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Powerful Marketing Strategies That Produce Sales
by John Graham
The retail harvest of Thanksgiving week 2004 was less than bountiful for
Wal-Mart. While other retailers were upbeat, Wal-Mart’s sales were
“disappointing” the last week of November and traffic was “low”
on infamous Black Friday.
Uncharacteristically candid, the company quickly acknowledged it had dropped
its deep discount strategy the day after Thanksgiving. Reacting predictably,
value-minded customers headed straight to the arms of the competition where
low pricing prevailed.
In Clued In, Lou Carbone writes, “With modern management
fixated almost solely on the bottom line, the value proposition of far too
many businesses has become increasingly one-sided; lots of emphasis on the
company but little on enhancing customer value.” And then he adds
an ominous warning. “As a consequence, I believe today’s organizations
have become extraordinarily vulnerable.”
The day after Thanksgiving 2004, consumers saw Wal-Mart in a new light:
the king of retail is vulnerable. What followed was dropping prices
on a couple of dozen bellwether items, along with an unprecedented print
and TV ad blitz. It’s almost as if the giant stumbled. They didn’t
anticipate the competition taking a page from the Wal-Mart game book. They
abandoned, just for a moment, their winning strategy of delivering the lowest
prices on customer-pulling products.
While Wal-Mart will not make that mistake again, what lingers is the unavoidable
fact that even the biggest company in the nation can stumble when it abandons,
even for a day, its customer-focused strategy.
If it can happen to Wal-Mart, it can happen to any company. To avoid the
problem, here’s a sales results marketing strategy:
1. Get the right information. Evidently, Wal-Mart assumed
that its competitors would behave the day after Thanksgiving as they had
in the past.
Most businesses make a crucial marketing mistake: they listen to themselves.
They convince themselves they’re right. Krispy Kreme is another example.
The company’s enviable success seemed unstoppable. Then sales hit
a wall. The company blamed the low-carb craze, even though the slide started
at least a year before the Atkins diet became popular.
Did Krispy Kreme believe it had an unbeatable recipe for success? Did they
try to analyze what was driving it? Did lines a block long outside their
new stores tell them everything they wanted to know? Even today, does the
company understand what customers value? Without solid information, even
a hot donut cools off.
2. Always think brand. Brand has less to do with look and
logos than it does with the way a customer experiences a company, product
or service. If Fedex means one thing, it’s certainty. Disney says
it’s great to be a kid no matter how old you are.
But as Joseph Benson points out, “We all know, buy and experience
brands that have a great heritage. For some of us, it’s Mercedes,
Philips or Disney. For others, it is McDonalds, Heineken or Gucci. What
makes these brands great, what they all have in common, is that they have
had the time to build a meaningful and relevant past––a heritage.”
How much do we care about taking all the tiny, seemingly insignificant and
bothersome steps to painstakingly create a heritage that establishes value
and builds customer confidence?
3. Value identification. It’s time to put features
and benefits behind us. They’re the past. A product may appear to
be benefit rich, but what if the customer isn’t interested or doesn’t
care? Are they still benefits?
For example, a marketing research project for a large dry cleaning chain
revealed that customers at certain stores value coupons, while those in
other stores don’t. Where’s the benefit of coupons for those
who don’t want them?
“Becoming the customer is different from listening to customers,”
says Michael J. Lanning in Delivering Profitable Value. All that’s
important is what happens when the customer experiences a company’s
“products, services and actions.”
4. Get service right. One visit to the service department
of Quirk Ford in Quincy, MA makes it clear they don’t ever want to
hear customer say, “You didn’t fix it right when I brought the
car in.” For the Quirk Ford team, repairs must be perfect.
That’s not all. The service department is open six days a week, starting
at 7:00 a.m. and there’s a free shuttle service. You speak to a service
counselor in an office, not a repair facility.
The result is confidence in the service and satisfaction at having a dealership
that thinks like a customer.
5. Renovate instead of innovate. Cox Communications has
embraced renovation. And it’s doing it by thinking like its customers.
Getting broadband service to a home is only half the job. Rather than leaving
it up to the customer to figure out how to connect to a computer, Cox offers
wireless network installations as one of several other computer-related
services. By building on its existing capabilities, Cox figured out how
to deliver more of what the customer wants.
Instead of innovators, Sergio Zyman says the need is for renovators, companies
that keep looking for ways to engage the customer more fully. He learned
the lesson the hard way at Coca-Cola where he was part of the management
team that introduced an ill-conceived product, “the new Coke.”
6. Plan for disaster. Wal-Mart evidently wasn’t prepared
for the Friday after Thanksgiving. No one thought of asking, “What
happens if our competitors do something different this year?” Doubters
aren’t viewed as “team players.”
Yet, look at what happened to the insurance industry in the aftermath of
New York attorney general’s charges and indictments. One of the world’s
largest––and most necessary––industries was caught
off guard––thrown on the defensive.
The worst part has nothing to do with the illegal activity or even the highly
questionable sales practices. The blow to the insurance business was the
breach of trust, the cornerstone of the industry.
Asking “what if” questions is far from an empty exercise. It
may be the most pressing issue business faces today.
7. Be helpful. “E-marketing is about substance over
show, logic over emotion, text over graphics,” writes Web site content
expert Gerry McGovern. “In fact, good Web marketers follow the Google
motto: be useful.”
The words apply to all marketing. Certainly, if you want to know
how a company sees itself, visit its Web site. If the focus is on the company
and what it sells and how proud it is of everything, you can be sure it’s
totally inward directed. It’s sending the message that it doesn’t
want to engage customers, just sell them.
Visit palmone.com and see first hand what it means when a company takes
“useful” seriously. Palm owners experience a company that thinks
their thoughts.
“Useful” should drive everything a company does including marketing,
sales and service.
8. Make everything yours. There’s one thought companies
never want entering a customer’s mind: “Why do we really need
them?”
Apple Computers learned early on that manufacturing computer components
wasn’t its business. This article is being written on a Powerbook
with parts from Toshiba, Mashita, LastDash, among others. What makes it
a Mac is its user-friendly operating system.
And what makes amazon.com unique is not what it sells but how
it sells it. It’s the unique amazon.com experience that brings customers
back time after time.
We need to ask ourselves, “Are our customers just using us to buy
what they need? Or, have they made the conscious decision to want to do
business with us?” The difference is the experience.
9. Get out of your skin. The major hurdle companies face
is getting outside of themselves. Citizens Bank has risen from its humble
Rhode Island roots to its current position as one of the fastest growing
financial institutions in the nation, made possible by the enormous resources
of its parent, the Royal Bank of Scotland. Through it all, Citizens works
to position itself as a local bank.
However, the Royal Bank of Scotland decided it wanted more visibility for
itself. To help accomplish this objective, Royal Bank of Scotland’s
four inward pointing arrows are replacing the Citizens’ “C.”
The change sends an interesting, but perhaps, unnoticed message. If local
means looking at the needs of the community, an inward directed logo sends
a conflicting message.
These nine strategies are interrelated, each one leaning on the other eight.
Each is a keystone; remove any one and the strategy collapses. The power
is in their unity.
A service department that doesn’t understand the need to “get
out of your skin” undermines the entire process. A sales force that
fails to address what customers value is equally as harmful. And management
that ignores branding fashions a faulty future.
© 2005 Graham Communications
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John R. Graham is president of Graham Communications,
a marketing services and sales consulting firm. Mr. Graham is the
author of four books on marketing and sales, including Break the Rules
Selling: Success Strategies that Beat the Competition (Superior Books).
Mr. Graham writes for a variety of marketing and sales columns for
business and trade publications and he presents his Magnet Power presentations
at company and association meetings. He can be contacted at 40 Oval
Rd., Quincy, MA 02170; by telephone at 617-328-0069; by fax at 617-471-1504;
or by email at j_graham@grahamcomm.com. The web site is grahamcomm.com. |
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