Page 20 - Selling the Invisible: A Field Guide to Modern Marketing - PDFDrive.com

The First Rule of Marketing Planning

Unless warned otherwise, the people responsible for marketing a service almost
always will take up where they left off the last time they thought about
marketing.

Everyone will assume that the company is in the right business, basically
organized in the right way, and staffed as it should be staffed, give or take a few
thorns in everyone’s side.

And everyone’s focus for marketing for the year immediately will turn to
“How do we sell this?”

Instead, everyone should start at ground zero. They should ask, “Is this viable
anymore? Is this what the world wants?”

Have we added capabilities or skills that suggest that we should enlarge our
scope, to serve new markets? Should we develop or acquire related skills and
capabilities? Or should we narrow our scope, and leverage these specialized
skills and services we are developing to prospects looking for those specialties?

Whatever questions you ask, you should consistently follow the first rule of
marketing planning:

Always start at zero.

The Possible Service

Want a good model for marketing your service in the nineties? Study the
evolution of the automobile industry.

The first car met only some minimum standards because that is what products
and services do in stage one of any industry. In stage one, meeting acceptable
minimum standard s is the driving force: Get a basic, acceptably reliable product.
Buyers accept this minimal product—the first car, the first VCR, and the first
fast-food restaurant—because they desire the unique benefits it offers. Buyers
will accept with that good some bad—typically, the fact that bugs aren’t out and
the price is high. In the auto industry’s first stage, we had any color so long as it
was black and a product that got you there—and nothing more. Stage one in an
industry, then, is product-driven. Stage one companies offer their clients the
accepted product.

In stage two, competitors enter. Differentiation of this core product becomes
vital. Enter the marketers. They listen and make the refinements the customers
ask for: more colors, an ashtray so that drivers can smoke, and later an AM/FM