What’s the right marketing attitude to take?
Filed under: marketing | No Comments »
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.
