BRAND IMMORTALITY – Part 2

What is the Marketing Concept? What is the basis of all marketing management?

Is it not meet the customers’ needs with available resources?

Is pushing an imperfect satisfaction of needs, via advertising, personal selling, tricky copy and negative options, give-aways and incentives, going to imbed success in a brand?

Is a badly thought-out product or brand extension, timed well or not, a failure because of insufficient advertising?

Not necessarily.

Looking at the purpose of a marketing expert’s being: For all exponents of the marketing profession, there is one focus… The needs and wants of the markets (or the targeted segments in which you are interested).

IF the market NEEDS advertising, if the ACTUAL product (as opposed to CORE product) includes imagery and positioning, then the marketer’s responsibility is to deliver those needs. In delivering the needs of the target audience, a marketer maintains brand equity, and thus, the life of the brand/product.

If the marketer just invests in advertising without understanding the customer, life cycle is bound to prematurely terminate, brand decay will set in, and brands will die…. in response, of course to substitutability, imitability, comparative value and rarity.

This turns focus not to the science of marketing but the skills abilities and talent of marketing management personnel.

Does management “get it”? Do they really UNDERSTAND ‘marketing’ or do they perceive it hype, advertising, or selling? Are they CAPABLE of embracing and applying marketing science, or simply charismatic diplomats, climbing the corporate ladder? Are they EMPOWERED with funds, autonomy, flexibility and leadership support to implement? Do they have the ACUMEN to pull it all together and planning skills to imbed the direction for years to come?

[The answer, by the way, is that ego and corporate arrogance, stop people like us helping people like them ]

Is Brand Immortality Possible?

There are no specific strategic models for FMCG brands to manage lifecycle because any generalisation would be fictitious nonsense.

The secret for ALL marketers is market segmentation.

Until decision makers recognise that there is no singular ‘market’, but a unique combination of segments that make up an individual market, we are unimpowered.

“Markets’ are as unique as people, segments as unique as human characteristics. Noses vary, size, hair, eyes, teeth, skin… just as segments are different. Individual products must be made to fit the attractive/targeted segments.
Just as nose drops may be useless as skin moisturisers, some products or brands may not appeal to some segments.

Brands can and do survive anticipated life cycles as a result of disciplined marketing strategies based upon trend analysis and rational strategic response to changes in segments.

Brands fail when companies choose to deliver what is easiest for them rather than what is demanded by the market. You can’t maintain a brand without market satisfaction. You can’t go wrong if you achieve market satisfaction.

But we can delve deeper into brands than that… For example, several years ago “Marlborough” was the 7th most valued brand in the world. Tobacco giants could have brought out new products to extend the life of the brand… not cigarettes, but other “Marlborough man” themed products… capitalising upon this brand equity and developing it according the changes in the market at a core product level – where the core product for growing segments was not ‘tobacco smoke for inhalation’, but (as a result of long term brand positioning) became ‘virile and manly country & western masculine image’. [For more on “Core Product see: http://www.launchengineering.com/ModelsLawsRules.htm, for more on “Market Segmentation see: http://www.launchengineering.com/Market_Segmentation.htm]

In summary, the commercial reality is that lifecycle is almost completely a function of competency of management rather than some ‘cosmic inevitability’. If management can identify and respond the change, a brand can live forever.

Ultimately, it is the 5th “P” of Marketing, PEOPLE, (in this case executive acumen) that make the difference between brand immortality and brand decay.

Are you tired of rubbish marketing plans that only serve to collect dust?

Sometimes, it seems like people have forgotten that a marketing plan should be a clear and concise set of directions that, if followed correctly, ensure you achieve or exceed your goals.
So many marketing plans end up being a report of where the business is now, or a weak wish-list of what the writer thinks might be as good a guess as any.
While many businesses accept the importance of a marketing plan, few know where to start or the questions to ask to build this comprehensive and powerful business tool.
Partly this is because few marketing planners actually have a decent marketing planning template or marketing planning workbook on which they can craft and build a winning marketing plan. See this blog for more>> http://wp.me/pO33U-1r
With literally thousands of awful, limited, and distracting documents offered on the web, all promising they represent a decent marketing plan template, the problem is magnified. Discriminating planners find these are not written by marketing planners, or those whose marketing planning skills and talent have much to be desired. The documents offered appear to be plagiarised extracts from basic business textbooks, devoid of commercial marketing planning functionality.
Since rising to Marketing Manager level in the mid 80’s, I’ve learned, the hard way, how to put together marketing plans that work, and have written around 30 marketing plans since then: 3 were not implemented due to politics of weak management, every other one succeeded.
Since my current consulting firm, Launch Engineering, has been going, we’ve seen frequent occurrences where an aspiring entrepreneur, middle management, marketing executive, or a frustrated COO brings us their marketing plan built upon a generic marketing plan template they’ve wasted weeks of their valuable time trying to fit their business into: The structure of a marketing plan template they have acquired, having distracted them from the key, specific and individual issues that may make or break them.
After seeing this over and over we said to ourselves, “There needs to be a better option for marketing planners.” So we set about empowering marketing planners to identify the real issues and key variables to build proper marketing plans. We built a professional’s marketing planning workbook.
Sharing this with key clients across diverse industries such as banking, telecommunications, infant nutrition, tobacco, international air transport and fashion retailing, this marketing planning workbook has proven to be universally applicable for building marketing plans that are relevant and individual, while being concise and implementable.”
As a non-profit endeavour, we simply called it “the Ultimate Marketing Planning Workbook”, an Excel formatted document of over 30 individual worksheets that force the marketing planner to explore the pertinent issues, and dismiss irrelevancy. Marketing Plans evolve from the workbook’s output of isolating the key issues and identifying the tactics, resources, and strategies necessary to achieve marketing objectives.
Peers, colleagues and even a few clients says the tool is worth its weight in gold and that making it available at a nominal price doesn’t indicate its true value.
However, in an effort to enlighten struggling marketing executives, and raise the bar (so to speak) we decided to release it for only the fulfilment/processing cost.
Anyone who is less than 100% satisfied with their marketing plans will find using this workbook a dream.
Give it a try, go to: http://bit.ly/mktgplan

Once we were (marketing) warriors…

During my Feb 2012 presentation at the FMCG summit at MGSM in Sydney, I asked the group of about 60, “When did you do your last segmentation study?”.

I was appalled to find only 1 company had undertaken a segmentation study in the past seven years… SEVEN YEARS!!!!!!!! (Less frequent than 3 years is considered intolerable!)

There was once a time when FMCG marketers were recognised as leaders, gurus even, in the execution of marketing science: An FMCG marketer was the herald of super-normal profits, profit maximising decision making, and management leadership.

When segmentation is the most powerful tool in the arsenal of a marketer’s weaponry, and the professional standard slips to such a low, no wonder FMCG companies are crying poor!

But, are their marketing executives to blame? I wonder….

Could it be the declining quality of market research services in Australia has so declined as to undermine the anticipated value, insight or trend identification?

Could it be that senior management is so diluted in marketing training that those who control the purse strings – ignorant of how much they don’t know – simply are not allowing marketing departments sufficient budget for segmentation studies – denying resultant sustainable competitive advantage and brand equity investment?

Could it be that the pure-academic standards in the tertiary education of marketers has simply eroded the passing down of commercially important training and skills to the point where marketing graduates simply are not empowered with proper education in marketing anymore?

I sit, jaw agog, sometimes at the wasteful and poor marketing communications efforts in TV advertising spend and creative, at outdoor ads, online ads and other marketing communications execution that just denies justification, and I wonder… but with the revelation of such poor strategic marketing management helps me understand the woes of the industry and from where they come.

The One & Only Obstacle to Business Growth – Where the ‘buck’ stops

The older I get, the more I learn how much I don’t know – but also the more I recognise so-called “business experts” don’t know as well. I guess that’s fair, except at least I know how much I don’t know… others appear to “believe their own BS”.

The latest manifestation became glaringly apparent in the search for “Sticking Points in Business Growth” and “Barriers to Business Growth” where ‘money’ and ‘funding’ was patronisingly offered as a main reason. In reality, GROWTH should be easily funded, as trading history inspires lenders. (Launch, however, still is constrained by the 22nd Immutable Law of Marketing.)

Other reasons offered for growth constraints were ‘people’ and ‘market size’… Come on!!!! Surely, there are some strategic corporate thinkers out there that can distinguish between operational and strategic issues?

There is one, and one only, profound issue that hampers business growth, stifles unbridled expansion, and suffocates limitless potential… is the CEO the leadership and managerial talent that follows.

Many true veterans of business-consulting recognise this to be the core truth: When CEO’s reject a completely valid and rational business plan, when CEO’s horde decision-making, forcing operational middle management turnover rate to increases When decisions just aren’t made because the CEO won’t delegate and his in-try overflows… when money is NOT spent in growth generating areas, and, the most fatal of all… when not undertaking an idea is justified because “we’ve never needed to do this before”.

Nothing is more heart breaking for qualified practitioners of their specialised skills than when their CEO stops letting them do what they do best, and applies the brakes.

CEO’s who cant ‘let go’ inspire new appointees to keep their job search robots alive if a CEO interferes with new initiatives introducing higher sophistication levels than the firm is used to implementing: No one likes to dumb-down!

It is said that the only constant in the world is change. That business cannot stand still and must grow or wither. A CEO’s unwillingness to change with the business is frequently the key problem. Even CEO’s conscious of the need for change can fail to recognise their own inability to do so. (The most dangerous and destructive are those that SAY they move with change, but can’t.)

Hurdles that exist at key points in a business’s growth trail:
1. At $2M they must surrender their control over management decisions and accept that different decisions are not necessarily wrong ones.
2. At $5M they must recognise that future growth means complete market orientation and adoption of strategic initiatives rather than operational ones. complete autonomy of decision making delegated to the position holder responsible.
3. At $20M they must adopt corporate disciplines and formality of structure with complete detachment from all operational decision-making.
4. At $100M a CEO is the COO, and the CEO of the foundation years moves over the administrators to take Chairman and CEO mantles, mentored by major shareholders and appropriate performance incentives.

Summarily, if a CEO doesn’t change in order for the Organisation to grow, and the Organisation doesn’t change its CEO, then the Organisation cannot grow because it cannot change.

What’s Sales got to do with It?

Entering my local Coles store, recently, a young woman manning a Wholesale Kitchens promotional booth approached, promoting kitchen sales.
Rewarded for the number of leads she generated, she was thrilled I was ready to upgrade my kitchen. I filled out a lengthy details form, requesting an appointment time of 8:30am Monday morning, to allow the kitchen sales person undivided attention.
A few days later another person called back, confirmed the appointment, and why it had to be at that particular time and day.
The next day the “Sales Manager” called back and said “we can’t see you – that’s when we have our weekly sales meeting”.
Despite my circumstances and other commitments, he would not allow hs sales meeting 8:30 am Monday morning appointment.
The kitchen budget was $25,000. He refused to allow his salesman to attend their appointment with me.
Curious, I telephoned the sales company at 8:35 am that Monday morning… and the telephone rang off… too committed to a sales meeting to answer the phone?
So I called their national head office, a 1800 number, and a automated message said… “our office hours are from 8:30 am please ring back or leave a message”… it was 8:45 am when I rang.
Business MUST be great for Wholesale Kitchens – imagine if SERVICE entered the vocabulary of their management team or if they employed a professional marketing executive!

Corporate Arrogance: Ready for another victim in Woolworths?

Roger Corbett, who was CEO of Woolworths on its rise to co-domination of Australian retailing, warned that corporate arrogance was the most dangerous threat to Woolworths’ future.
Could he be right?
In March, 2009, post GFC, American business analysts came to the conclusion… “Today, we face corporate arrogance that is almost transcendent and vastly more damaging than any of organized labour’s excesses”.
All to frequently, enraged experts, frustrated by simply ‘bad calls’ of businesses that have suffered by not following great advice, vent blame on…. “arrogant executives who use corporate leverage to implement an “our way or the highway” mentality”.
Is Woolworths in danger? Many thought Ansett would last forever, that FAI was rock-solid, that One.Tel, supported by a marriage of Murdoch and Packer, must be invulnerable. Even Qantas, also accused of outrageous corporate arrogance, but thought immortal, teeters on becoming the Asian Kangaroo.
Having heard Roger Corbett speak, I am convinced where there is smoke, there is fire, and while Woolworths may see movement into hotels and poker machines as a sure bet, I have too often observed profitable companies disappear into the mire of management by conceit that gives credence to the old adage “pride cometh before a fall”.