What’s the right marketing attitude to take?

Q: I used to be an entrepreneur with my own small business. After five years, things didn’t work out and I had to give up the business. I didn’t have the funds to try again. In fact, I had a serious cash flow problem. I’m married with one daughter and my wife and I are expecting one more in six months. I had to get a job. And thank God I got one in a medium sized enterprise.

The owner asked me to handle marketing. I don’t know why because I’m an engineer. But he said I fitted his idea of a marketing man.

This is the first time that I will be handling marketing in a corporate world. Of course as a former entrepreneur, I did everything including marketing. But that’s different although I don’t really know what the difference is.

I guess I just don’t know where to start and how to proceed. I’ve been asking my friends for help. Two of them told me that in a seminar on marketing for non-marketers that you conducted, I understand that you said that it helps a great deal to have the right marketing attitude. It’s not a criticism of my two friends for me to say that their explanation wasn’t that clear. But every little bit of marketing insight will be of help to me right now.

A: We want to start by telling you about your own work attitude. It’s a good one and it’s the right attitude. You know what you don’t know and you’re not reluctant to admit what you don’t know. You also ask around. That’s the best part of that work attitude.

Now, here’s what we said about the “right” marketing attitude. We’ll tell you why we placed in quotation marks the word “right.”

Whether working in a small, medium or large scale enterprise, the right attitude is the right attitude, and the wrong one is wrong. So there’s no such thing as the right marketing attitude for a small enterprise and another for a medium enterprise.

There have been many expressions of the right marketing attitude. Here’s one of them from our friend William Smith, a social marketer at the Academy for Educational Development:

“The problem is how to make sure we are really using marketing to the fullest extent and not dropping into advertising alone, or product development alone, or ignoring the consumer because we think we know more than they do.”

The portion in bold font is about the right marketing attitude. In our own marketing and marketing research consulting work, we restate the attitude this way: “Never start planning or deciding on any marketing campaign or program from where you are as a marketer. Instead, always start from where your consumers are.”

The reason is obvious. It’s what the consumers actually see, think, feel, and do that determines the effectiveness and eventual success of the marketer’s decision, plan, campaign or program. Obvious as this reason may be, many marketing practitioners still proceed from where they believe and assume consumers are, and not from finding out where those target consumers are. As William Smith says, these marketers believe they know more than consumers know.

The more technical the product or service is, the more this marketer-centric attitude prevails. For example, we recall how the operations and sales executives of an electrical company were like this. We were conducting a training program on marketing and the marketing orientation focused on the need to be customer-centric first. The engineers among these executives asked: “Sir, do many or most of our customers know electrical engineering?” When we answered “Most don’t. Only a few, very few,” they almost all and immediately asked: “So why start with them when they don’t know anything about our product and service?”

When marketers still succeed even without first learning what the real situation of the consumers is, this only means that they’ve been lucky and not that they are correct. Their assumption about the consumers converges with what it’s really like with those consumers. But in today’s fast changing market and intensifying competition, the marketers’ assumption about their consumers diverges more and more frequently from what’s true of the consumers. So it’s always safer to first check with consumers.

Without first considering how things really are with the consumers, the marketer’s plan and program are just assuming what’s true with the consumers’ responses and behavior. This is still the case even among those who abide by the thinking of Philip Kotler that marketing is a learning game. Here’s what he said:

“Marketing is a learning game. You make a decision. You watch the results. You learn from the results. Then you make better decisions.”

Marketers who want to do things quickly and take action on an exciting idea that competition may learn and beat them in commercializing, like doing marketing as Kotler advises. Learn as you’re taking action on your decision and just watch and learn from what happens with the target consumers. Then if something is amiss, learn from this and adjust toward a better decision.

Only companies with a deep pocket can afford to allow their marketing executives to do marketing this way. It’s clearly an expensive marketing attitude and the least cost-effective. If you know, for example, that the priority consumer values you’re trying to promote in the campaign diverge from the target consumers’ true priority values, you’re effectively into educating your target consumers. You’re telling them that the priority values your campaign is pushing is superior to what these consumers currently subscribe to. So your campaign is going to convince consumers that this is so and that consumers ought to give up on their currently held priority values in favor of what you are pushing.

This is essentially a market development attitude. You intend to develop the market to think in your favor, in favor of what you, the marketer, want. It’s not you who’s converging with the market. It’s the other way around; you want the market to converge with you, the marketer.

We’ve been asked if this actually happens in the real marketing world. Of course, it has. Consider the time when P&G first introduced powder detergent when everyone was washing with bar detergents. Even when it knew that women found it strange to wash with powder detergent and didn’t want to switch from hard bars to powder, P&G persisted. Eventually, it invested enough “throw away” money in the project to eventually succeed in educating a critical mass of laundry women to make that shift.

Another case in point is when Yakult first entered the Philippine market. From its market study and product testing, it knew that mothers all over the country found the taste of Yakult terrible and so did their children. But Yakult persisted and invested in slowly educating mothers about the health benefits of the product. As it was doing this, its version of P&G’s throw-away money was its continuous product sampling. Trial and retrial and some more repeated trial tasting of the product eventually changed the mothers’ and children’s taste buds from against the Yakult taste into tolerating it and then into actually liking it.

Kotler’s concept of marketing as a marketer-centric learning game has its contrast in a model of marketing as an interactive consumer-centric learning game. This model is from Roland Rust of the University of Maryland. It sees marketing as a learning game but this time it’s a consumer-driven learning game. Here’s a summary of the model:

First, the Marketer learns what Consumers want.
Then, the Marketer gives Consumers what they want.
Next, Consumers learn what Marketer is offering.
If Consumers like it, they buy.
Later, some buying stops. Then more and more stop buying.
The Marketer learns why. The Marketer redevelops, adjusts, or repositions.
Next, Consumers learn the Marketer’s “new” offer.
Then if Consumers like it, they buy again…and so on for another cycle.

In contrast to the market development attitude, this one is a product development attitude. You, the marketer, develop your product according to what you have learned consumers want, need or value. You align your thinking to that of the consumers. It’s not the market you want to converge with what you want but it’s you who’s converging with the market. That way, you get your target sales and quota quicker and more efficiently. It’s in this sense that it’s the “better” marketing attitude. So our preferred word is “better” and not “right.”

We are also often asked: “How do we learn what the market, what the consumers really want?” That’s a critical question to ask. It’s critical because there’s a correct way to learn and there’s a wrong way. So when we say, “learn by researching your consumers,” this means that there’s a correct research and a wrong one. In addition, when we say that the correct research depends on asking the correct questions, we imply that there’s a correct way of crafting and asking a question and a wrong one. If you wish to learn more about this matter, let us know and we’ll devote the next or another column to this.

Cost Effective Web Marketing

When promoting your Web site you want to make sure visitors will want to return again. ‘Visitors’ refers to human web surfers and also the search engines and directories.

Check Your Links

Web site promotion starts with a search engine spider indexing or cataloging your site by following the links from one page to another. Just as human visitors dislike a broken link, so do the spiders. If a link doesn’t work they’ll simply move onto the next page. No matter how sophisticated the search engine software is, it can’t index what it can’t find. Also remember that a spider won’t be able to follow a link that requires a form submission or JavaScript.

While considering the subject of links, if you’re using HTML and CSS on your site, make sure that both work properly. A certain minimum level of requirements must be met so that your pages will display correctly. It’s only if these are met that a spider can do its work. There are free facilities online that can check both of these for you.

Keep Your Pages Small

Most of us have heard the expression that size isn’t everything. This is also true when it comes to Web pages. People don’t like having to wait for a Web page to load. Search engine spiders may not fully index a page bigger than 150k in size. Remember that the size of a page doesn’t simply depend on the actual HTML file itself, but includes everything on the page such as images, banners etc.

If you have a lot of images on your pages, then either reduce the number of them, or use a program such as Macromedia Fireworks to optimize them for the Web. If the page has a big file size due to a massive amount of text, you should consider splitting the text into smaller, more manageable pieces and putting them on several pages. SEO Chat has a tool called “Page Size Lookup” which can tell you the size of your Web page.

What’s the Difference Between a Search Engine and a Directory?

People frequently use the term ‘search engine’ as a catch-all expression for anything they use to search the Web. They are different things though, and an understanding of the differences will help you promote your site successfully.

How Does a Search Engine Work?

Search engines use highly sophisticated software to search the web for new pages. It then automatically creates and updates their indexes. Whenever they find an active hyperlink, they will follow it and add that to the index and so on. These programs are generally referred to as ’spiders.’

Normally, all this is totally automatic, but sometimes human intervention is involved. The spider will return periodically to the pages and check for updated content. Often there will be a delay between you uploading your page, and the spider finding it, unless you submit your URL directly to the search engine itself. You can submit a web URL to Google free of charge.

How Directories Work

The primary difference between a search engine and a search directory is that a directory is compiled by a real person. Frequently the site owner will submit a short description of the site together with its URL to the directory compiler to be considered for inclusion. Directories are arranged into categories to make it easier to find what you’re looking for.

When you submit your site to a directory, you choose the appropriate category for your site. A reviewer then checks to ensure that your site is in the most suitable category. Another difference between a search engine and a directory is that whereas a search engine could list every individual page in your Web site, a directory will generally only contain a single entry covering your entire site.

Shared Indexes and Hybrids

Things are never so straightforward though. Some search portals are a hybrid, combing a search engine and a directory. The search engine part returns automated results, while the directory gives human found results. Normally, a hybrid will supply hits from the directory as the primary source, with the search engine results of individual pages as the secondary source.

Getting Your Site Ready

It cannot be stressed too strongly that search engines and/or directories are by far the most important way of getting your site noticed. To do this, you have to properly prepare the site and submit your URL to them.

Choose the Right Keywords

Think what your Web site is all about. If you had to describe your site in one word, then that word is your first keyword. Then think about other words to describe your site. Make a list of them, with the most important at the top of the list and so on. You want a list of between ten and fifteen words. Since these keywords will be used in a variety of ways, it is important that you take some time selecting them.

Keywords are important because they are possibly the most important thing that a search engine uses to determine whether a page is included in the search results. While search engines use keywords in different ways, most experts agree that the frequency and position of your keywords is an important factor.

Pick a Good Title for Your Web Page

When you create a Web page, there is always a <title> tag. This goes into the <head> section of your Web page. The <title> tag is what is shown at the top of your Web page when it is displayed in a web browser. Search engines, however, often use the <title> tag as the title of the listing in the results.

The <title> tag looks like this

<title>The name of my Web Page </title>

It’s a good practice to make your <title> tag have a good description of the content of the page, and if you can but if you can use some of your keywords, so much the better.

Why You Should Use Meta Tags

Meta tags are a special type of HTML code that goes into the <head> section of a web page. Site visitors don’t normally see them, but search engine spiders do. Just as some HTML tags have an attribute with a value, so do meta tags.

As far as optimizing your web page for search engines is concerned, the most important meta tags are keywords and description. The syntax for the keyword <meta> tag is as follows:

<meta name =”keywords” content = “keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″>

The description <meta> tag is as follows:

<meta name =”description” content= “A description of the subject of the web page”>

Unlike some HTML tags, it’s not necessary to have the meta tag closed, but if you want to have valid XHTML, then you do need to close all your tags