The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Marketing:
How To Create And Nurture Your Best Customers
By Dave Donelson
DSDA Publishing, Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2010 Dave Donelson
Discover other titles by Dave Donelson at Smashwords.com
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Table of Contents
Marketing With A Capital “P”
“Before you make any decisions about price, or which products to sell, or what ads to run, take a good hard look at your customers as people.”
How Many Baskets For How Many Eggs?
“An emotion-free analysis of each segment of the business is a good place to start.”
Case Study: Conwin Carbonic Inflates An Industry
“Conwin transformed itself from a product-driven industrial operation to a customer-driven marketing company.”
How Niche Is Your Market?
“Serving a special market successfully requires paying particular attention to customer communication.”
Seven Ways To Wow Your Customers
“Surprises work really well when they come later, after the customer has started to forget the last time they did business with you.”
Specialty Market Case Study: Selling To Off-Roaders
“The amount of time we spend with the customer is our competitive advantage.”
First Impressions
“Take a look around and try to see the place the way customers see it.”
Welcome All Newbies
“Remember what it was like when you went onto the field for your very first Little League tryout?”
Beat The Big Box
“Because you know your customers as people, you better understand exactly what turns them on.”
Case Study: Schweser’s Little Stores On The Prairie
“In today’s big-box world, the 125-year-old chain of women’s clothing stores has beaten the odds by staying true to its roots.”
The Magic of Pricing
“Setting prices is part art and part science with maybe a little management magic thrown in for good measure.”
Specialty Market Case Study: Artists And Their Prices
“There may be a price so high the customer won’t pay it, but patrons seldom buy a piece of art just because it’s cheap.”
Two Ways To Compete Without Chopping Prices
“As long as we’re promoting quality and being fair about pricing, I don’t worry too much about our competitors.”
Specialty Market Case Study: Sportswear, Speedwear, and Other Profitable Threads
“Making a profit in the rag trade isn’t automatic.”
Marketing in Cyberspace: Not A Buck Rogers Idea
“The website is essentially another complete business location.”
Blogging And Social Media—Other Online Marketing Options
“If putting your business into cyberspace has seemed like more trouble than it’s worth, maybe now is the time to reconsider your decision.”
Social Media Marketing Three Ways: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
“Your business can establish a two-way dialogue with customers that reinforces your marketing message.”
Specialty Market Case Study: Automotive Aftermarket
“You can use tried-and-true marketing tactics like showing off your work to car owners at neighborhood cruise-ins but the main thing is to go after the business.”
Specialty Market Case Study: Sports Team Sponsorships Rewards and Regrets
“The marketing essence of sponsorships--whether you put your money into race teams or the PTA bake sale--is the endorsement value that the investment gives you.”
Business To Business Marketing - Beyond the Price Sheet
“You should market to other companies much the same way you market to consumers: with a combination of advertising and personal selling.”
Speaking Up For Your Business
“It’s good for business because the more information and knowledge you give your customers, the more they appreciate it.”
Tune Your Company’s Publicity Machine To Stay In The News
“Dealing with paparazzi and signing autographs is a small price to pay for frequent press coverage that will help build your company’s business.”
Businesses come and go and there are plenty of reasons for their success or failure, but the ones that thrive almost always have one thing in common: they are good marketers. What does that mean? It means they make all their business decisions based on meeting their customers’ needs. Which products or services they sell, where they sell them, how much they charge for them, how they encourage customers to buy them, and all the other hundreds (if not thousands) of business decisions a good marketer makes start with a simple question: how will this affect my customers?
This customer-first business philosophy isn’t something I invented. It’s been around since early in the last century when the dynamic managers of their time realized that supplying the kind of widget the customer wanted was more important than how many widgets their factories could produce. In other words, the manager who wanted to grow his business turned his eyes away from the factory floor and started looking outside—at the customers—to figure out how to succeed. Thus began the study and practice of marketing.
Like many people, my introduction to marketing came in college. The classic approach divided the discipline into four elements—the four “P’s”—Product, Price, Place, and Promotion. While plenty of academics and others have tried to update, enhance, and expand on this simple scheme, I still feel it’s pretty solid. It’s probably obvious to you, but here are what the four terms mean:
Product is the “what” of the business—as in “what should we sell?” You probably know that the best answer to this question is “what the customer wants to buy,” but you’d be surprised at how many companies try instead to build a business around “what can we make?” When you ignore the customer’s needs and wants, you suffer the fate of the apocryphal buggy whip manufacturer or, to cite a more modern example, you become pets.com, home of the hugely irritating sock puppet mascot and proof that just because you can sell kitty litter online doesn’t mean you should.
Price is market-driven, too, regardless of what your accountant tells you. Sure, you have to cover the cost of your product or service (as well as the overhead of your company) with enough left over to provide a profit, but you won’t be able to do that unless the customer is willing to pay for it in the first place. Individual customers don’t set your price, but as a group—when they become the market—their judgment of whether you’re delivering fair value can’t be ignored.
Place deals with the “where” of the business, as in “where does the product come from and where does the customer get it?” This includes topics like supply chain management and product distribution that are a little outside my areas of expertise, so I’ll just touch on them lightly in this book.
Promotion covers all the ways you communicate with the customer—from advertising and public relations to how your sales people interact with them in your store, office, telemarketing center, or online. These facets of marketing are so important I cover them separately in The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Advertising and The Dynamic Manager’s Guide To Creative Selling, but a great deal of this book is about other forms of promotion based on good marketing practices.
As in all the books in the Dynamic Manager series, much of this material was drawn from my conversations with thousands of small business managers and owners. I filtered their stories through my own experiences as a manager and entrepreneur to distill some sound guidelines on why and how you can market your products and services in the real world. Versions of some of these chapters previously appeared as articles in various national business and trade publications you’ll find listed in the bibliography; others were taken from my seminars on marketing. I’ve also included several case studies of companies that depend on solid marketing to succeed—often against great odds—as well as a few chapters about companies in specialty markets that I found illustrative of good marketing practices.
The book is organized to encourage you to sample, think about, and try out different concepts in the daily operation of your business. It’s not a narrative or a text book; there isn’t a step-by-step organization but rather a collection of useful articles that address practical problems in marketing for small business managers and owners. My goal is simple: to give you some helpful tips and perhaps even some inspiration to become a successful marketer.
--Dave Donelson
Marketing With A Capital “P”
“Before you make any decisions about price, or which products to sell, or what ads to run, take a good hard look at your customers as people.”
Before you begin applying the four P’s of marketing to your business, you need to understand the most important “P” of the discipline. The other four, product, price, place, and promotion, all intersect at one point: People.
“People” as in customers. “People” as in the folks who buy your product or service. It doesn’t matter if you are a manufacturer, a retailer, a wholesaler, an inventor, an insurance agent, banker, restaurateur, doctor, lawyer, butcher, baker, or candlestick maker. Without customers, the auto manufacturer’s cars turn to piles of rust. Without customers, a farmer’s corn rots in the silo. If you don’t have a customer, you don’t have a business.
And customers, of course, are people. Attracting their attention, persuading them to buy from you, and ensuring their satisfaction with your product or service all require good people skills.
Doing these things really well is how small businesses grow to be big ones. If that is your goal, I urge you to invest your time, energy, and yes, some money, in learning everything you can about the people with whom you do business—your customers. The more you know about what makes them tick, what they want out of life, why they get out of bed in the morning, the more you will know about things like why they buy your product or your competitors’, what price might make them change their purchase intentions, and which services they think are important and which ones they find a colossal bother.