What's Inside

“If the are no customers, there is no business. And the only purpose of marketing is to find customers for businesses. Therefore, marketing is at the heart of every business.”

“In our experience, too many marketing executives believe they have an innate ability to make faultless snap decisions. They manage to retain this belief even as the projects on which they have made decisions—to introduce this new product, to run this ad campaign, to choose this media schedule, to adopt this positioning—routinely crash and burn. Chief marketing officers who embrace the idea of ‘thinking without thinking’ may help explain marketing programs in the middle of the bell curve—it’s failure—and why the average tenure is only 23 months.”

“Every marketing plan or marketing strategy begins by developing an understanding of what is taking place in the marketplace today. Smart companies do three things. The first is a marketing performance audit. The second is a best-practices bench marketing audit. The third is a marketing competency audit. All of these, whatever you call it, are looking in the rearview mirror to see where you are.”

“Management knows it cannot—indeed should not—appeal to everyone because that would be expensive and wasteful. Therefore, executives use their gut, picking a target that makes intuitive sense. These are target markets like ‘heavy users,’ ‘category users,’ ’15-to-22-year-olds,’ ’18-to-34-year-old women,’ or ‘nonbuyers/nonusers.’ Maybe these targets seem appropriate, but here again, the brain is smarter.”

“No one can know a priori the best way to segment a market. Yankelovich and Meer say—and we agree—that, to be valid, ‘a segmentation must identify groups that matter to a company’s financial performance.’ However, there’s just no way to know what factors will predict behavior and profitability before collecting one iota of data or running an ounce of analysis. Marketers should consider hundreds of ways to divide the market—not some pre-prescribed list—to create detail-rich, proprietary segments that competitors don’t even know exist.”

“Whether you are a small business or a major corporation, start with a clear understanding of the needs, problems, and pains (the motivations) of your prime target customers. It is a marketing axiom that the bigger the problem you can solve for buyers, the bigger the market response.”

“At the most simplistic level, the most appealing concept is a triple-shot espresso macchiato with soy milk for a quarter. The product may have enormous appeal, but if you sell much of it, it will put your coffee shop out of business.”

“Although marketers are trying to make sense of the media muddle and are experimenting with different vehicles, we have yet to see any solid evidence of most alternative media’s effectiveness, that is, its ability to affect sales and return on investment positively.”

“We’ve come to believe that agencies design many ads to impress the client and the advertising community. The last thing many agencies worry about is whether it tests well against its target market.”

“The good news for marketers is that there are several approaches that go well beyond one-dimensional circulation-type data, approaches that can be applied before, during, and after a sponsorship or event. The type of research a company can do is dictated more by sponsorship size, company budget, and availability of existing sales and tracking data than by lack of readily available tools. A small- to medium-size company is probably better off not trying to play on this field than spending the money on research that will likely show no or inconclusive effects.”

“The place for CMOs to start is by looking at the sales department as a client the way they look at the organization’s end customers. Marketing should view sales as an internal client and recognize that the salespeople are the ones on the street or on the phones or on the Internet. They are the ones who are touching customers with conversations and letters and presentations and the like, and they are clearly a key source of information that could make the marketing function much stronger.”

“Even sophisticated corporations develop marketing plans with no real knowledge of the relationship between marketing inputs and outputs. Top management set sales and profit objectives without any clear perception of whether they can be achieved. It is very unlikely a brand will obtain a 10 percent sales increase after a year when it has dropped by 3 percent, and certainly not without major marketing investments. Calling it a stretch goal does not make the 10 percent any more realistic or less demoralizing to those who have to try to reach it.”

“Whether a marketing plan is for a new product or service or an established one, if it does not relate inputs to outputs, companies have little way to know before launch whether the plan will work or whether there are ways to improve it to generate even greater sales and profits. Fortunately, it is now possible to develop a marketing plan that takes marketing inputs and outputs into account and establishes the relationship between them.”

“We find implementation often stalls because senior management is unable to relate to the proposed marketing strategy change. Having a business case in hand provides a mechanism to translate a good idea into the kind of investment trade-offs the senior manager faces every day. Moreover, quantifying the different impacts forces all of the affected functions—sales, customer service, logistics, manufacturing, and the like—to scrutinize the changes thoroughly so, one hopes, there are no unpleasant surprises later.”

“You want to choose the strategy that will increase the dollar value of your customers the most; you want them to be loyal, to buy your products more often, to tell their friends about them, and buy your new products. The organization, however, has limited marketing resources; where would they best be spent?”

“Marketing organizations are increasingly seeking to improve the efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability of marketing efforts. Those that orchestrate and optimize marketing resources—and close the gap between data and timely insights—will outperform their peer group in revenue and profit performance and create significant competitive advantage.”

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