Maybe I just love the process, maybe I had good coaches, but in my years of running obstacle courses, throwing my body over mud-soaked walls, 5Ks, 10ks, pull up and push-up competitions, and a variety of other endeavors that pushed me beyond what I thought I could do, I never thought about the finish line or what waited for me there.

Why?

• Because trophies and medals feel cheap to me.
• Because the training, the preparation, and the event were always so much larger than the finish.
• Because the learning happens in the process. The finish is just an acknowledgement.

​So, while we as a society like to run for the finish line, keep in mind that the gift is not the trophy or a t-shirt but the endeavor itself. Enjoy the ride – even the hard parts. They made you who you are. 

I see a lot of motivational memes, videos, etc. floating around the Internet. Many with a similar theme, “Don’t ever give up”, “Work harder”, “Put in the extra effort”, “Chase your dreams and keep going until you get them.” While many of these are good messages, I think there is also a danger in this thread of constantly pushing. Hard-charging 24/7 can be exhausting. Moreover, if you don’t have the energy to “Go for it!” these messages can be demoralizing.

I have a smaller, perhaps humbler, message. Little victories. You don’t need to take on the world. You don't need to get up in the morning and charge up that hill - screaming like a banshee. Small victories (baby steps if you will) can be just as satisfying. I do set my intentions on a weekly and daily basis, often in the evening when things are quiet so I can consider what I would like to accomplish the following day. Those accomplishments may not be grand or worthy of a sonnet, but they keep me moving forward. Every now and then, I have a burst of energy and the projects and details just come together and I can ride the wave. However, when the energy is not there and every moves feels like slogging through mud, I go back to the small steps. The accomplishments that keep me in the race, albeit at a slower pace.

When those days arise, and they do, when I can’t even manage that, then I rest. I take the time knowing that even the boldest and bravest of us need to rest and recharge before they can return to the fray and chase that dream again. 

Take good care of yourself.

Of all the disciplines in business, marketing is one of the few that touches almost every department in an organization. As a marketer, you need to have an understanding of every element that comes in contact with the customer experience. That can be anything from operations and speed of shipping merchandise down to the credit terms offered to new customers.  Any one of these can disturb the brand message you are striving to develop and maintain. 

​Take the time to get to know the department heads in your company and the pain points they are dealing with.  Better yet, ask them what they think would help improve the customer experience and ultimately sales.  Each department has a unique view of the company and the customer.  Understanding that view and how it fits into your overall marketing approach will only make you a better marketer.

​Carol Marzouk discusses "the one thing" she tries to get across to her clients and the world.

It is nice to have people agree with you, it really is.  Everyone on the same page, in full agreement, it just feels good.
Be cautious of that bubble.  In Psychology, they call it groupthink. Defined as “the practice of thinking or making decisions as a group in a way that discourages creativity or individual responsibility.”  In business, it often leads to groups of intelligent, thoughtful people making bad decisions.

Seek out different viewpoints. If you have to, designate someone as a devil’s advocate for the group, but don’t rollout a plan without having aggressively questioned your planning, your assumptions, and your belief on what the outcome will be. 
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It is not as pleasant as that big group hug, but in the end you will be better for it.

When many corporations think of market research, they imagine expensive and elaborate studies.  Large swaths of data, focus groups with one-way mirrors, telephone call centers with scripts, and a lot of time and expense. While all of the tools mentioned above are valid ways of conducting quantitative and qualitative research, market research does not need to be that complicated. Sometimes a lighter approach can be less daunting and yield good results that can still help guide a company.

B2C - Simpler is better:
When I was handling the marketing for a large cabinetry company selling through the big box retailers I used to make it a point to visit at least a few stores a month just to get a sense for how things were going at the store level and the process the consumers were going through to make their choices.  I would watch and often carry gift cards or coupons with me that I could use in exchange for the customer spending a few minutes with me to run me through their experience.  There was nothing elaborate about the way I approached these customers, but the insights I gained were important to the brand and yes, store intercepts like this qualify as qualitative research (no one way mirror required).

If you are working with a B2C brand there are a variety of ways to gain insight into the consumer experience without incurring high cost. Although, there is a time and place for larger studies to give you a more representative sample of your customers as well as highlight any regional differences.  Work with your sales team to find opportunities to get in front of the end-users and learn more about why they chose (or didn’t choose) your product.

B2B Dinner is on you
If you are operating in a B2B environment than you are probably working with the 80-20 rule – 20% of your customers are currently giving you 80% of your business.  Spent a little quality time with them to find out what you are doing right and what you need to fix.  I have yet to meet a customer who was shy about articulating what I and my company could do better to keep and grow their business.
 
Final Takeaway: 
Formal market research is a wonderful thing that can yield terrific insights into the customer experience and their preferences, but in the absence of it there are many ways you can conduct informal or anecdotal market research to keep your pulse on how your company is doing.

They call it a Unique Selling Proposition or USP.  In laymen’s terms it is the equivalent of a small hand jutting out of your product packaging, waving frantically “Pick me! Pick me!”   In the markets we face today, with tremendous competition and a downward trending towards commoditization in many industries, the ability to differentiate your company and your product can be the difference between a won or lost sale.  A few points on differentiation:

An Old Lesson with Modern Application:

I remember being at lunch with one of my first mentors when he proclaimed to me, in between mouthfuls of food, “Seth, you can’t be everything to everybody.”  Cliché?  Sure.  Still relevant today?  Absolutely.   Many are the times I have seen corporations stray away from their core audience searching for additional revenue and customers on the horizon.  It distracts you from your core business and stops you from building upon the work you have already started. Even worse, almost always these efforts dilute your unique selling proposition and differentiation in the hopes of saying something that might appeal to this broader audience.  Even the most universal of brands like Coke and Pepsi understand who their core audience is and focus on creating unique, differentiated messaging that speaks to that audience.  Does that mean you shouldn’t have a secondary audience? No, but it means that your efforts and energies need to be properly prioritized, both in terms of dollars and manpower, and you need to know your limitations. Your company and your products will not be everything to everyone, so let it go now and focus on being something important to that smaller cadre that appreciates and at some level relates to the uniqueness of your brand.

Salient and Sustainable

When I think about defining the USP for an organization I start by looking at two things:

1) What does the organization do well and can keep doing well? (Sustainable)
2) What is of greatest importance to the target audience? (Salient)

A differentiation strategy that is not based in those elements of key importance to the customer will not work.  Flashback to the early 2000s, I am sitting in a meeting with Sales, Marketing, and Engineering for a company that specializes in bathroom cabinetry.  The head of engineering states that he thinks the company should promote the stainless steel hex screws that are used in cabinet construction.  Do these screws make for a better product?  Sure. Does the customer care? Probably not.  When you are concocting your USP make sure it is something that your customers care about.  Your internal team probably has a very different idea with regard to what is unique or special about your products.  Don’t know what your customer value?  Ask them.  Not all market research needs to be done formally and keeping strong, regular communication with your “A” level customers to ensure you are meeting their needs is not only good common sense, but a necessity in these competitive times.

Your unique selling proposition and your differentiation strategy will ultimately limit your audience, but it will make your company and your products more important to the people that matter.

Do you have a sustainable USP for your brand or product?  Post a comment on what differentiates your company.

This topic is a bit more esoteric, but I think worthy of discussion.  In our careers we encounter various requests from customers, business partners, and corporate colleagues - all asking of us something. I like to group these requests into two categories:

Spoken Requests: 
Accomplish task A and B and deliver them on-time and on-budget.  Do the job as requested and everyone is happy.

Unspoken Requests: 
Behind the requested task is often something deeper.  It could be organizational, a lack of project clarity, constraints on manpower and budgeting, even reluctance on the part of the person asking for the project to move forward.

Your ability to first realize and then attempt to address this unspoken request can prove invaluable to your customers and partners and can build an order from a single task to a larger project if you are able to effectively communicate a solution that addresses both their immediate and deeper concerns.

​In my own career, I have encountered many situations in which, after first acknowledging the immediate need, I was able to get more information on what I suspected was the unspoken request and then was able to formulate a fuller solution for the customer that not only increased the breadth of the project, but also demonstrated greater value to them and strengthened our relationship.

In terms of colleagues and business partners, anticipating and understanding their unspoken requests can head-off problems and project delays before they happen.  Opening up that dialogue gets you out in front of what could be an issue before it effects your deliverables.

As marketers I think sometimes we get too focused on filling the order versus looking at the client and the situation and determining what they really need and what will give them the greatest value in the long-term.

When have you realized and addresses a customer's or colleague’s unspoken request? 
​Please join the conversation.

You’re a manufacturer - you make things. Good things. While that should be enough to bring new customers to your door, unfortunately it is not. You see, all of your competitors are claiming they make a product that is just as good as yours. Perhaps they boast different features, higher outputs, or a lower price that makes their product more appealing - the possibilities are endless. The point is this; whether you operate in a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) or Business-to-Business (B2B) environment, your competitors are shouting just as loudly as you, if not louder, to get the attention of your target audience. If you think just being a good manufacturer is enough, you need to think again.

Three Things You Need To Ask Yourself:

1. Am I an Engineering/Manufacturing or Sales/Marketing Driven Company? If the answer is engineering/manufacturing then you need to think about making some changes (and this list is that much more important). Engineering/manufacturing excellence are critical in the creation of high-quality products that customers will rave about and keep coming back for more, but without a sales/marketing focus your business is running blind and betting on whether your perfectly engineered product is a good fit for the market you are going after.
   
   
2. Do I have the Right People? Marketing is not Sales and Sales it not Marketing. You need strong, talented people in both roles. Sales is responsible for immediate, short-term revenue and helping provide feet-on-the street information on your customers. Marketing is responsible for developing medium and long term strategies to get your product in front of the right people and making sure your messaging represents your company properly and gives you a competitive advantage. A good marketing team should work in cooperation with Sales and have enough time in the field to understand the customer and market needs and incorporate that street information into their strategy development. I have never been a fan of “Ivory Tower” marketing and you shouldn’t either. Marketing people need field time and first-hand customer interaction to be effective. Think that kind of insight doesn’t matter in manufacturing? 
   
   A Quick Story: Earlier in my career, I was working for a manufacturing company that had run out of a specific product. Suddenly, we couldn’t keep that product on the shelves. The factory immediately made plans to source more materials, add a third-shift, and ramp up manufacturing to make sure we were swimming in that product in the next 60-90 days. I asked for a few days to look into the matter before we committed to essentially doubling our forecasted inventory for that product. A few discreet calls yielded that a key competitor had run out of a component to manufacture their product that competed with ours. We were getting their orders because they couldn’t fill them. They were making moves to correct the problem and were planning to be back on their production schedule in 60 days. Clearly, we had a short-term opportunity to realize sales and potentially to move some customers over to our product, but it was not the long term win that the plant thought we had. We adjusted the orders properly to make sure we could cover the short-term need without leaving us too deep in inventory and focused our sales efforts on getting to know more about some of these new customers and how we could win them over long-term.
   
   Marketing insight and Sales contacts were able to stop the factory from over-producing and leaving us in an undesirable inventory position.
   
   
3. Are you Budgeting Properly for Marketing? I am sometimes amazed at how many companies do not have a set budget for their marketing department. No budget demonstrates a lack of forethought and planning on what marketing activities are crucial for the coming year. No plan is perfect and no budget is perfect, but it is a place to start. If you are not sure what your crucial activities are, start with a task list. 
   
   What do you want to accomplish by the end of year? What activities will help yield that result? Again, this is a job for a seasoned marketing professional who understands how to look at short and long-term objectives and turn them into tactical deliverables with associated dollar values. If, by year end, you find the budget was greatly under-utilized then go back to your task list and determine if you accomplished everything you set out to do. If so, job well done and start planning for the next year. If not, find out what you need to do to tackle those objectives. If you go over budget before the year is out, then go back to that same task list and prioritize it - cut items, if needed. You also should do a review to find out where you under-estimated costs. As a percentage of sales, marketing budgets are anywhere between 1-20%. That is a lot of variance. 1-3% are your large corporations with revenues significant enough that 1-3% is still a lot of money. 15-20% are small independent companies with no sales force, such as a medical professional or a skilled craftsman where the only sales and customer acquisition related activities are accomplished via marketing. Depending on your size, your company is probably somewhere in the 4-14% range. That is still a lot of variance. Your head of marketing should be able to make a recommendation on the budget and support it. That is why you hired them.

“If You Build It, They Will Come.” was a wonderful sentiment from the movie Field of Dreams. Unfortunately, in manufacturing it is probably closer to “If you Build It, Build It Well, Market it Well, Follow-Up Promptly on Customer Requests, Provide First Rate Customer Service, Excellent Sales Support, and Make Sure You are Properly Differentiated in the Market and In-Front of Your Target Audience, They Will Come.” Not as romantic, I know.
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Are you a manufacturer challenged by how to market your products or with some good advice to share with others? Join the conversation.