Situational Marketing (2)

Unless you find a more profitable way(s) to pass your marketing message across to your chosen market segment, your business or product-service would suffer for it. People are getting busier these days and don’t really have the time and patient to look at every product-service. They only create few rooms in their already flooded brains for just a few of them, wherever and whenever necessary. At times, I will be shock to hear that a particular product-service (I may need) has been around for ages. And I will ask myself, where I have been. Did you get the point I am making here? Marketers should do away with assumption, and apply what works to targeting its main buyers!

Hence, it behoves on organisations to adopt a marketing means that they can effectually manage, control and influence. The same marketing technique should equally give you utmost profit(s) for the effort. Never be lured into adopting a marketing method because others are doing it. More like me-too-marketing-approach. There’s no wisdom in doing so much and getting so little. Asking the right question before diving into the market would do an organisation so much good. Who actually are your prospective buyers? Where are they? Then formulate the right way to hit them with your well-aimed marketing messages.

There is the necessity for new approach of marketing thinking. Let’s call it contextual marketing or better still, situational marketing. It’s just a matter of time we would start measuring our ever-increasing marketing budgets with critical eye to evaluate its return on investment. That should be the bottom-line of any approach you may adopt to go about your marketing business. Nobody wants to run a business at a lost, not even Bill Gates or Warren Buffet.
Sergio Zyman, former marketing officer, coca-cola once taught, ‘Marketing is comprised of everything a company does from how its product is packaged, to how it is positioned in the eyes of the consumer through ad and promotion. All these things define the benefit to the user.’ But how many of us have got it, and are effectively using it? Firstly, you’ve got to know who your customers are and where they are, and then device a procedure to give them a superior service than the competition.

The essence of marketing is to have your product-service get to the end-user effortlessly, and also leave you with something profitable at the end of the deal. To achieve this, it’s necessary that one breaks out of the marketing clutter and then fashion a strong system to move most consumers to action. This might require your doing a little home work to know the system that is most appropriate for your kind of business. ‘The purpose of researching your market is to find out the subtler truths. Marketing research can help you spot opportunities and problems’. That is how Sarah White and John Woods wisely put it in one of their books. It’s very sad that nearly all of us are still engaged in what I would refer to as blind-marketing, even when it doesn’t pay us that much.

I want us to briefly assess some of the ways you can market your product-services and the advantages and limitations of each process. And whether that particular method was superlative for what you want to achieve in the market arena.

By word-of-mouth
Someone once asked this question to a group of individuals: ‘When forming an opinion of a company product-service, how credible would the information be from a staff of the company? What about the opinion of your friends and peers?’ It was so revealing that sixty-one percent trust and value the judgement of other people (like themselves) than those from the company or their representatives. This is very natural for most of us; we value thoughts and opinions of friends than those of strangers.

A survey by Edelman Trust Barometer in 2006 disclosed that word-of-mouth is seven-times more effective than newspaper advertising, five-times stronger than a personal sales pitch, and two-times as effective as radio advertising. And thirty-six percent of surveyed consumers reported learning of an innovation through word-of-mouth, while fourty-eight percent reported being influenced by word-of-mouth when making a purchase decision. (Some other statistical figures are even higher). Did you see that?

People trust peolpe, and by that I mean friends trust friends more than marketers, who are paid by their respective companies to serve as advocates to their various product-services. Inspite of everything, scores of business executives tend to over-rely on mass media advertising and under-rely on the reputational campaigns like word-of-mouth. Oftentimes, if people want to buy certain product, they first get the counsel of respected friends, neighbours or colleagues, who they think should have a better idea about the product-service. We still believe them even when they have little or no knowledge of what they are talking about. In fact, it has happened to me on numerous occasions.

Word-of-mouth is one of the finest forms of marketing, particularly if you know how to create a buzz using it (to boost the sale of your product-service). This is governed by the 90/10 rule: ninety percent of the world is influenced by the other ten percent. Or better still, Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 rule can’t be truer elsewhere than here. You get eighty percent of your business from twenty percent of you customers. I am saying this experientially. Think of the first time you visited a particular business outfit that was novel to, what largely brought you there was the testimony of a person (possibly friend or colleague), who may have had an experience with that particular product-service.

Another good thing about this mode of marketing is that it has the tendency of creating a ripple-effect. And often times, buyers here don’t come to make inquires (or do window-shopping) but to buy, or rather have an experience like their friends with your given market offering.

Obviously, the most successful product-services (or businesses) are those that spread and grow because of the customers’ relationship to other customers and prospective customers, and not because of the markets to the buyers. At the centre of every thriving business are the voices of customers, which resound louder than those of the sellers! A great mind summarised it thus: ‘The future belongs to marketers who establish a foundation and process where interested people cam market to each other...Ignite consumers networks and then get out of the way and let them talk’.

Nevertheless, it’s not every product-service that could be effectively dispersed by word-of-mouth alone but no establishment, no matter how big or small can do without it. This type of marketing has a way of giving credibility and enhance acceptance by the general public, no matter your business.