It’s even scarier to think how many of the respondents hold MBA degrees in Marketing! What were they being taught at university? Frankly, I’m afraid to find out the answer…
Rather than dealing with an academic description of what marketing is (google Stanton’s definition, if you really, really need one), I wanted to talk about the essence of marketing, which involves one or both of the following four-letter words, repeatable in all company:
- NEED
- WANT
It amazes me how many marketers seem to ignore these two simple words. Unless one understands what the core need or want of a target market, how can one satisfy that need or want with the appropriate product or service? To whittle Stanton’s definition down to the basics, marketing is about getting paid for offering a product or service that satisfies a client’s needs and/or wants. Without understanding this, marketers are, for all intents and purposes, product pushers, and nothing more.
In my work, I constantly ask people about what their companies or organizations offer, and I usually get something about what their company does. What I try to do is get my clients and workshop participants to turn their thinking around and ask themsevels: "What does our product or service do for our customers?”
For example, I recently had coffee with a couple of colleagues, and one of them, an ambitious young insurance agent, said he was having difficulty in working out how to get clients to buy his product range.
The guy is very much client focused, as opposed to being focused on how much commission he makes – in other words, he’s in the business for the long-haul and wants long-term clients; a good thing, in my opinion.
My first question to him was what was he offering his clients. After a few goes at answering the query, he finally said, “I sell comfort.”
“Yes”, I answered, “you’re selling comfort, plus security, and peace of mind.” Just understanding what his offerings did for his clients, emotionally, opened his eyes to how he might be able to approach his customers in the future.
By understanding their needs/wants for ‘comfort’, he could tailor his offerings to meet them, and allow for changes in insurance coverage and investments as his clientele’s future requirements changed. This should build-in the potential to maximise client value at the beginning of the relationship, giving him an advantage over his competitors who are only interested in selling product to make commissions, short-term. It’s sure a heck of a lot easier to sell to a happy customer than constantly troll for new ones, the latter being the usual case in the Insurance Industry, I’m told.
This is why understanding the essence of what one’s products and services offer to fulfil the client’s needs and wants is the key to successful marketing.
In case you’re wondering, how do I define what my businesses do? We’re knowledge merchants, and how that knowledge is sold, its cost and in what form, is based entirely on the specific needs, wants and expectations of a particular client.
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