Sherlock Holmes enters stage left.
Any of the great detectives would have been good at marketing because they’d have been temperamentally adept at the first thing that matters, finding out ‘whodunit’. Just as a city trader, presumably, has a nose for the market, its shifts and swings, so the marketer, just as skilled and arguably more useful, can smell gaps in markets, opportunities to position a brand to best advantage, the charm to engage a potential customer in a mutually interesting conversation and a voracious appetite to win market share.
Most of all, do you have a nose for this? Can you be like Helena Rubinstein who, on being asked how she’d chosen her new perfume, said, immortally, ‘because it smells of money’?
Use all your senses, not just your brain.
This changing world
The world in which we now live will be tougher than the heady days of the early and mid noughties, tougher but more exciting. Getting a sale is going to be harder. And when marketing people talk about sales more than they talk about image you know times are tough. But all we have to do is work harder and smarter. Three things are now at the top of any marketing agenda:
- How good is our relationship with our customers?
- What’s the value for money of our products or services really like in the marketplace?
- Are our customers hearing us? Are they listening to us? Are they engaged by us?
Marketing must be exciting. Today we have a whole new set of tools available, which means we can communicate more sharply and vividly.
How to focus
- Most marketing textbooks don’t help. They are not bad books but they offer ordinary solutions and are boring. They tell you too much in a dull drone.
- Always have a list of ‘must dos’ on your desk.
- Put away your calculator. Marketing has more to do with art than science, more to do with feelings than logic. Here’s the hierarchy of talent: mindset first; skillset second; smart-set third. How you feel; what you know; how you utilise both together. Getting it together is the way to focus.
Marketing has more to do with feelings than logic so try to go with the way you feel instinctively. Let your gut have a vote. Guts are critical to brilliant marketing.
- Have a go. Focus on ‘doing things’. I love seeing people do clever things, such as Nestlé’s launch of it’s Skinny Cow Hot Chocolate drink. The brand was targeting young women who loved fashion but had limited budgets. So it was showcased in Oxford Street and Manchester, at House of Fraser boutiques and at tasting sessions at George at Asda (the biggest UK clothes retailer). Lesson: focus on your core market and be there when they first encounter your brand.
- Curiosity is a tool. Having it makes you focus on asking ‘Why?’ Spend time scanning the web, reading papers, looking at magazines, visiting shops and talking to bright people. Being good at marketing is like still being at university, but with less lager.
- Excess thinking leads to daydreaming. Think in a step-by-step way. Don’t think too big, don’t think too small, don’t think too much. Focus on trying to understand your customer. Feel the momentum of a market and try to work with it rather than analysing every last bit of data. Focus on trying to understand your customer – that’s the real key.
- Gather round and listen to more stories. Stories are historically how information, advice or lessons to be learned were passed down. Today they have come back in a big way. Throughout this book I use contemporary stories to illustrate the way to become a brilliant marketer.
Nespresso
Nestlé earned its spurs by being a big, aggressive, sales-driven business with some historic brands (added to when they bought Rowntree). For many, the arrival and subsequent explosion in size of Nespresso has been a surprise. The more so, as it seems to operate as an autonomous arm of the Swiss parent. What can we learn from the marketing cocktail the people at Nespresso invented?
- They recognised the pent-up consumer demand for really good coffee. Starbucks and others give us better coffee. Nespresso gives us the best-ever coffee.
- They price it as very expensive for instant coffee but very cheap in the overall scheme of beverages.
- They deliver it to us as an easy-to-make, at-home product and give us a recycling mechanism.
- They ceaselessly innovate with new flavours.
- They give us great decaffeinated too.
- They create good partnerships with appliance manufacturers of the Nespresso machines and focus on the software – the coffee.
- They have George Clooney as a spokesman – and everyone loves George. I bet even the Pope is a secret fan.
- They make it hard to get then easy to get by saying ‘to have it you must join the club and you can only do this by owning a proper Nespresso machine’. There’s no entry cost but you must join to be ‘allowed’ to buy their coffee. Ordering is a phone call away and 24 hours later you’re drinking more great coffee.
- They are very clever. They’ve created a luxury brand at an accessible price that is superb in quality (even Gordon Ramsay serves Nespresso).
Four lessons
- Superior products do better (that’s so obvious).
- Pricing at a new level requires you to rethink your distribution model.
- Sexy branding, advertising and presentation work.
- An exclusive, luxury feel pleases – never underestimate the consumer. Mass marketing increasingly feels like a mess. We want to be treated as special. Nespresso gets this.
Never underestimate your customer.
Think small
If you are a small business shaking your head thinking I’m suggesting you can marshall marketing tactics like the mighty Nestlé, well, you can in your own way. Nespresso thinks small. It loves its product. It has fun with it. Go to the very few stores where you can buy it, like Selfridges (if you are a club member), and look at the displays and the quality of the staff.
By thinking small and with such detail, by creating a virtually one-to-one customer experience, Nespresso has proved that small, beautiful and quality can also become big. The danger will be in Nespresso forgetting, with its increasing success, that its small thinking is in fact one of the keys to that success.
Change the way you look at things
People who write about marketing or management are always talking about ‘change’. If you think about it, they would be out of business without the existence of unsettling and unexpected change. My next book will certainly not be called How to keep everything exactly the same.
The Nespresso story shows how you can change your mindset. It was not easy for the company to NOT seek grocery distribution, because that’s what Nestlé does and is – a machine to drive tonnes of products into shops. Yet here Nespresso put itself where Prada and Versace sit. Here it wrote new rules. And you can too. You don’t have to market what you have in the same way as your competitors do. You have permission to work out a new and a better way.
One of the things any marketer wants to be is cutting edge – why? Because innovation is more fun. But there’s another reason. Being cutting edge says something about your being a modern, state-of-the-art brand.
I said don’t think too much, but ponder this. How do people, in as many different markets as you can think of, do what they do? Cars, fashion, organic vegetables, wine, hammers, insurance, anything. It’ll open your mind and kill the voice that says ‘We always do it this way’.
Marketing – a simple plan of attack
- Write the marketing brief – the discipline of setting out what you have, what makes it special and what you need to get done. This is your map.
- Define your resources – who you have on your team, how much time and talent they have. Be clear about what they and you are capable of delivering. Next, how much money do you have to spend? This will determine what you can and cannot do. Never bite off more than you can chew.
- Examine your options – and then settle on one. Go in one direction; don’t go wandering about. So long as you have a clear brief, then the things that most economically and effectively match the objectives you have set should be shortlisted. One word is key here: focus. Focus on what you are trying to achieve. Focus is the single most important quality in marketing and business.
- Write a detailed ‘how-to’ plan – no one should ever spend a penny of a marketing budget without having a good robust plan. Detail really matters. Big-picture thinking alone won’t pay bills.
- Execute that plan – Harvard Business School say execution is more important than strategy. They have dozens of case studies where the strategy was fine and the execution was wanting. Is everything ready on time? Is everything right? This is your checklist time.
- Measure the results – everything you do must have an effect. Your job is to measure these. Are sales going up? Is share going up? Is anything changing? As a result of your review does anything need changing? Go back to the brief and make sure it still holds water. Never, ever keep pouring good money after bad.