Avoid the Deathly Hallows of Marketing & Make Your Organisation Successful

How do “once-successful” businesses fail? Ultimately, it comes down to basic errors of leadership, spawned by executives who are more confident than they are competent, often making poor decisions in ignorance of the business science readily available to them.

There is a plethora of proven methods that maximise competitive advantage, known to less and less of the marketing fraternity due to poor tertiary course direction in marketing, or the complete absence of marketing-qualified personnel.

Here is a list of the most common reasons large organisations and small organisations, new businesses, and long-established enterprises, previously successful or never successful businesses, fail: KNOW THEM AND AVOID THEM!

  1. Misunderstand the meaning of the word, “marketing”: The business world is being poisoned by poor marketing pseudoscience…  falsely propagated rhetoric that interprets the word “marketing” to only mean marketing communications or promotion. If leaders and decision-makers don’t know that advertising and promotion, online and digital, are only a small part of the marketing function, then any enterprise is doomed.

2. Rejecting the importance of market segmentation: When decision makers say, “Everybody doesn’t like…”, “No one wants…”, “Everybody needs…”, etc., they demonstrate a cookie-cutter copy perception of the marketplace.
Denying the existence of market segments (where different needs and wants are exhibited in different groups within the marketplace) excludes an entity from the opportunity for strategic competitive advantage.


3. Ignorance of industry lifecycle: If the parties responsible for making strategic decisions in any element of the marketing mix don’t understand their individual industry life cycle, and the mandatory requirement to change and modify the marketing mix required at different stages of the life cycle, they can’t possibly be able to always choose the right strategy.
REMEMBER: There are 22 different life cycle paths, NOT just the commonly known one…

4. Ignorance of product lifecycle: Movement along the product life cycle path demands that you exercise changes to your marketing mix. Here are just the PRICING issues you should consider…


5. Lack of awareness of characteristics of innovation: There are three distinct types of innovation when introducing a new product. If decision-makers utilise a marketing mix for one type and the other version is a different type, they can constrain or destroy potential sales growth.

New to the world products require a completely different marketing mind-set to "me-too" products.

6. Brand & Product Portfolio Management: It is impossible to satisfy all the people all the time with a single brand or a single product…but it can (almost) be done with great brand and product management.

7. Great Leadership and Planning: Because “it is all about people”, senior leadership must build, adopt and be true to a genuine MEVPIV, reflected by their OSATTF.