Mar 30, 2010 | Marketing, Small business, Strategy
Trader Joes in the US is not a huge chain, but they are one of the ones to watch to see what the others will be doing in the future.
Joes has a rich history of being different, and their customers love it.
The latest move is to announce that they will be rapidly changing seafood supplies to sustainable sources, of seafood, and if history repeats, this will be the first of many to follow that line. It is probable that Woolworths or Coles in Austalia will follow closely, there may be an opportunity emerging for aquaculture suppliers to gain shelf sapce, and for the retailers to lift the poor performance of their seafood counters.
Mar 21, 2010 | Marketing, Small business
Yarning to an old mate last week, the usual wide ranging stuff you examine with someone you know well, he said “you know, what you do is forensic marketing, exhuming the deeply held assumptions that distort the outcomes, simplifying the jargon, identifying the make-work activity, seeing with a fresh eye the alignment of priorities”
It struck me as a very useful description, so I constructed a simple list of the starting points:
- Who are your customers?
- Why are they your customers?
- What do they buy?
- How much could they buy?
- What do various customers have in common?
- Why do they buy from you, and not your competitor?
- How much & what do they buy from your competitor?
- How do you define their Wallet?
- Is it the same as they would define it?
- What keeps your customers, your competitors, and you awake at night?
- Which customers have you lost, and why?
- What would you have to do to get them back, and is it worth the cost?
- If you were seeking to enter your market now, how would you do it?
- What are the barriers to better performance of your products?
- What are the markets where your capabilities rather than just your products have relevance?
- How do you communicate with customers?
- How do they communicate with you, and what is the quality of that communication?
- How engaged are you with your key (not necessarily biggest) customers?
- Where are the markets that have evolved that use different versions of your key pieces of capability?
- What can you learn from them?
- How do the demand chains work?
- Where in the chain does the real leverage reside?
- Where are the sources of waste in the chain?
- How do you innovate to eliminate them?
- How can you turn those who inhabit your demand chain into collaborators?
- What are the key competitive capabilities of your competitors?
- How do competitors react to the tactics you employ?
- How effective are their reactions?
- How has their response fed into your planning?
Once I started the list, I found it just went on, and on, and on, pages of it.
What changes is the way elements interact, apply differently to different situations, and the means by which experience, deep sector knowledge, and the wisdom that comes from hard lessons steers you towards a smaller range of drivers that warrant deeper analysis in any given situation.
A review of marketing, that can be best described as “forensic” can deliver real benefits from the insights that evolve.
Mar 1, 2010 | Marketing, Small business, Strategy
It is very tempting for marketers to become all sweaty about the prospect of a message going viral, all that free awareness, when in the old days, it would take lots and lots of advertising, costing big dollars.
If only it was that easy, just make a funny video and load it up!
It is still a matter of deciding who you want to delight, executing, and then you have a chance that they will spread the word, but without the focus on the small group to whom the experience of whatever it is you are selling is compelling, it is unlikely anyone will make the effort to spread your word for you.
In the early stages, it is inevitably, “one at a time” marketing, and the web does not make it easier than it has always been, it is just a different tool.
Feb 22, 2010 | Branding, Marketing, Sales, Small business
What will be the continuing impact of the development of housebrands by retailers, and the current heightened value awareness of consumers? Most FMCG suppliers lose sleep over the retailers undermining their profitability by hogging shelf space with far cheaper imitations of their brands, brought to market overnight without much concern about the long term health and development of the category, but delivering short term profitability to them at the expense of their suppliers.
This apparent duplicity, retailers demanding innovation and category building activity from their suppliers, whilst undermining their ability and willingness to invest has to have its limits. Clearly, the old mass market model of branding is over, but what has replaced it?
Increasingly I see the evolution of focused brands and retailers serving the more niche markets, and segments of larger markets where something different is being delivered to customers. Retailers are enabling a new breed of supplier with deep category expertise to emerge at the expense of the older mass market model, and they are in turn fuelling the growth of specialist retailers.
Feb 16, 2010 | Marketing, Small business
What do you do that others cannot?
What enables you to deliver value for a group of customers or potential customers with something in common, which is increasingly nothing to do with demographics, that your competitors cannot match?
Answer those questions, and the rest is pretty easy.
My old mate Louis Marangon at Riverina Grove produces wonderful Italian style products from fresh ingredient sourced as far as possible from around the Riverina region in NSW. Pasta sauces, tapenades, herb infused olives, and other delicacies, almost as if they were from his mothers kitchen. Doesn’t appeal to everyone, and hard to find, but for those who want an authentic Italian inspired product whose provenance is local, know that Louis will break his back to provide it, and they keep on coming back. Thats a CVP with legs, and it is probably the only thing that a small buiness can do as well as, and often better than, because there is less marketing “noise” around, than a large one with substantail financial and personnel resources.
Jan 10, 2010 | Management, Marketing, Small business
In a small business, every action has someone responsible for it, whereas in a large organisation , or worse, a public bureaucracy, nobody has responsibility for the dumb things they do, they just become an automatically imposed “rule” that carries the sanction of the organisation.
Taking responsibility is not just good policy, good for the employees, it is good marketing.
