Smart Marketing: An Essential Guide for Smaller Businesses

By Wayne Attwell

Marketing is a battle fought in the minds of your customers. By understanding how customers think and make decisions, you can develop a more compelling marketing strategy that will increase sales and improve bottom line profit.

Smart Marketing shows you how to:
- Identify new customers that are most likely (and willing) to buy from you
- Understand how they make buying decisions and how to use this to your advantage
- Build a compelling marketing pitch that sets you apart from competitors and enables you to sell at a premium price
- Develop a cost-effective promotional programme using the latest online and social platforms as well as traditional media

By applying the proven concepts of Need Satisfaction MarketingTM ANY business owner or manager can create a powerfully different and successful brand. The techniques, ideas and models presented in the book are based on over ten years of direct consulting with over 400 companies across the world.

Smart Marketing is a toolbox of valuable resources enabling the reader to build and manage their own brand. Plus, readers get exclusive access to additional free marketing resources, tools and planning templates on the author's website (details provided inside the book).

The National Business Review says, "This book is a must for business owners who know they need to think about their brand but don’t know where to start".

This is what readers are saying about Smart Marketing...

“Phenomenal. Smart Marketing is a highly practical book with tons of examples that illustrate how the presented tools of Need Satisfaction Marketing work in reality. Wayne uncovers in an easy to follow way how customer decisions are a manifestation of human mind processes. In my opinion the book demystifies marketing for small businesses and provides the readers with confidence that they can go ahead and start generating more business today. If you have a small business, work on a start-up or spin - off project and customer acquisition and retention is important for you this is a must read (and must follow) book!”

“An excellent book. Practical, pragmatic and easy to follow. Highly recommend it to any business wanting to make a real difference to their marketing.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wayne Attwell
• Release date: Aug 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9780473253974

Wayne Attwell

Internationally trained in business management and marketing strategy, Wayne Attwell has held numerous senior marketing, sales and general management positions. He has also been involved in several business start-ups, mergers and acquisitions. In 2004 he started a specialist brand marketing agency. Boasting a client list that included some of the most successful and recognisable brands in New Zealand, it came to be recognised as a leading integrated marketing agency. In 2013 Wayne established a new marketing business that specialises in presenting interactive marketing workshops for smaller businesses. His professional interest lies in how recent discoveries in cognitive neuroscience can be used to understand and influence the way brands are marketed, thereby improving their bottom-line performance. Wayne has consulted extensively to start-ups and to many established businesses across a wide range of industries such as software, technology, eCommerce, consumer, pharmaceuticals, local government, non-profit, utilities, infrastructure, education, arts, tourism and travel, manufacturing and agriculture. These organisations range from small privately held companies through to large corporate enterprises. Wayne’s international experience covers New Zealand, North America, Central Europe, Japan, United Kingdom and South Africa. As a sought-after commentator on brand and marketing strategy by the mainstream media and business press, his views and opinions have been widely published. He is a member of the executive leadership team of the Waikato Digital Industry Forum and is principal marketing consultant to Soda Inc., of New Zealand’s leading business incubators. Find out more at www.wayneattwell.com.

Book preview

Contents

Chapter 1

Introduction

Chapter 2

Why brand strategy matters

Chapter 3

A brand development methodology

Chapter 4

The good, the bad, and the ugly

Chapter 5

Building an effective organisation

Chapter 6

Who are you marketing to?

Chapter 7

How your customers make decisions

Chapter 8

The secret behind successful marketing

Chapter 9

To assume makes an ass of you and me

Chapter 10

It’s all about being unique

Chapter 11

A few thoughts on pricing

Chapter 12

Competition and your market position

Chapter 13

Own a hill then defend it

Chapter 14

Brand storytelling that sells

Chapter 15

Validating your unique proposition

Chapter 16

Did your customer have a brand orgasm?

Chapter 17

Online is different, but exactly the same

Chapter 18

Engagement platforms—theories and models

Chapter 19

Our world is changing

Chapter 20

It won’t happen by magic

Chapter 21

About the author

Chapter 22

Glossary

Smart Marketing

Build a powerful brand through

Need Satisfaction Marketing™

wayne Attwell

SMART BOOKS | NEW ZEALAND

SMART MARKETING

Build a powerful brand through Need Satisfaction Marketing™

Wayne Attwell

Published by Smart Books, New Zealand. Smashwords Edition.

Copyright 2013 Wayne Attwell. All rights reserved.

Smashwords Edition, Licence Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be resold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

The author asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the author.

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate information, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for changes that occur after publication. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages. Any use of the information in this book is at the reader’s discretion.

All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

Cover design: Annette Crowther, Bold Horizon Creative

ISBN 978-0-473-25398-1

No trees were harmed in the production of this eBook.

Smart Marketing is also available in softcover print - visit www.wayneattwell.com

Acknowledgements

Writing a book is a long, lonely and difficult road and it cannot be achieved without the support and help of a great team. My deepest gratitude and thanks to Petr Adamek and Geoff Greenwood for their technical review and useful suggestions; to Dr Sasha Boer for her professional review and valuable edits; to my business partner at Marketing Brainiacs, Kay Spencer, for her diligent approach to the subtleties and nuances of the book as well as her insightful input; to Sandra The Scribe Clark for her incisively intelligent edits and for remaining faithful to the flow and style of the book. I’m also deeply grateful to my beautiful partner Annette Crowther, for her unswerving support, encouragement, patience, thoughtful feedback and outstanding cover design. My sincere thanks to my peers who have generously allowed me to include their words in this book, and to my clients, who allowed me to learn with them and earn a living at the same time.

Need Satisfaction Marketing™

Understand what your customers REALLY want, not what you THINK they want, then offer them unique benefits that satisfy their needs, better than anyone else can.

Wayne Attwell—brand strategist

Chapter 1

Introduction

Introduction

As we move out of the worst recession since the Great Depression of the late 1920s, the focus of business is changing; and it needs to. If you asked businesses over the past few years what their priority was, many would have said that survival was foremost in their minds. But as the world economy starts to stabilise and pick up momentum there’s a need for a shift of focus from survival to growth and expansion.

The reality is that, both in periods of recession and in prosperous times, many businesses fail to achieve their full potential. There are numerous reasons for this, but in a large number of cases they don’t fully understand their market and the real needs that motivate their customers to buy. To make matters worse, they’re often unable to develop and then communicate a unique value proposition that resonates positively with their customers and differentiates them from competitors. As a result they’re unable to make enough sales at a sufficiently high profit margin to grow and achieve their full potential and promise.

When I started my brand marketing agency in 2004 my purpose was not only to build a successful business of my own, but also to develop a robust marketing model that would help my clients to substantially improve the effectiveness of their marketing, in turn improving their bottom-line profitability and ability to grow.

Smart Marketing is the result of that journey. It’s a pragmatic book illustrated with real-life examples and practical models to help smaller businesses to become better marketers and thereby improve their overall business performance. By means of a logical and easy-to-understand planning process it will show you how to rapidly create a powerfully different and successful brand, and how to present it to the market in an engaging and memorable way.

I believe you’ll find the material and ideas effective whether you’re a start-up creating a new brand from the ground up, or an organisation re-inventing itself or looking to invigorate an existing brand. By understanding the structure and mechanisms that underpin marketing and strategy, it’s possible to apply a methodology and framework to ANY organisation, including commercial businesses, social enterprises, quasi-state organisations, even cities and regions.

The theories and methodologies presented are the same as the big guys use. There are no mysteries—they’re right here for you to take and make your own. Successful mega brands don’t achieve their lofty market positions by luck. They apply best practice to every aspect of their businesses and make smart marketing decisions based on deep customer insights and a clear understanding of how customers make decisions. It’s easy (and common) for smaller businesses to look at the big brands and conclude that, although these good business practices work for large corporations, they often seem unachievable and possibly less relevant in the small business context.

Truth be told, the big guys succeed because they do a lot of things well, and many smaller businesses falter because they don’t.

So where exactly does brand strategy, as it’s discussed in this book, fit into the overall marketing and business planning process? Applying the principles of the Lean Business movement, which is revolutionising the way businesses and brands are created, Smart Marketing strips down the traditional marketing model and strategy process to the most important elements needed to build a powerful brand.

Brand strategy is a critical subset of the marketing plan–it focuses mainly on uncovering and satisfying valid customer needs through a unique value proposition, and effectively communicating and delivering this value promise to the market. The complete marketing plan (incorporating product, pricing and distribution strategies) is in turn a component of the overall business plan.

figure1.2.svg

Fig 1.2—Brand strategy is a subset of the overall business and marketing plans

Fig 1.2 illustrates this hierarchy. The smaller business with no internal marketing department or dedicated and suitably qualified marketing resources will probably get the most out of this book. I don’t consider marketing and sales administrators who have simple marketing-related responsibilities, such as ordering brochure reprints or updating website content, to be suitably qualified marketing resources, certainly not at the brand strategy level. Smart Marketing was written with the smaller business in mind, although I believe that marketing practitioners at all levels are likely to find valuable nuggets throughout the pages.

Smart Marketing doesn’t limit itself exclusively to either consumer or commercial and industrial markets. Whilst some examples may be based on one or the other, the fact is that in marketing we engage with and sell to people, making much of the content of this book equally applicable and important to either group. There are of course some differences and varying levels of applicability, so I’ll rely on you to use common sense in determining how best to apply the material in your own situation. To simplify things, I use the phrase ‘customers’ to refer to potential customers or prospects within your target market, as well as existing customers. ‘Brand’, ‘company’, ‘business’ and ‘organisation’ should be seen as interchangeable terms. I also use the broad term ‘products’ to mean products, services and offerings.

It’s impossible to remove theory from marketing, but I’ve tried to present it at a level that any business manager can grasp and act upon, given some effort and application. The elements and aspects I’ve chosen to include have all proven themselves to be highly effective in the real world. Wherever possible I’ve tried to provide insight and logic behind what I say to give you a working understanding of marketing and why things are done in a particular way. As you’ll discover throughout the book, insight is a fundamental requirement for all successful marketing.

My interest is for your marketing efforts to rapidly translate into tangible bottom-line value; to this end, Smart Marketing will show you how to develop an effective brand strategy that can be quite easily implemented without having to re-invent your organisation. Winston Churchill summed up this approach when he said:

However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.

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Where you see the ‘Downloadable resource’ icon, you’ll be able to access the template and other useful resources at www.WayneAttwell.com. The login details are available at the end of chapter 20.

Chapter 2

WHY BRAND STRATEGY MATTERS

Strategy is about setting yourself apart from the competition. It’s not a matter of being better at what you do—it’s a matter of being different at what you do.

Michael Porter—management guru

WHY BRAND STRATEGY MATTERS

Brands are intangible. You cannot touch them, nor can you hold them. They exist in an emotional context in the minds of your customers and in the hearts of your staff. If both are not perfectly aligned then the brand cannot and will not be a star performer. The relevance of this is explained in later chapters, but I’d like you to keep this thought in mind as we work through the elements of brand strategy.

The benefits of brand strategy

An effective brand strategy provides many valuable benefits. Most importantly, good strategy creates a solid foundation for all marketing and promotional campaigns and improves bottom-line profitability. This is driven through the resulting brand message being presented as a compelling and unique value proposition based on accurate insights into the customers’ needs and buying behaviour, and not on guesswork or hunches.

Brand strategy is not only about the product or service, but threads itself through the entire organisation. Great brands create an authentic brand experience—from within the organisation right through to the end customer. This is a by-product of consciously building a culture within the organisation that’s in step with the brand promise. This concept will be explained in more detail in Chapter 5, The Organisational Brand DNA.

The business world is becoming more complex, competitive and challenging every day. Without a well-defined strategy it will become increasingly difficult to perform and prosper, or even survive for that matter. Through your brand strategy you determine how to communicate the value that you offer, and through the customer experience you actually deliver that promised value.

A long-standing concern I’ve had is that many smaller businesses don’t participate in strategy development or even formalized marketing for that matter. Some business owners are ignorant and some are just lazy. Others are probably just lucky that the stars have aligned for them. It’s not surprising that most businesses fail!

On the other hand, what excites me about this situation is that, if the majority of these businesses are not developing their strategies in an orderly and thoughtful fashion, a pot of gold awaits those who do make the effort. In business, the harder things are to do, the more I like them, because that means there’s likely to be less real competition. Thankfully, there are more inept and lazy business owners than smart ones, so you can quite easily create a competitive advantage through the development of an effective brand strategy. But remember, strategy has no value unless it’s followed up by action. Even the smartest and most carefully planned strategy will fail if no action plan is put in place and then implemented.

Brands can add meaning to our lives

The need to find meaning in life is one of the essential human traits that distinguish us from other species. Too many people wait for life to give them meaning rather than finding their own source of meaning. Viktor Frankl, in Man’s Search for Meaning, relates how the harrowing ordeals he suffered and observed in the German concentration camps during the Holocaust caused him to postulate that the prisoners who survived the camps were all motivated by clinging to some form of meaning within their pitiful lives. This may have been as simple as carrying a photo of a loved one whom they dreamed of seeing again, or the driving need to survive to tell their personal story.

Realising and understanding this innate human need for meaning is a key factor in developing an effective brand strategy. Powerful brands create an emotional connection, which can offer at least