Marketing Triumph ingredients

The biggest marketing mistake I've made by now is beleiving I can make people moving just because I have a great idea. Not to humiliate personal skills and abilities, it is impossible to be the only marketing and innovation drive.

But it is possible to break the rules. The team, not the only person can make it. And for a leader - think out a set of actions, create a reasonable budget, get personnel, create a team (put teambuilding and educational expenses into the budget and use it) and set the market on fire.

To succeed, you need three components. Clarity of the mind + Team + Budget = Marketing Triumph.

Loose budget means lots of plans and weak implementation.
Weak team means you will abandon most of the plans' implementation due to the lack of time and efficiency.
Blurred mind means money spent for no purpose.

Clarity of the mind + Team + Budget = Marketing Triumph. Shake well. Enjoy.

Took me 1 year to find the recipy.

Revlon reminescence

What marketers sell is hope.

By Seth Godin.

Seth Godin on expensive logos:

I guess the punchline is: take the time and money and effort you'd put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead.

Key lessons for marketing in a recession

Coachie has written a list of notes from a report "Key lessons for marketing in a recession".

I can't say I agree in full, there are some typical marketing self-esteem lies to approve marketing existence. But for sure I agree that companies which cut marketing budgets are long term marketing losers. It was always easier and cheaper to maintain customer relationship rather than building them from scratch.

And of course, crisis is a great time to search for an opportunity and to use new alternative media which is cheaper than traditional one.

marketing essence

Marketing essence from Seth Godin:

Make big promises; overdeliver.

Mistakes:
- Making too big promises - unrealistic.
- Making not enough promises - not attractive.
- Deliver less than promised.

marketing strategy for decision making game

Well, the first course of electives has just finished. 15 sessions in 5 days with market simulations. 6 groups competing in two markets, starting with 2 products (similar for each group, 2 different segments). We didn't manage well - I'm not experienced in those types of games, but we made several remarkable mistakes to be mentioned and got lot's of experience. Basically, we learned how to manage a company with small budgets and were recovering every time after crisises. At the same time we launched successfully the product to a new market (correct strategy, but rather low profitability).

Some ideas.
- When all the companies have the same products, the only difference can be made by the strategy is by advertising (influencing perceptions) and allocating salesforce. First is good for pull strategy (influencing ultimate consumer), second is for push (working with channels).
- When a company start launching differentiated brands, it is important to fit into segment needs/requirements (price is included). The closer the better.
- Products become obsolete, segment's requirements are changing, and marketing is all about managing perceptions.

Pricing strategy.
- Wrong pricing can kill very successfull brand (specially when it is become obsolete). The leading on the segment can turn to total loss with one wrong pricing decision. Our wrong-priced brand couldn' recover even after drop in price and remarkable (for us, not for competitors) budget.
- While launching totally new product pricing can be made upon estimates from the most similar products margins.

We also can have a remarkable market share, but low net contribution due to higher base cost and lower margin. We did it several times until discovered the problem. Common truth, but dramatic consequenses.

Managing small budgets:
- You always need to think in advance. Investing in rnd now will require a launch money. Is it possible to manage bigger brand portfolio with existing money? And with projected profits and budget? Sometimes we postponed launching and product become obsolete.
- It is better to have less brands but well positioned rather than to spread small budget among several promosing but not very profitable brands.

One more thing. We tended to create more advanced products that exceeded segments needs. Therefore we were less competitive on price (due to less margin). How could I forget about example of perfect tent - if you create tent with best materials and techs, it will cost you around 5000 eur (don't remember when and how we made those proximations), that's why producers normally go for simpler solutions.

One more remarque upon using marketing research data will follow if I can insert table.

marketing strategy decision making

The very first subject on electives for me is marketing strategy for decision making. We´re playing multyteams´game - market simulation. The very first round my team finished as the last one. Although we did quite a normal job (I can´t say that the job was good though) in terms of market contribution (at least it was positive and better than in previous perion), when being compared with others and with market figures (growth, for example), we showed the worst performance.

During my job as product manager I was always feeling that all product category´s growth is not enough, we can make it better by paying more attention, assigning more salesforce etc... But I just didn´t have any benchmarks - this information for different competitors is closed in Russian market.

Sometimes you need to run very fast just to stay at one place. But how fast should you run, you can understand only while looking on milestones.

more quotations from different classes

No classification. Just a list.

• Negotiation class: Education is complicating your life to make one of the others better.
• Ianna Contardo, Strategy: Drop your tools! (the resume of "Collapse of sensemaking in organizations: Mann Gulch case").
• Jacob Hornik: "Competition is running faster than competitor."
• Free markets online case (IS class?): ...without people who can sell a concept, ask for money and close deals, you are dead.
• InfoSystems (guest speaker): News evolutioned to entertainment. Funny or horror, it is now no more than a way to amuse people. We're going to have news we'd like to hear. (Look at your friend-feed or remember last time you decided to maintain frendocite - F). It's scaring - to have only news you like. And boring most of times.
• Cost accounting brain-washing (again, thanx for sharp eye of Mauricio): Normal costing is a costing system that traces direct costs to a cost object by using the actual quantities of direct-cost inputs and that allocates indirect costs based on budgeted indirect-costs rates times the actual quantities of the cost-allocation bases.
• Org.behavior (Pino Bethencour): Leadership is a hard work. The price leader often pays is lonlyness.
• Own note after 1st term: Perfectionism hurts.
• All classes: tree main concepts: added value, CSR (in all aspects) and 'It depends' (as an answer to any questions).
• OB: Gentelmen, that's a sad thing to mean nothing. Old Man, 12 angry men.
• Marketing (first awful professor on this subject): Sales are the people implementing marketing hopes and dreams into reality. That's how it should be.

from other blog notes

I've got the perfect marketing professor finally. My russian professors were at most regular (except one pricing guy who was tough, but ok). And here I was disappointed, even started hating the subject.

http://www.billcarney.org/

This guy changed a lot. I've got a bunch of quotations from his classes. Here they are.

• In our knowledge we have perception "the more the better". It depends upon whom this more belongs and how much they're paying for that.
• You make money on similarities, but differences cost you money.
• Approach to non-mutinational company - do product, do marketing idea and push everything to distributors - they should be interested in product distributio. Put marketing effort - promotion, sampling etc to them - you don't have time for that.Distributors know their markets. If you are ok to tell them what to do, you don't need them. Just go to the market and do it yourself.
• Marketing strategy is a carefully designed plan of actions which aim is to elicit specific response of a specific target group of customers. Official, but according to the scheme Who-What-How.
• Pricing is the marketing mix element by which you meet your financial obectives. Wrong price - unsatisfied consumer - lost profit - failed financial goal.
• All your efforts should be done to customers who are sesitive to your core business values. First focus on the customers that is easier to obtain.
• Salestaff compensation normally consists of 3 parts: base salary, comission, bonus. What the mix? Depends upon your target. Sales compensation is now used for manipulating. Base salary is a primary control - discipline, business practices etc. Comission which is a percentage from sales is a working icentive, the more you sell the more u get. And finally bonus is an appreciation of teamwork and collaboration. You as a manager define the mix since you know your staff better.