Make Marketing Clearer.
Strategy is about identifying and exploiting a sustainable competitive advantage - a fancy way of saying what it is you do better than anyone else and how you intend to maintain that (either by excellence or manoeuvering).
Good marketing does the same - it's the distillation of the essence of what it is your company's strategy or entrepreneurial instinct has generated and its aim is to convince customers that your product/service meets their needs better than any other.
Now, you wouldn't know about this shared mindset from the bloated mission statements and blandly pompous marketing ideas that are often mistaken for strategy and good marketing. But those tend to be ego-driven rather than customer-driven and overlook the fact that they're about communicating with people. People who make happen the things you want to happen - be they employees who execute the strategy or customers who validate the marketing by buying the end product
Seems clear to me.
Inspired by this post about brand onions.
posted by john dodds @ 10:49 AM
2 Comments:
With respect, I'm not sure it's always about exploiting competive advantage, because, in many cases, one doesn't have any.
Quite frequently, it's about creating one by making folks feel differently about stuff that's quite generic.
Heineken was built on making refreshment distinctive for example
Virgin is built on being the cooler version of British Airways
Sometimes it's just creating a great story out of the mundane, or making the obvious extraordinary - it's just that telling the right story at the right time to achieve the right goal is bloody hard
Differentiation for want of a better word is one of the primary sources of competitive advantage. Michael Porter always said that.
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