The importance of understanding Marketing.
As a Marketing professional you would see that “Marketing” has more definitions than your fingers could count. Some definitions are so short and sweet that it misses substance, while some are so wide and general it leaves one clueless. Although my all-time favorites come from greats like Peter Drucker and Philip Kotler, yet my most favourite definition of marketing is a limerick.
The scientist says to his colleague: “You know I trained a Mouse to come and ring the bell when he wants food”. The mouse says to his fellow mouse: “Hey. I trained a scientist to give me food whenever I ring a bell”.
Given that the scientist is the Marketer and the mouse is the consumer, in my eyes, no better set of words can define Marketing. You the Marketer, be it mouse or scientist, has created a fabulous win-win relationship between brand and it's target market.
It’s not just about a definition
Definitions don’t really matter. All Marketers hailing from various schools of thought, establishments and markets are different. There are many companies around the world where a Marketing Representative is actually a Salesman. Of course, Marketers would define the sales team as personal selling and their advertising activities as non-personal selling. Marketing does not end there. We have to build brands, establish brand perceptions and identities, do research, cross borders, etc, etc.
Why is Marketing misunderstood?
1. We have forgotten the smell of the customer: No! This is not about the odor, but a term used by Tom Peters for the customers' minds and hearts we lost touch of. Consumers have a heart, be it impulse purchase or a thought out and planned one, brands must speak to their hearts. To do that the brand manager must understand what’s in them. Try not to make the consumer just a statistic. Remember that this is a living, breathing human being. In modern day Digital marketing we speak of a customer persona, and it seems like a lot of marketers create persona's based on numbers alone. That is why it is highly recommended to take a sample of 15 customers from the "numbers" and interview them directly prior to creating this persona.
Let me give an example.
There was a sanitary napkin brand in Sri Lanka which had a spike in sales during two particular seasons, every calendar year. Normally what takes place is when you notice a pattern of spikes in sales during a particular season the brand manager will make sure the trade floods the seller with enough products to sustain the demand. But one should also think why in the world do sanitary napkins have seasonality. Well, the monthly cycle for sanitary napkins do not occur more frequently during a particular season.
It took years for them to think about it. Curiously, these seasons are two monsoon seasons where paddy farming is done due to heavy rain. Also, the sales spike happens in farming areas. Hmm. Do female members of the farming community have more menstruations during the farming season? No, there is a hidden consumer there. The "Male Farmer". They buy sanitary napkins to cover their nose and mouth when they spray pesticides on their plants. This insight was highly useful because the use of sanitary napkins as masks takes place in certain places only, and if you create an actual mask for farmers, there is a countrywide market vacuum you could fill. And they manufactured a mask, introduced it and it was a super hit. The irony is the company that actually exploited this opportunity was a competitor, which would not have been the case if the brand manager knew the ‘smell of the customer’. Marketers must go to the consumer, and understand them at a personal level.
2. Forget the jargon and focus on the objective: One day some time ago my ex-boss started a team meeting with the words “are we gonna do a jingle, paper ad or just go BTL?”. We must understand the problem, the goal, and think from the perspective of a marketing solution rather than ‘hey, these are the tools, what should we use?’.
You may end up using the same tools, but unless you change this approach we are all stuck in a box. Every single time we should begin with the end in mind. What is the objective? Why? What could achieve this? When’s the right time? How do you optimize the budget usage? What media mix should we use? Etc. Only then, we are marketers.
3. Think out of the box: That's not a drop a buzz word. Think that your brand is a person who is looking at you from a distance. Think of its color, clothing, physical attributes, appeal, personality, value, speech, smell and tone, and this person (your brand) says hi to you how would you feel towards it? Get others to do the same (applies to non-tangibles products like insurance and financial services as well). We should be with our consumer more, than within ourselves.
I have been at meetings where the brand manager gets very touchy when a proposition is made. A team member may go ranting on about a new perspective to look at problems the brand might be facing, while the brand manager could be closed up and unwilling to listen.
A great beverage brand had a unique eye-opener when they changed the head of marketing. He found one competitor brand extension was leading in sales by far. An investigation showed that villagers like to treat their guests to a red colored drink rather than a light colored drink. The bright red color is very appealing to them. When they pour the drink into a see-through glass the red color has a compelling effect on the guests. The flavor is secondary. If the previous brand manager thought from the consumers point of view, asked others and walked in their shoes a bit they could have had a better market approach.
4. Marketing and Bias are not synonymous: Ego being our biggest hindrance, we marketers do tend to be bias. At a meeting with a digital marketing agency, the head of the division said that he does not believe in direct placement advertisement in the digital space (placing banner advertisements on websites). It was simply his belief and he refused to propose banners for any client neglecting proven statistics. E.g. A client advertises a brand promotion on a website that has 3 million unique visitors a month and sells 100 extra taxis in three months at a cost of 2,000 USD a month. His expense per sale of a taxi 60 USD which is 9% of the total profit made within the promotion period. These numbers are proven facts you cannot dispute. Simply because you don’t like these ads, you cannot just take that money and put it into other mediums. That is acting out of bias. A marketer has to analyze, not impose our biases on the money spent.
Another good example would be my ex CEO investing in a well-known rugby team in the country spending approximately 3% of the total annual marketing budget. It was a sponsorship that allows us to place some banners at the rugby grounds and the team would wear branded jerseys. But this is absolutely nonsensical for my brand at the time.
Rugby Audience – Upper-class, rich. Target Market – Lower socio-economic classes.
Why? – Because boss loves the Rugby team
5. Who’s the boss? Think different: Your actual boss is not your CEO or your line manager. The actual boss is the consumer. Worship him. Adore him. Live for him. Understand him. Respect him. Share knowledge with him. You are a Marketer. Your results will get you the dividends we tend to try and gain by focusing on the manager, two folds or more.
