Marketing For Dummies®, 5th Edition
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Marketing is part science, part art and is truly one of the most fulfilling roles you can play in business.
Today, marketing embodies science through data and predictive analytics; psychology through consumer behavior studies and applications; emotions through events and engagement that spark inspiration and excitement; technology that breaks down boundaries; and art that invites imagination, innovation, and creativity beyond limits. And, as you read throughout this book, marketing involves fun and games, too.
But even with all the technologies available to create compelling programs to take products to market and capture a consumer’s lifetime value, marketing is a challenging endeavor. Consumer expectations and demands change frequently, their attention becomes increasingly fragmented due to all the time spent on mobile and social channels, and they have more purchasing options than ever because e‐commerce took down all the walls and barriers associated with location.
This edition of Marketing For Dummies helps you get a solid and working understanding of the marketing strategies, techniques, and technologies proven for today’s markets and consumer‐driven world that can help you build your business, no matter your size or whether you’re in B2B or B2C.
To succeed in any field of business, you need to clearly communicate what you do in a way that’s personally relevant, compelling, and exciting and taps into your customers’ aspirations, values, and ideals. You also need a plan. You need to map out your journey to take a product to market, increase its real and perceived value, partner with distributors and retailers or B2B channel managers, and secure loyalty and evangelism from your customers — all while you’re continuing to innovate new ideas for products and services that will keep your brand current and set you up for future success. Marketing isn’t for the fainthearted, but it is for those who love fun, creative, and exciting challenges.
As you read this book, remember, everything is possible! The key is to craft a plan that enables you to work smart and efficiently with the resources you have. It’s like mapping out a journey with a specific destination in mind and staying the course instead of veering off at tempting detours.
This book will serve as your guide whether you’re a business owner, marketing executive, or small business manager and want to plan and execute your marketing yourself. It will also guide you to think more about big‐picture ideas and identify smart ways for getting the job done instead of stretching yourself too thin. If you work for a business or marketing agency, this book will guide you on what you need to include in your marketing plan to achieve the goals given to you and advance your own career journey.
This book caters to every marketing function and role — from small business owners and managers to staffers of larger organizations who work on plans, programs, product launches, ad campaigns, printed materials, websites, and other elements. It’s also for those managing political campaigns, public health educators, directors and board members, museums, nonprofits, and the army of independent consultants who must not only be experts in their own field but also promote their personal brands to guarantee a steady flow of clients.
Ultimately, every marketer can benefit from the insights in this book about the consumer‐driven world in which you operate, the media tools and channels you have at your fingertips, the technologies available to manage, deploy, and measure all that you do, down to the individual level. You’ll also discover the key to executing successful customer journeys and experiences as well as direct, email, digital, and print campaigns that drive sales and profitability and, of course, how to do all of this while reducing costs and increasing efficiencies.
Even though we admonish you to avoid assumptions about your customers and markets throughout this book, we have clearly made some about you while writing this edition.
Look for these symbols to help you find valuable info throughout the text:
In addition to the great content in the book or e‐book you’re reading right now, you can find more marketing tips and suggestions at www.dummies.com
by using the search box to look for “Marketing For Dummies cheat sheet.” These, plus the numerous narrow‐topic books on marketing in the For Dummies line, give you lots of additional options for researching your marketing program.
If you read only one chapter in one business book this year, make it Chapter 2 of this book, which explains the psychology of choice and how to trigger consumers’ unconscious minds for unthinkable ROI. Unless you know what really drives people’s emotions, joys, fears, anticipations, and aspirations, you can’t be effective in building a sustainable business founded on lifelong relationships with valuable customers.
Perhaps you have a pressing need in one of the more specific areas covered in this book. If fixing your website is the top item on your to‐do list, go to Chapter 11 first. If you need to increase the effectiveness of your sales strategies and approaches, try Chapter 16. Working on a direct mail campaign? You’ll discover the role of data and direct channels, such as email and direct mail and how to execute both successfully, in Chapter 10. Chapter 5 will help you build a marketing plan, and Chapter 8 will guide you on using and managing digital tools and tactics that can help you execute campaigns that build sales and profitability.
Whatever you do and whatever your role, this book will provide you with new ways of thinking and doing, all of which are proven to work for businesses, both big and small and B2B and B2C, throughout all industries. So start reading, get going, and let your marketing light shine.
Part 1
IN THIS PART . . .
Fight through consumer distraction, and discover how to market to different generations.
Discover what really drives consumers’ choices, and make use of social influencers.
Determine your market’s growth rate, and then implement market share and positioning strategies.
Chapter 1
IN THIS CHAPTER
Fighting through consumer distraction
Marketing to different generations
Building trust
Creating great customer experiences
Having fun with guerilla marketing
There’s never been a more exciting time to be in business, especially in marketing. With all the communications channels and technology available today, you can truly learn about and communicate with customers one to one while marketing to millions. You can know with certainty how customers spend their leisure time, what media channels they use and how often they use them, what their interests are, their brand attitudes, shopping patterns, preferences, likes and dislikes, and what their precise value is to you over their lifetime of purchasing. With all this knowledge, you can determine when and what they’re likely to buy, how much and how often, and you can communicate specifically to their needs and relationship with you.
You can also monitor their attitudes, political preferences, and lifestyles on social media and insert your messages into their personal pages and sites when you see an opportunity to influence or inspire them. And you have the ability to analyze past behavior and scientifically predict their future behavior. It gets better all the time.
With the advent of artificial intelligence systems like IBM’s Watson, you can program machines to have conversations with your customers, millions simultaneously and one to one, and learn even more so that you can deliver exactly what they need and want when they want it. And all these communications can happen in real time. Any day. Any time. Limitless possibilities await.
On the flip side: All this technology gives more knowledge and shopping power to customers as well and has changed the game significantly. They don’t have to shop at the local pet store; they can order just about anything online and get it delivered within two days, often free. They want you to communicate and serve them like they’re your only customer, and they’ll abandon you on a whim if they don’t like your values or if you don’t support a cause that’s important to them. People have so many options available today that loyalty is becoming obsolete. Consumers tend to choose brands based on their doing good in the world and the overall experience they offer rather than just the product and price.
As a result, marketers have to change their game. You have to change the way you distribute your products and services, how you reach and communicate with your customers and prospects, and how you engage them emotionally and physically. And you have to offer much more than a great product and value point; you have to offer consumers a fulfilling experience that adds value, happiness, or excitement to their lives.
This book is about doing all the above, effectively and affordably, for any business in either the B2C or B2B space, local or regional, national or global in scope. It’s also for entrepreneurs starting a new business or marketing managers wanting to have a big impact on their job and their careers.
Beyond going through the essentials of building marketing plans, growth strategies, distribution channels, and pricing and merchandising strategies, this book guides you on developing emotionally relevant, creative experiences, websites, and online and offline promotions and marketing campaigns. You’ll also discover the essentials of selling for a lifetime to capture lifetime value and loyalty in a world where both are hard to come by. And in Part 6, you find out how to measure your marketing in ways that can give you deep insights on how to grow your brand much more than just your traditional ROI and response analytics.
Before we get into the how‐tos and guidelines for doing all the above, you need to focus on the mindset and behaviors of today’s customers and this new era of consumerism. You need to understand what distractions you must overcome, generational influences that make or break brand relationships, consumers’ level of trust in businesses like yours, and expectations for brand values and behavior. We cover these topics and more in this chapter.
Today’s consumer mindset can be summed up in one word: distracted. And it just keeps getting worse as people spend more and more time looking at screens.
Reports by eMarketer and Nielsen show that people spend about ten hours a day on a screen — computer, TV, mobile phones, and other connected devices. About three of those hours are on mobile phones.
The vast majority of adults 18 years and older have smartphones and on average check them 46 times a day, or 8 billion times collectively, or so says a Deloitte report on smartphone usage. If you have 16 waking hours (and get 8 hours of sleep), that means you’re checking your phone about every 3 minutes.
The bottom line for marketers is that pretty much all consumers are highly distracted and not paying attention to much around them.
Now add to that how much people multitask when it comes to media consumption. Accenture put out a report showing that 87 percent of consumers use more than one device at a time — for example, watching TV while chatting, posting, browsing, texting, or playing a game on their phone. That doesn’t leave much attention span for marketers to capture and engage.
In this book, we show you how to develop creative that’s emotionally relevant so you can break through some of that clutter and engage consumers in inspirational common causes, open distribution channels that address their lifestyle, and execute direct marketing programs using email, print, mobile, and more that get noticed, acted upon, and generate sales.
This is not your father’s marketing book, nor is it the same book that was released in 1999 under this title. Times, technologies, channels, and needs have changed and so, too, has the way you connect, engage, and sell to your customers. With all this change, the gap or differences in the various generations is getting wider as people’s attitudes, perspectives, and the way they live, shop, and engage with brands is redefined by technology, media channels, and social trends.
This section provides some insights about some of the different values and attitudes that drive behavior among the generations most businesses target today, in both a B2B and B2C setting.
The primary “shopping” generations are roughly broken down as follows:
Although a ton of information about each generation is available — from books to white papers to videos and more — the main thing marketers need to understand is what each generation thinks of brands, what they expect about brands, and what they respond to in terms of values and stimuli.
Tables 1‐1 through 1‐3 list some of the characteristics of the various generations that impact their “marketing ability” and what you can do to address and engage them in meaningful ways. These attributes, mindsets, and potential actions should be front and center when you create your customer profiles and emotional selling propositions (ESPs), as outlined in Chapter 2, and your creative, as discussed in Chapter 6.
TABLE 1-1 Marketing to Millennials
Value |
Suggested Response |
Want self‐expression. |
Involve in user‐generated content. |
Respect is earned, not given. |
Use statistics, industry knowledge, and experiences to position your marketing leadership and authority. |
Trust equity is low because many don’t trust brands to be truthful or operate in others’ best interests. |
Be transparent. If you don’t have the best product, don’t say you do. If your customer service is poor, fix it before making promises. Listen and admit to wrongdoing when you’ve made mistakes. |
Crave change. |
Keep your brand energetic and change things up to add interest and novelty. |
Respond to bold colors, ideas, humor, and interaction. |
Use digital channels that provide interaction, such as games (discussed in Chapter 8) and bright colors that fit their energy level, and engage them in disruptive events, like guerilla marketing tactics (described later in this chapter). |
Seek relevance. |
Your products, not just your marketing, need to fit their lifestyle and add value. Marketing should demonstrate how. |
Open‐minded, intelligent, responsible. |
Always communicate with transparency, and never talk down or misrepresent the value of an offer or product. When trust is broken, you won’t get a second chance. |
Expectations for brands. |
Involve them in user‐generated content and product design and respond to them promptly. |
TABLE 1-2 Marketing to Generation Xers
Value |
Suggested Response |
Want to feel they are contributing to something worthwhile. |
Involve in volunteerism and corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives. |
Like recognition for what they do. |
Send thank‐you emails, invite to VIP clubs, and reward with experiences, content, discounts, or products. |
Thrive on autonomy, freedom. |
Give them options for pricing, packages, service agreements, and product inventory. Enable communications options as well. |
Seek a balanced life. |
Align your brand’s values with their values and personal life. |
Accept authority but are skeptical. |
Position your leadership and authority in an objective manner. |
Skeptical about economy, fearful of job loss and financial setbacks, and skeptical of big business. |
Communicate the security, comfort, and peace of mind that your product and brand deliver. Be transparent about pricing and product claims. Design brand offerings around their need to feel in control and have peace of mind. |
Entrepreneurial. |
Appeal to their desire to initiate new programs, ideas, and movements. |
TABLE 1-3 Marketing to Baby Boomers
Value |
Suggested Response |
Want to feel they are in control of their choices and lives. |
Provide information that informs, provides guidance, and assists in decision processes. |
Like recognition for what they do. |
Thank them for their business, invite to VIP loyalty programs, and reward frequently. |
Thrive on prosperity. |
Because they have worked hard for years and want to enjoy the perks of successful careers and financial planning, promote perks, pampering, and themes around “you deserve this.” |
Seek self‐actualization. |
Align your messaging and experiences with what matters most, such as leaving legacies, making an impact, achieving personal goals, and recognition. |
Collaborative. |
Invite to your causes centered on your common goals associated with charity, environment, and so on. |
Optimistic. |
They see good in communities and people and like to believe people can be trusted to be who they say they are. |
Goal oriented. |
Like to set goals and have a plan and a purpose. |
Worldwide consumers are losing trust in business, media, and government. In just one year, the level of trust dropped three points and reached an all‐time low in 2017, according to Edelman Trust Barometer for 2017, an annual report worth reading to help you get a better understanding of your customers’ mindset and how it may have changed year over year. Visit Edelman.com for consumer studies on trust and other key topics.
The most trusted source for business information today is peers, or “people just like me,” while CEOs and other business executives continue to lose ground. Note that the most trusted industry is technology and the least trusted industries are financial services, chemicals, and banking.
What does all of this mean? If customers don’t trust business, and if you’re in a business that consumers don’t trust in general, you need to build content, customer experiences, and messaging around the things you do to be trustworthy. Your customer experiences need to show that you and your people are honest, care about customers’ needs, not just your own, and that you do what you say you’ll do.
In Chapter 2, you read about the emotional and psychological influences of choice and how to appeal to these emotions in ways that build sustainable trust among your consumers.
Traditionally, consumers demanded fair prices, good quality, and good service from brands in order to go back for more. Today, the demands are so much more. Consumers want to know what you’ve done for employees, communities, the earth, and the underprivileged and needy, not just what you’ve done for investors, stakeholders, and executive compensation. In fact, as we cover in Chapter 2, more than 80 percent of consumers (Cone Communications CSR study) state that their purchasing decisions and brand loyalty are based on what a brand has done and is doing to improve the world. A large majority, close to 90 percent, of global consumers are willing and likely to switch brands to one that’s doing good in the world if price and quality are comparable.
More than 80 percent of consumers say that a brand’s actions and positive impact on the world influence what they buy or where they shop and also which products they choose to recommend to others. As consumers continue to say, the most influential source for their purchasing decisions is actually other consumers, friends, and peers, and a brand’s altruistic behavior becomes exponentially more critical.
So what does this mean to you, the marketer? And for small businesses, regional, or large global enterprises?
This movement to align with good brands has become so powerful that it has actually sparked an era of anti‐consumerism. A leading consumer activist group called Adbusters has grown consistently since the late 1980s and actively engages in what it calls “culture jamming,” which describes its movement to interrupt consumer experiences and expose underlying and not‐so‐positive truths about large corporations while jamming their profits from sales. It has exposed advertising it believes communicates unrealistic and misleading promises from companies that engage in child labor or other unethical practices, and it organizes movements that send messages to big corporations. Its best‐known movement is Occupy Wall Street, which successfully jammed New York’s Wall Street district in 2011 and sparked similar protests against big banks worldwide.
Although this statement may be an extreme expression of an extreme consumerism group, it reflects the level of distrust and angst toward big brands that other research from Neilsen, Edelman, and Cone Communications has reported in reports on trust, consumer social media, and so on.
As you go about reading this book and developing your own positioning strategies, messaging, and marketing and engagement programs, keep in mind the power of transparency, truth in all communications, integrity of your deeds and alliances, and the values you stand by and spread. You don’t want to be featured on Adbusters’ website or in its widely circulated magazine.
We’ve seen a lot of consumer action toward brands because of their positions on social issues. Remember what happened to Target’s stock value when it announced customers could self‐identify their gender to decide which bathroom they wanted to use? And all the boycotts of Chick‐fil‐A when the CEO’s comments opposed same‐sex marriage?
You need to consider your company’s positions and how you’ll communicate them if the need ever arises, because in a market driven by consumer expectations and demands that transcend products and prices to social issues, you need to understand how your actions and words can trump even the best and most carefully crafted marketing plan. We’re not suggesting that you change your values for financial gain but rather that you consider how you communicate about and respond to social issues. There is power in taking a stand for what you value and believe. As a brand, you need to plan for both positive and negative feedback.
Your biggest competitive advantage is not how clever or fun your social and traditional marketing campaigns are, and, as you’ll read throughout this book, it’s not your price. It’s your ability to build relationships with customers on trust, value, and relevance.
Your marketing plan is thus not just about building a sustainable and profitable business through the right sales channels, distributors, social engagement, and advertising strategies; it’s about building a community.
Brands that have done this well and which are referenced in detail in this book include TOMS, Wildfang, and Patagonia. Check them out online after reading their stories in later chapters and stay on top of what they’re doing to build strong emotional bonds with customers who have like values and purpose.
Communities need to make sense for the products you sell. If you sell clothing, creating a community effort around helping people in underprivileged situations to get professional clothing for job interviews and jobs is likely to be meaningful to your base. Building a community around carbon emissions or climate change, not so much.
Ask yourself the following questions to help guide your actions that present your values as you build a community of like‐minded people:
As customer expectations and demands change from generation to generation, so, too, does the nature of marketing campaigns in general. Changes we’ve seen recently include refocusing the marketing department to become the customer experience department.
Some businesses have even renamed their chief marketing officer (CMO) to a chief experience officer (CXO) and are replacing advertising campaigns with customer experience initiatives for both their online and offline worlds.
How is customer experience defined today? Customer experience is the entirety of interactions between a brand and a customer beginning with her first purchase to the end of her purchasing life cycle. Interactions take place during each step of the decision process, which includes the following:
You must address all these decision steps in your marketing plan and customer experience strategy. The following sections walk you through how you can integrate each one into a concerted, mapped‐out marketing plan.
Charles Graves, mentor of author Jeanette McMurtry, offered this great piece of marketing advice: “Consumers don’t want to be sold; they want to be told.” In other words, they want to be told what is in their best interests so that they can make informed decisions. When marketers educate rather than sell, they become trusted partners, not just suppliers and vendors, which often leads to lifetime value and loyalty (discussed in detail in Chapter 16).
Education‐based marketing is not only a strong marketing communications strategy, but it is also a sound customer experience strategy. Providing guidance, decision support, and information for each step of a customer’s experience with your product and brand can help set you apart from the competition. Here are some customer experience activities that can help you succeed at this important task.
Customer experiences clearly start with the sales process, as outlined earlier in this chapter, but your marketing plan must address a bigger journey after you close the sale that builds loyalty, referrals, and of course captures lifetime value. As part of your customer experience strategy, you need to map out your customer’s journey or the steps necessary from first sale to lifetime value that you need to address.
Again, a customer’s journey encompasses the steps you must take and deliver upon at every touch point. For example:
The purpose of a customer journey is to build and maintain emotional bonds with your brand and get customers to refer others. To do this most effectively for your brand, it helps to look at the most powerful affiliations people have in their lives that aren’t associated with purchase of products or services. Not to be politically incorrect or controversial, but these are your political and religious affiliations. In many cases, people don’t know why they believe what they believe or take the stand they do on social issues other than somewhere, someone taught them to believe a certain way or embrace certain values. Right or wrong is not the issue.
The issue is that people hold powerful beliefs that guide them, and they make life‐lasting choices and decisions based on these values and beliefs. People’s commitment to their chosen organization is so strong that they commit their time and even money to organizations that don’t give anything in return but intangibles, such as hope, faith, and anticipations of rewards if they stay the course and further the cause.
Experiences that keep people faithful to belief structures and value systems are present in all religious and political organizations despite how different they may be. For example, the same tenets are present in Christianity and all the various churches within this genre, Buddhism, Judaism, Islamism, and so on. These tenets exist in political organizations, too. These include symbolism, sensory appeal, promises, community, and rituals.
Successful brands integrate these same tenets. Think of your favorite brands. Note how they embrace these tenets. Apple is a great example of a brand using these cornerstones of religion to create a faithful following. Here’s how:
How can you create religious‐like events and thus loyalty for your brand? This book is full of ideas for doing just that. Check out Chapter 8 for digital tactics, Chapter 16 for emotional selling, and Chapter 2 on how to trigger the unconscious mind for unthinkable ROI.