six Million Dollar Man reference. You know, back when $6 million was a lot of money and we built cyborgs with it.)

What you really want is someone who is a student of the human condition. Why? Because all the people reading these ones and zeroes are still people. They’ve only been around this whole Internet thing for the last decade or so. Not that long.

Measure that against emotions and instincts that have developed over billions of years. (Evolutionarily speaking, of course. If you follow the Bible literally, that’s 10,000 years or so. Still a lot longer than 10.)

You also want someone who is a student of marketing strategy.

Marketing strategy is a combination of rules, insight, attitude, application of said attitude and adjustment to results. Many of the best rules come from direct marketing, of which I’ve been a student for 20 years and counting.

This whole Internet and social media thing has more in common with direct marketing than anything else. It’s about making offers and getting them accepted. (Do I offer to follow you? Do you offer to follow me? What’s in it for each of us?) Brevity or length and knowing where to use which (Twitter vs. blogging, anyone?). Testing and measuring (try something, see if it works. Refine. Repeat.). Structuring arguments, engagement (still with me?).

All good direct marketing skills.

If you want 10 tips that include things like when to use subheads, or how to write a winning headline, there are lots of places to get that.

But that’s not what you need, is it?

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Created by Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter to analyze the attractiveness and likelihood of profitability of an industry, Porter’s Five Forces are a simple but powerful tool for understanding where power lies in any business situation. Using this tool, you can gain insight into the competitive strength of your current position as well as one you’re considering moving into.

In this way, you can take fair advantage of situations of strength, improve weaknesses, and avoid missteps.

While these Five Forces are typically used to determine whether new products, services or businesses may be profitable, you can use them to analyze any “balance of power” scenario, including key strategies in your marketing plan.

How to Use Porter’s Five Forces

The Five Forces that determine the balance of power in any business situation are:

1. Supplier Power. How easy is it for suppliers to drive prices up? The answer depends upon the number of suppliers of each key element, how unique their product or service is, their ability to control you, the cost of switching from one to another, and so on. The fewer your choices, and the more you need their help, the more powerful your suppliers are.
2. Buyer Power. How easily can your buyers drive prices down? As in Supplier Power, the answer depends upon the number of buyers, how important each buyer is to your business, what it costs them to switch from your products or services to a competitor’s, etc. If you only have a few buyers, they can exercise a lot of control over you.
3. Competitive Rivalry. The key here is how many competitors you have and what their capabilities are. If you have a lot of competitors that offer equally attractive products and services, then you’ve probably got very little power. If suppliers or buyers don’t like the deal they get from you, they’ll go to someone else. If no one else can do what you do, however, you may have a lot of strength.
4. Threat of Substitution. Can your customers find another way to do what you do? Can they hire people to do what your product does? Can they hire developers to re-create your software? If it’s easy and viable for them to substitute something or someone for your product or service, your power is weakened.
5. Threat of New Entry. How easy is it for new players to enter your market? If it doesn’t cost much money or time for someone else to start a business and compete with you (low barriers to entry), if you can’t gain or haven’t gained advantages via expansion such as lower-priced supplies (economies of scale), or if your key technologies aren’t well-protected or can’t be, then new competitors can quickly enter the market and destabilize your position. On the other hand, with strong barriers to entry that you can defend, then you can keep your position of strength and use it to your advantage.

To use Porter’s Five Forces to assess the balance of power in your business situation, start by examining each of these forces individually.

Think about the factors that are relevant for your market or situation, and then check them against those in each Force.

Download a copy of this diagram and mark your key factors for each Force. To characterize the size and scale of each Force, use a plus sign for any force that’s moderately in your favor, two pluses for any that’s strongly in your favor, and a single or double-minus sign for any force moderately or strongly against you respectively.

Next, brainstorm opportunities. Where can you further leverage a Force strongly in your favor, bolster one that’s a moderate advantage, or shore up weaknesses? Does one area require a rethink in order to change the balance of power?

At first blush, it may not be readily apparent where branding or marketing strategy’s role is in this tool, but if you consider “quality differences” in Competitive Rivalry, you’ll realize that this is where brand has the most impact. “Quality differences” is a catchall area that can also encompass other value-adds such as brand affinity, “stickiness” and customer service, all of which have a huge impact on “customer loyalty,” also in this category.

Consider the Coke vs. Pepsi rivalry and the point becomes clear. Two simple products—I always like to refer to them as “brown, bubbly, sweetened water” to illustrate their simplicity—that have waged brand wafare to the tune of billions of dollars. The Coca Cola logo is one of the most recognized logos in the world. (Not bad for a can of bubbly brown water.) That alone shows how important perceived quality differences are. They can make or break a brand.

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Idris Mootee’s Presentations on SlideShare
(tags: brand_strategist branding)

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What would make the strongest case for a large fiscal stimulus package – - upwards of $1 trillion for infrastructure, energy, education programs, and for aid to the states, for a new electric grid, for the building of hospitals, schools, for improved water and sewerage systems, for the biggest build-out in the United States since the Great Society?

Investors could probably think of dozens, but economist David H. Wang has a compelling one: the condition of the U.S. consumer himself / herself, or what Wang calls the “consumer’s dilemma.”

Has the U.S. economy changed?

Now Wang proceeds with the assumption that the U.S. consumption-based economy will largely continue. If one disagrees with that premise, then Wang’s thesis is moot, and we then also have a different U.S. economy that will require very different prescriptions to achieve sustainable growth.

But let’s, for the sake of argument, assume that the consumer-based economy – - one that historically has accounted for roughly 60-65% of U.S. GDP – - is not going the way of the Edsel. That creates Wang’s “consumer’s dilemma.” Namely, the U.S. economy requires the consumer to spend (buy things) to grow at capacity, but consumers have already consumed at too high a level for too long – - in some cases saving nothing at all — and hence many will now increase their rate of savings to begin to make up for their many years of inadequate savings.

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Hard to believe that a major brand like Toys R Us can make it so hard on the consumer and their own employees in this day and age, and yet they do.

Two experiences just this week alone.

Toys R Us opened a little temporary store called Toys R Us Holiday Express in a vacant shop in the mall near my house. Now, even though there are two locations within 10 minutes from me, this is a stroke of genius for the holidays. Toys R Us will now get all the foot traffic they’d otherwise miss being that their other locations are in drive-up malls, not the happy little foot-traffic shopping district near me. Genius. What’s not genius is that their own employees at the permanent big box locations haven’t got a clue that this little Holiday Express location exists. That’s what I found out when I went to the big store to try to purchase something I’d seen in the Express locale after it had closed and my daughter was giving me no peace about a certain kitty cat she just had to have because “I think she misses me, Mommy”. The guy I talked to at the regular store had no idea what I was talking about, but did tell me that another mom had just mentioned she bought something “near there” just a few days before. Turns out his manager knew about it—in fact, he works there. So how could other employees be so uninformed?

Just days later, I’ve found out that my child’s crib is on the recall list. To make a long story short, the crib I’d like to replace it with is an “in-store only” purchase. They don’t stock it at all. OK, inconvenient, but we know how these things go. The big problem? They wouldn’t allow me to purchase it over the phone—and there’s no means to order it online for delivery to the store. So if I want the crib, I have to drive to the store and order it for delivery in the next few weeks. Interestingly, when you look the product up online, it offers you a Buy Online option, even trying to upsell you with a Buyer Protection Plan—none of which you can actually activate. Apparently, they’re just there to frustrate customers.

What’s wrong with this picture? I probably don’t even need to ask. You’ve already spotted all the customer service and supply chain management issues for yourself.

It’s a shame all the missed opportunities Toys R Us stacks against them. Moms like me are a fiercely loyal audience when a brand treats us right. Toys R Us could be providing world-class service, a place for moms to gather, play areas for kids, an unsurpassed online experience that leads to more purchases, fun and educational areas in the store and online, and certainly better-informed employees. The list goes on and on.

Speaking of lists, looks like I’ll be taking my toy shopping one elsewhere this holiday.

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Scribd

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Our society is undergoing massive fundamental transitions. Learn how these forward-thinking brands seized the underlying marketing opportunities.

Article Highlights

• Savvy marketers are recognizing the impact of mass collaboration and constant connectivity
• The broader trends of globalization and corporate distrust are reshaping how consumers interact with brands
• The global sense of urgency to fix the world’s problems goes well beyond the green movement

Read the article

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