A Realistic Look At Your Offerings

What are you offerings and how are they being communicated to your audience?

Think this a ridiculously simply question?

You know what you provide.  But your brand perception is  your perspective. Other people might see your brand in a completely different way. These are your customers. So it does matter how your brand is represented in their minds.

It is not always easy to see your brand with fresh eyes. Getting honest feedback from other people and using this information to develop your brand will be worth the effort.

Here is a list of four basic questions for you to seriously consider in planning out your strategy for product development and marketing strategies. To make this list work for you, start writing down your answers on a piece of paper and take note of any areas where you become stuck. You might be surprised at what an eye opening experience this is.

• What exactly are your offerings? Does your product benefit others? Does it make things easier? More enjoyable? Does it solve a particular problem?

• Do your offerings have a differentiated edge? If all your competitors offer what you do, then why should your market audience choose you?

• How well does the average person in your target audience understand what your product is about and how it can benefit them?

• Is the language in your marketing material convoluted & wordy? Are the benefits clearly communicated?

As you can see, these considerations require that you perceptually step outside your business and look at your brand from a consumer’s point of view. It’s like being two people at once.

Product development and  marketing are often thought of as completely separate departments.  But let’s look at this realistically. If your offerings are weak, marketing will not work. Don’t think that smoke and mirrors can disguise a poorly developed product. This might have worked somewhat in the past. But with the internet, everything is quite transparent. Your customer’s best interests are in your best interest. On the web, word of mouth marketing and social media can work for or against you.

In Search of the Obvious, Words to Live By

In Search of the Obvious by Jack Trout is an eye opening read for anyone in the marketing field. It clarifies the cloudy thinking that many people fall prey to when it comes to marketing goods & services.

I’ve listed my favorite quotes to share with you.

• The search for any marketing strategy is the search for the obvious.
• When presented with a simple obvious strategy, most clients are not impressed. They are often looking for some clever, not so obvious idea.
• Common sense is your guide
• Research can obscure the obvious. A flood of data should never be allowed to wash away your common sense and your own feeling for the market
• Success or failure is all about perceptual problems and opportunities in the market. And it’s all about understanding that the perceptions in the mind of the customer are where you win or lose.
• Customer awareness of a brand does not link to real customer behavior.
• Research may promise to reveal attitudes, but attitudes aren’t a reliable prediction of behavior. People often talk one way but act another.
• How many people really want to chatter about products? Do you really want to talk about your toothpaste or toilet paper? Even people with prestige products tend not to talk about them. All they really want is to be seen driving in one.
• How do you get people to say the right thing or talk about your obvious idea? There’s no way to control word of mouth.
• All these new ways to reach customers are just new tools. You still have to search for the obvious right product, the right strategy and the right differentiating idea in relation to your competition.
• Reaching customers is one thing. Selling them is another.
• All advertising and marketing have to do is supply the obvious reason to buy your product instead of your competitor’s product.
• If you build a differentiated product, the world will not automatically beat a path to your door…news of your product has to have some help along the way.
• Every aspect of your communications should reflect your difference- your advertising, your brochures, your web site, your sales presentations.
• The basic role of an agency is to take that difference [differentiating factor] and make it interesting.
• Branding is all about what makes you different and what the benefit is in that difference.
• On GM versus Toyota: A successful brand has to stand for something. The more variations you attach to it, the more you risk of standing for nothing.

These are the quotes I pretty much live by in my professional life. You’ll probably be seeing them throughout my posts. Not that I am trying to sell copies of this book or anything. But I believe that when you encounter good advice, it’s important to connect the dots to other contexts, including projects and challenges that you are currently facing.

We tend to get quite distracted by fancy terms, new technology and prestigious facades that it becomes very easy to lose sight of the obvious objectives in marketing.

I do have a lot to say on this, but I will write about it all in subsequent posts. For now, I am just happy that someone is helping to clarify fundamental basic truths that marketing professionals and business managers should keep in mind at all times.

If you have this strong, burning impulse to get this book, here is the cover.