The Five “R’s”

I have worked with many business leaders who employ a shiny new Marketing Director to help transform their marketing function and then provide them with a “To Do” list of all the initial things that the MD feels “needs” to be done rather than what actually “should” be done.

The new Marketing Director, desperate to impress, resorts to type and begins to “restructure, repackage, redesign, relaunch and then resign” mainly because they did not begin at the right starting point and ask the right questions.

A new refreshed logo, a new funky website, a few new promotions, and some funky social media campaigns, may tick all the boxes initially with your MD, but if it fails to engage with your core customer base, then it will not deliver long term success and growth for the business.

Understanding Your Market & Customers

Marketing is the process of understanding your marketplace and competitors, which helps to define your company’s market positioning, pricing, and service. All of this helps to promote the company effectively to your target audience and explain clearly how they might benefit by working or buying from you.

Every successful Marketing leader should always have funds allocated in his annual marketing budget for structured systematic research that explores questions about the company’s competitors, products, and services, which then helps to build up a knowledge base about the environment the company is operating in. Simply put, without this core understanding of your “market & customers” the marketing team are just churning out the same activity they have always done in the past, which will flat line results and hamper true long-term growth.

Knowledge Drives Strategy & Growth

Creating a knowledge base within your business is essential, and is derived from effective research and planning tools, both qualitative and quantitative,  which once in motion, helps to craft a successful marketing strategy which continuously evolves over time to drive long term business growth.

Fail To Plan, Plan to Fail.

There are many recent examples where companies have failed to understand their customer or taken their customer base for granted and paid a high price as smart competitors move in on their complacency. The assault by Aldi and Lidl on the UK grocery market whilst Tesco was looking the other way at expansion in the USA or the refusal by Arcadia Group to adapt quickly enough to their customers online buying habits are two classic examples.

When I joined CK Tools in 2012, my very first starting point was extensive International market and consumer research on the brand, competitors and the products. This then helped the brand team create activity growth plans for their categories that kickstarted the programme for significant company growth over several years, in what was a mature and competitive marketplace,

If you need help in reviewing if your marketing team are working on the right things PMF Marketing can help. Please call me today for a FREE 30-minute call and let’s get building your business back to growth together.

Do your products stand out from the crowd?

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Knowledge Is Power

The starting point when looking across your products to understand what is working and what isn’t, key statistics like sales numbers or customer reorder patterns across the various years provide a valuable insight into where your various products are in their lifecycle of introduction – growth – maturity – saturation or decline?

Analyse, Analyse and Analyse

A deep dive into the numbers will help form the framework of what action a business needs to take, are the various product categories in growth or decline? if its the latter why is that? is ? is it too expensive? are their modern day improvements that need to be made ? is the packaging not communicating what it does or does it simply lack some focus and communication out to the market. What is the distribution of the product like? are customer numbers falling ? why is that? Is the product margin too low due to cost increases or a change of supplier or excessively high because it has not been looked at in a while?

Time For Action 

Understanding where the product is in its lifecycle from an audit of its sales and distribution may raise further project work in terms of sourcing new suppliers for new or improved products, promotional plans may need to be drawn up, packaging or point of sale improvements may be required, additional field research to shape new ideas or sometimes even product obsolescence.

PMF Marketing has a number of marketing tools which can help businesses shape their future product development plans, from carrying out a basic range review to full feasibility documentation including research, supplier sourcing, product forecasting and the production of new product launch collateral.

If you would like to understand more how I can help your business, please call me today for a FREE 30 minute call and lets get building your business back to growth together.

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