Chapter 2

Strengthening Your Marketing Strategy

In This Chapter

Taking advantage of market growth and targeting specific customer groups

Competing to grow your market share

Positioning your brand in consumers’ minds

Adjusting your approach as the market matures

Writing a statement to help you implement your strategy

When I teach workshops on marketing, I find that most of my participants don’t know what a marketing strategy is. If most people don’t know what marketing strategies are, how important can they be? Very important, actually. A marketing strategy is a way to achieve success. There are only a dozen or so main ways to achieve success in marketing.

In this chapter, I explain what the different marketing strategies are and help you select the right one for your business or project. I also show you how to use strategic thinking to make your marketing program more effective and profitable than most.

Finding and Riding a Growth Wave

The simplest and most reliable marketing strategy you can adapt for your business or product is to go where the growth is. Find it and ride the growth wave — an opportunity to sell something with increasing demand — for as long as you can. Doing so is important because growing and prospering when selling into a growing market is much easier than when facing stagnant or shrinking demand.

For example, builders who worked in Arizona and Florida as these states’ populations grew between 2000 and 2008 were in great demand because construction was at a record high. When a recession struck the real estate market in 2008, construction virtually stopped in these states. If you’d asked me to write a winning marketing plan for a Florida builder in 2005, I would’ve smiled and written it on the back of a napkin — it would’ve been so easy. In 2010, that same builder would’ve needed a much more carefully crafted and cautious plan, and would’ve had to accept greatly reduced expectations.

The following sections help you determine what the growth rate of your market is and evaluate other markets to find one that’s growing. With this information, you can make sure you’re focused on growth opportunities.

Measuring the growth rate of your market

At any point in time, a minority of markets are growing rapidly. However, most markets are growing at a slow pace, and some markets are shrinking. Knowing how quickly or slowly your market is growing is vital because it’s a key driver of your sales growth and profits. Take a moment to evaluate the current growth rate and future growth potential of your market. If it’s not fast enough, then find a new and faster market to target (check out the next section for how to find a growing market). Your market ought to be experiencing at least 5 percent overall annual growth (although my preference is for a 10 percent or better growth rate). Anything slower than 5 percent makes it hard to grow your own business. Figure 2-1 illustrates the market-growth strategy.

Figure 2-1: Growing with the market.

To assess your market’s growth potential, think of one or several simple indicators of your market’s overall growth rate and use them to gauge market growth. These indicators include the year-to-year trend in industry-wide sales, the trend in number of customers, and the trend in type and size of purchases per customer. If you find that the market is shrinking or static, then you need to look for a growth opportunity.

Sometimes, finding a direct measure of your market’s size and growth rate is difficult. For example, if you sell office equipment and furniture in the greater Chicago area, your market is the dollar value of all office furniture purchased in that area. Can you find out what that figure is? Not very easily, if at all, so you need to find indirect indicators of your market’s growth rate that you can use instead. Statistics on business employment in Chicago are useful because as business employment grows, so does the need for furniture. If corporate headquarters are leaving the downtown area or laying off workers, then you can assume the overall market for office furniture is shrinking. In fact, when I did a quick Internet search, I found that Chicago lost about a half a million jobs in 2008, after experiencing job creation earlier in the decade as software and other companies sprang up. So it sounds like the office furniture market in Chicago is, at the time of this writing, shrinking.

Responding to a flat or shrinking market

When faced with a declining market, do the following to adjust to the growth rate:

Reduce retail stores and other major investments to avoid losses.

Eliminate low-margin products from your line so you can survive in a slow market.

Look for other places to sell your product or find another product line to sell that offers more growth potential.

Don’t waste your time trying to grow and prosper in an unhealthy market. By keeping a regular eye on market growth rates and focusing on selling into growth markets, you simultaneously ensure that you can grow your sales and increase the ease of operating at a profit. Slow-growth and no-growth markets are brutally competitive. To win sales in either case you often have to slash prices, ruining your profit margins. That’s why smart marketers make a strategic point of focusing on growth markets. They also keep careful track of the growth rate in their market so as to be alert to a slowdown that may indicate a need to move on again.

To identify the best market for your future growth, ask yourself where growth is. Some types of customers may be increasing in number while others are declining (for instance, the United States has a lot of consumers in their 20s, so some marketers are shifting away from older consumers and targeting the newer ones). Furthermore, certain types of businesses are expanding (such as healthcare businesses), so a business-to-business marketer can grow by providing specific products or services to them. Also, geographic areas vary in their economic health and strength, so if you’re willing to relocate or expand into new markets, you can target cities or states with relatively strong economies.

Growing with a Market Expansion Strategy

Market expansion is the most common strategy in marketing. The idea is to start selling to new groups of prospective customers. If you find a way to get in front of more prospects than last year, you should be able to make more sales than last year, too (see Chapters 10, 12, 13, and 16 for specific ways).

Two powerful ways to expand your market (and business) involve introducing more products into the market, which can give you access to multiple new customer bases, and taking advantage of a product that’s especially popular, which allows you to piggyback sales of other products when customers are drawn in by your bestseller. The sections that follow highlight how you can go about accomplishing both.

Offering more products

Introducing new products is a strong way to expand your share of a particular market — eventually. If you sold only 10 products last year, and you offer 20 this year, you just may find that your sales double, too. Of course, it’s quite likely that the new products won’t sell as well as your old ones at first, but if you persist, you should be able to ramp up their sales over the course of a few years.

When looking to offer more products, you have two options:

Add new products simply by reselling or distributing products that complement your current line and meet some need of your current customer base.

Innovate to create one or more new products that nobody else sells.

Either way, you have the two-fold challenge of informing customers that you have something new to offer and convincing them to take a look. That’s why being especially visible and persistent in the first few months of your campaign to open a new market is so crucial. A concentrated blast of marketing communications is the key to opening a new market successfully.

Create visibility by showing people your brand or product often and in a consistent, professional manner. You can do this through advertising, direct mail, e-mail blasts, paid placement of your Web address for key-term searches, signage (such as billboards and transit ads), sales calls, or presence at conferences and trade shows. Plan to use at least three of these or similar methods in the beginning of your campaign to open a new market (see Parts II and III for details).

Risks and costs increase when you experiment with new products — defined as anything you’re not accustomed to making and marketing. Consequently, you should discount your first year’s sales projections for a new market by some factor to reflect the degree of risk. A good general rule is to cut back the sales projections by 20 to 50 percent, depending on your judgment of how new and risky the product is to you and your team. It may also cost you double the time and money to make each sale when entering a new market, because your new prospects won’t be familiar with your brand, and you likely won’t have a well-defined marketing formula at the start. Budget accordingly.

Riding a bestseller to the top

If you have a bestseller on your hands — in other words, a product that outsells your other products by a multiple, which means it ought to sell at least three times as much as anything else — why not make the most of it? Some marketing experts look for bestsellers to achieve sales that are at least ten times the norm; outstanding bestsellers can achieve a hundred or more times the normal level of sales for a product in their category. If you have just one bestseller in your line, growing your revenues and profits is a piece of cake.

How do you create a bestselling product? First, look for one. Don’t be content with products that sell moderately well. Keep looking for something that has more excitement and potential. Test many alternatives. When you find one that seems to have momentum (you’ll know it has momentum when early sales figures surprise you by their rapid growth), quickly refocus your marketing efforts on that product. Make it the heart of sales calls and ads, feature it at the top of your Web site’s home page, talk to the media about it, and offer specials for new customers who try it. Bestsellers are found and made by marketers who believe in them. Be a believer!

When you have a product with bestseller potential, your marketing strategy should be to ride it as hard and far as you can. Write a marketing plan that puts the majority of your budget and efforts behind the bestseller and gives the rest of your product line as minimal a budget as you think you can get away with. The bestseller will tend to lift all sales by attracting customers, so don’t worry about the rest of your products.

After you have a bestseller, you should see your profits grow. Use some of these profits to look for the next bestseller. Why? Because eventually, your bestseller will lose its momentum. Your best bet is to find another bestseller, which may take a while, so you can have it ready and waiting in the wings. Test ideas and options, and be patient. If you can’t find another bestseller, switch to another marketing strategy. You don’t have to have a bestseller to succeed, but it sure is nice if you can find a product that fits this strategy.

Specializing with a Market Segmentation Strategy

A market segmentation strategy is a strategy in which you target and cater to (or specialize in) just one narrow type or group of customer. The object of this approach is to be so well-suited to that specialized customer that you become the top seller in your segment. The main way to develop a segmentation strategy is to take a look at your current customers and identify one particular type that seems most profitable for you right now. Or if a subset of your customers is growing faster than the rest, consider specializing in those types of customers to gain more of their business.

The advantage of a segmentation strategy is that it allows you to tailor your product and your entire marketing effort to a clearly defined group with uniform, specific characteristics. For example, the consulting firm that targets only the healthcare industry knows that prospective clients can be found at a handful of healthcare industry conferences and that they have certain common concerns around which consulting services can be focused. Many smaller consulting firms target a narrowly defined market segment in order to compete against larger, less specialized consulting firms.

If you’re in the consulting business, you can specialize in nonprofits, for example, instead of trying to be a consultant to all businesses. If you sell office furniture, you can decide whether to focus on corporate sales, small businesses, government offices, schools, or home offices. Each segment has different needs and buying patterns, and at any particular time, one of these segments is going to be easier for you to dominate (and it may be growing faster, too). As an added bonus, marketing is usually easier and less expensive when you’re highly specialized because you know exactly where to find your customers.

Figure 2-2 illustrates the way you can divide a particular market into segments.

Figure 2-2: Segmenting a market can help you dominate that niche.

The next sections explain how to determine whether a market segmentation strategy is right for you and how to expand your business by focusing on more than one specific target customer base.

Gauging whether specializing is a good move

Specializing in a specific market segment can give you the momentum you need to power past your competition, but it may not always be the right approach for your operation. The segmentation strategy may work well for you if

You think your business can be more profitable by specializing in a more narrowly defined segment than you do now.

You face too many competitors in your broader market and can’t seem to carve out a stable, profitable customer base of your own.

It takes better advantage of things you’re good at.

You’re too small to be one of the leaders in your overall market or industry. Maybe you can be the leader in a specific segment of your market.

Adding a segment to expand your market

If you’re running out of customers and market and need to expand (see the earlier “Growing with a Market Expansion Strategy” section), one way to do so is to decide to target a new segment. For example, the consulting firm specializing in coaching healthcare executives can decide to start offering a similar service to nonprofits. A different approach and marketing program may be needed, because the two industries are different in many ways and have only partial overlap (some hospitals are nonprofits, but many nonprofits aren’t hospitals). By specializing in two segments rather than just one, the firm may be able to grow its total sales significantly while still maintaining a grasp in niche markets that gives it an edge over the competition.

Developing a Market Share Strategy

The bigger you are in comparison to your competitors, the more profitable you’ll be. Scale helps. That’s why trying to be relatively big is a good idea. A powerful strategy is to increase your market share through your marketing activities. In essence, that means taking some business from your competitors. Market share is, very simply, your sales as a percentage of total sales for your product category in your market (or in your market segment if you use a segmentation strategy). If you sell $2 million worth of shark teeth and the world market totals $20 million per year, then your share of the global shark teeth market is 10 percent. It’s that simple. Or is it?

To help you comprehend how increasing your market share can be beneficial for you and your business, the following sections provide some basics on this strategy and how you can implement it.

Choosing a unit

Before you can completely determine your market share, you must know which unit (what you’re measuring sales in) you’re going to reference. Dollars, pesos, containers, or grams are fine — as long as you use the same unit throughout. Just pick whatever seems to make sense for your product and the information you have access to.

Estimating market share

To effectively increase your market share, you must have an accurate picture of how large your market is and what your current share of it is. Take a look at this simple method for estimating market size and share (you can even sketch it out on the back of a napkin if you haven’t the time or money for fancier approaches):

1. Estimate the number of customers in your market.

For instance, guess how many people in your country are likely to buy toothpaste, or how many businesses in your city buy consulting services.

2. Estimate how much each customer buys a year, on average.

Does each customer buy six tubes of toothpaste? Fifteen hours of consulting services? You can check your sales records, or ask some people what they do, to make your estimate as accurate as possible.

3. Multiply the two figures together to get the total size of the annual market and then divide your unit sales into it to get your share.

For example, if you import fine English teas to the U.S. market and wholesale them to grocery stores and specialty shops, you can look up U.S. tea wholesalers by visiting www.census.gov (where the latest U.S. Census data is posted), selecting the Economic Census link on the home page, clicking on the 2007 Economic Census link under the Get Data heading (left-hand side of the page), and clicking on the Search for data sets link under the Detailed Statistics bullet (this is where information by industry is posted as it becomes available). Please note that Census.gov is edited fairly often and may look different when you visit it. Persist and you can find details on your industry.

If you were to research tea sales, you may find out that there are 98 tea wholesalers with a total of $3.886 million in annual sales. If your sales of tea are $525,000, then your market share is 0.525 ÷ 3.886, or 13.5 percent. (My numbers may be out of date by the time you read this, but the source — the industry series of the U.S. Census — is a great place for all sorts of market statistics. Check it out.)

Alternatively, you may estimate that three-quarters of the wholesalers handle low-cost, inexpensive teas and therefore don’t compete directly with you. In that case, you can calculate your market share of the quarter of total sales that are similar specialty teas as 0.525 ÷ (0.25 × 3.886), which gives you 54 percent. That’s a much larger share based on a narrower definition of the market. Estimating your market share helps you determine which market share numbers are correct.

Understanding where your product fits in the market

In order to create a market share strategy, you need to clearly identify and define your product and where it fits into your market. In other words, you need to know your product category: the general grouping of competitive products to which your product belongs (be it merchandise or a service). Knowing your product category is extremely important. If you don’t know where your product fits into the market, you can’t begin to develop a strategy to build on and increase your existing market share. For example, if you sell specialty teas, are you competing with mass-market brands or not? Should you count their sales in your market calculations and try to win sales from them?

To get an accurate picture of your product category, you really need to obtain feedback from your customers. Doing so helps you create goals to drive your planning, as explained in the following sections.

Ask your customers

Your customers can provide you with valuable information and help you determine exactly where your product fits in the market. What matters is customer perception: how the customer sees the category. So watch your customers or ask them to find out what their purchase options are (see Chapter 4 if you want to conduct a formal study). Get a feel for how they view their choices. Then include all the likely or close choices in your definition of the market.

To stick with the tea example, are they choosing among all the tea options, or just some of them? With specialty teas, you may find that a majority of consumers sometimes drink the cheaper mass-market brands too. You may also find that you must, as a wholesaler, fight the mass-market brands for shelf space in grocery stores and mentions on restaurant menus. So you probably do need to use total market sales as your base, not just specialty sales.

On the other hand, you compete more closely against other specialty teas, so you may want to track this smaller market share number also and set a secondary goal for it. A wholesale tea importer’s strategic goals may therefore look something like this:

Increase dollar sales of our products to U.S.-end tea consumers from 13.5 percent to 15 percent.

Protect our share of the specialty tea market by keeping it at 54 percent or higher.

Differentiate ourselves even more from mass-market tea brands by emphasizing what makes our tea special to avoid having to compete directly against much larger marketers.

Make a plan

To achieve your market share goals, you must plan accordingly and look at what you need to do to get the market share you want. For starters, a wholesaler needs retail shelf space, so you may need to push to win a larger share of shelf space from retailers. And to earn the right to this shelf space, you may need to do some consumer advertising or publicity, provide the stores with good point-of-purchase displays or signs, improve your product packaging, or do other things to help ensure that consumers take a stronger interest in buying your products.

This plan needs to revolve around the goal of increasing share of tea sales by 1.5 percentage points. Each point of share is worth roughly $40,000 in annual sales (one percent of the total sales in the market), so a plan that involves spending, say, an extra $25,000 to win a 1.5-percent share gain can provide an extra $60,000 if it works. But will it work? To be cautious, you, as the marketer, may want to discount this projection of $60,000 in additional sales by a risk factor of, say, 25 percent, which cuts your projected gain back to $45,000.

Then consider timing. Remember that the plan can’t achieve the full gain in the first month of the year. A sales projection starting at the current level of sales in the first month and ramping up to the projected increase by, say, the sixth month, may be reasonable. Dividing $45,000 by 12 to find the monthly value of the risk-discounted 1.5 share point increase gives you $3,750 in extra monthly sales for the sixth month and beyond. Lower increases apply to earliermonths when the program is just starting to kick in. But the marketing expenses tend to be concentrated in the early months, reflecting the need to invest in advance in order to grow your market share.

Knowing your competitors

So what if your competitors have more market share than you? Don’t fear them; use them instead! Study your closest and/or most successful competitors to figure out how you’re going to gain market share. The better you understand your competitors, the more easily you can take customers away from them.

Ask yourself what your competitors do well, how they take business from you now, and what new initiatives they’re trying this year. Talk to customers, suppliers, distributors, and anyone else with good knowledge of your competitors’ practices and gather any online information about them from their Web sites. Also, collect their marketing materials and brochures and keep track of any information you come across on how they market. For example, if they’re picking up good business by having a booth at a trade show you don’t attend, consider getting a booth next time to make sure you’re able to compete against them there.

Studying market trends and revising if need be

Market share gives you a simple way of comparing your progress to your competitors from period to period. If your share drops, you’re losing; if your share grows, you’re winning. It’s that simple. Consequently, most marketing programs are based at least partly on a strategic market share goal, which is the percentage of sales you want to win during a specific period, such as a year. For example, you can say, “Increase share from 5 percent to 7 percent by introducing a product upgrade and increasing our use of trial-stimulating special offers,” which is a clear goal.

You also need to study the market and see how your products compare year to year and against your competition. The postmortem on last year’s program should always be based on an examination of what market share change accompanied it. (If you don’t already do routine postmortems, or careful analyses of what happened and why it differed positively or negatively from your plans, you should. The planning process in Chapter 3 takes you through an analysis of past results, along with plans for improving your program and results in the future.) If the past period’s program doubled your market share, seriously consider replicating it. But if your market share stayed the same or fell, you’re ready for something new. Note: Whether or not you make share gain the focus of your marketing program, at least keep it in mind and try not to lose any share.

Designing a Positioning Strategy

A positioning strategy takes a psychological approach to marketing. It focuses on getting customers or prospects to see your product in a favorable light and think of it before competitors’ offerings. The positioning goal you articulate for this kind of strategy is the position your product holds in the customer’s mind. The following sections break down how to find your position and craft your positioning strategy.

Your positioning strategy can be as simple as saying that you want your brand to be the easiest to buy, or as complex as saying your brand is easier to purchase, more affordable, hipper, and more contemporary than the competition. Just make sure your claims are truthful and believable.

Envisioning your position: An exercise in observation and creativity

Good positioning means your product has a prime parking space in customers’ minds thanks to its strong, clear image. People recognize your brand and know immediately what it stands for. If you’re in a fairly new or uncompetitive market, standing out in customers’ minds should be easy. But if a lot of other marketers are involved, as in older, well-established markets, chances are they’ve already used positioning strategies and secured their places in customers’ minds. That’s why it’s important not to get hung up on what you want your positioning to be. Instead, focus on what it needs to be in order to resonate and stick.

To help you figure out your position compared to other brands, start by drawing a simple, two-line graph. The two lines represent the range, from high to low, of the two core dimensions of your positioning strategy. You find these dimensions by asking yourself — and ideally some talkative customers, too — what the main differences between different products are. The differences may be price and quality, or any number of other possible variables, depending on the product in question. (See Chapter 4 for help conducting your customer research.) Map all the major competitors and look for a space where you can fit your brand.

For example, if you’re marketing soap, your dimensions can be how gentle or harsh the soaps are, as well as how natural they are. A brand that claims to be all natural and as gentle as the rain is obviously in the gentle and natural quadrant. Another brand that claims to be tough on dirt and germs is going to score low on the all-natural scale and high on the harsh scale, placing it squarely in the opposite quadrant. If the marketers of these two brands consistently communicate their different positions, the two brands won’t compete directly. Consumers who want a gentle, natural soap buy one brand, whereas consumers who want a strong soap that kills germs buy the other. Both marketers can succeed by virtue of their unique positioning strategies.

Writing a positioning strategy: The how-to

After you’re clear on what the consumer values most (see the preceding section, as well as Chapter 4), position your product in relation to that. For example, if bank customers say in a survey that they’re desperate for better interest rates, then a bank’s advertising can focus on a special, high-interest rate introductory offer. To refine your positioning strategy and make sure it gets incorporated into all your marketing communications, you need to write down a positioning statement. Fortunately, writing a positioning statement is pretty easy. Just follow these two simple steps:

1. Answer the following questions:

• What type of customer do you target?

• What attribute does the customer value most?

• What do you do for that customer with respect to that attribute?

• How do you fulfill your customer’s wants and needs?

• Why do you do it better than the competition?

2. Fill in the following with your own words:

• Our product offers the following benefit (which the customer values):

• To the following customers (describe target segment):

• Our product is better than competitors in the following manner:

• We can prove we’re the best because of (provide evidence/differences):

Here are some of the common approaches for a positioning strategy:

You may position against a competitor. “Our interest rates are lower than XYZ Bank’s.” (This tactic is a natural in a mature product category, where the competitive strategy applies.)

You may emphasize a distinctive benefit. “The only peanut butter with no harmful trans fats.”

You can affiliate yourself with something the customer values. “The toothpaste most often recommended by dentists.” (Doing so allows some of the virtues of this other thing to rub off on your brand.) A celebrity endorser, an image of a happy family playing on the beach, a richly appointed manor house set in beautiful gardens, a friendly giant: All have been used to position products favorably in consumers’ minds.

Write your positioning strategy in big print and post it above your desk to make sure you stay focused on its execution. Handing out copies of it to your ad agency, distributor, publicist, salespeople, and anyone else who works on or in your marketing program also pays off.

Considering Other Core Strategies

Are there other winning marketing strategies? Certainly. In fact, strategy, like everything in marketing, is limited only by your imagination and initiative. If you can think of a better approach to strategy, go for it. The following sections present a few examples of other proven marketing strategies. Perhaps one of them may work for you.

Simplicity marketing

With simplicity marketing, you position your business as simpler, easier to understand, and easier to use or work with than the competition. For example, I’m usually in a hurry, so I remember being excited when they first introduced gas pumps that allowed you to swipe your credit card. It’s so simple and quick — and a perfect example of a simplicity strategy.

Some customers are willing to pay a premium to avoid complexity and make purchase decisions simply and quickly. Can this approach be useful to customers in your market? Look for technologies or processes that can make your customers’ lives simpler and easier. For example, try making it easy to reorder on your Web site by storing information about what customers last purchased so they don’t have to search through many options to find the right item.

Quality strategies

Most marketers grossly underrate quality. All else being anywhere near equal, a majority of customers choose the higher-quality option. But be careful to find out what your customers think the word quality means. They may have a different view from you. Also, be careful to integrate your quality-based marketing messages with a genuine commitment to quality in all aspects of your business.

You can’t just say you’re better than the competition; you really have to deliver. But if customers see you as superior on even one dimension of quality — then by all means emphasize that in your marketing. Quote customer testimonials praising your quality, describe your commitment to quality in your marketing materials, and make trial usage easy for prospective customers so they can experience your quality too. And make sure your pricing is consistent with a high-quality image. Don’t advertise cheap prices or deep discounts, which signal cheapness, not quality.

Reminder strategies

A reminder strategy is good when you expect that people will buy your product if they think of it — but they may not without a reminder. A lot of routine purchases benefit from this strategy (Got milk?).

Point-of-purchase (POP) marketing is often an effective way to implement the reminder strategy. Point-of-purchase marketing simply means doing whatever advertising is necessary to sway the consumer your way at the time and place of his purchase. For retail products, this often means a clever in-store display or sign to remind the consumer about your product.

Wenger NA promotes its Swiss Army knife product line in jewelry and knife stores by offering it in attractive, attention-getting countertop display cases. Although the pocketknife market has been mature for decades, POP displays remind consumers about the option of buying a Swiss Army knife as a gift — for someone else or even for themselves. Another great POP program is the displays of Lindt chocolates in the front of Borders bookstores. Next time you go to any store, take a look at the wide variety of floor, shelf, and wall racks used for POP displays, as well as the wide range of creative signs and designs used to highlight a product and remind consumers that it’s available.

Innovative distribution strategies

Sometimes the most important feature of a purchase is when and where people can buy it. With innovative distribution strategies, you can capture sales from your competitors by being more convenient or available than other options.

For example, can you recall the brand of gas you purchased the last time you stopped at a highway rest stop? Probably not, because it didn’t matter. Whatever brand was offered, you bought it because you needed gas, and highway rest stops only offer one or two options. The gas station owner who manages to secure one of the slots at a rest stop is using a distribution strategy. As the old saying goes, there are three secrets of success in retail: location, location, location.

The three rules of success actually hold true in all businesses, not just in retail. Always consider what you can do to be more present and convenient for your buyers. The Internet offers opportunities for innovative distribution, and many businesses are building online stores that make it easy to shop at midnight from the comfort of your own bed, or whenever and wherever you please. See Chapters 16 and 21 for details of how to win the marketing game through effective distribution.

Selling Innovative Products

Every product category has a limited life. At least in theory — and usually in all-too-real reality — some new type of product comes along to displace the old one. The result is called the product life cycle, a never-ending cycle of birth, growth, and decline, fueled by the endless inventiveness of competing businesses. Product categories arise, spread through the marketplace, and ultimately decline as replacements arise and begin their own life cycles. If you’re marketing an innovative product that’s just beginning to catch on (in what marketers call the growth phase of the life cycle), you can expect rapid growth in sales and profits. Fast-growing products are every marketer’s dream.

To visualize the advantages of selling a hot new product, ask yourself whether you’d rather be selling record players, tape decks, CD players, or MP3 players today. Obviously, the MP3 player, as the newest of these technologies for playing music (and other digital content), is the hottest. It’s easier to succeed when selling new, hot products than when selling faded old ones that are being replaced. As a strategic marketer, you need to keep a sharp eye on your product line and weed out any fading old products before they drag you down with them. Keep looking for adding hot new ones, so your marketing efforts will be supplemented by the natural growth of exciting new options.

Some marketers do hardcore product development and regularly file patents on their inventions. However, if you don’t, that’s okay. Most marketers source their products from elsewhere and resell them. That’s fine, but don’t forget to keep looking for new, better options. Make a strategic point of upgrading your product line (or services if you don’t sell products) to stay on the growth curve. Don’t let innovation pass you by. See Chapter 5 for tips on how to create innovations. Visit www.insightsformarketing.com for help adjusting the marketing of a product to fit the phase of its life cycle.

Writing Down and Regularly Reviewing Your Strategy

What’s your marketing strategy? Is it a pure version of one of the strategies reviewed in this chapter, or is it a variant (or even a combination) of more than one of them? Whatever it is, take some time to write it down clearly and thoughtfully. Put it in summary form in a single sentence. (If you must, add some bullet points to explain it in more detail.) After you write it down, don’t put it away in a drawer and forget about it. Keep it close by and review it on a regular basis.

Write a strategy that’s a clear statement of the direction you want your business’s or product’s marketing to take. This statement needs to be a big-picture game plan. With this strategy on paper, you can work on designing good products and packaging, friendly services, and impressive ads that communicate your quality to consumers. Here’s what one company’s marketing strategy looks like:

Our strategy is to maximize the quality of our security alarm products and services through good engineering and to grow our share of a competitive market by communicating our superior quality to high-end customers.

After you develop a marketing strategy, be sure to follow it and make it obvious in all that you do. In fact, I highly recommend that you do some formal planning to figure out exactly how you’ll implement your strategy in all aspects of your marketing program. (Never fear: I show you how to develop a plan as painlessly as possible in Chapter 3.) After you adopt a specific marketing strategy, you must actually read it from time to time and check that you’re following it. I’m often amazed at the lack of relationship between marketers’ strategies and their actions. Everyone involved in your organization’s marketing needs to understand how their work ties to the strategy.