marketing basics

Marketing Myth: The Customer is Always Right

Step aside, old myth! It’s time to debunk the notion that the customer is always right. While customer satisfaction is crucial, it’s equally important to strike a balance with your business goals, budget, and ethics. Let’s dive into the truth bomb of customer orientation and discover how it can shape successful marketing strategies.

Customer Orientation: The Foundation of Marketing

Customer Orientation stands tall as the cornerstone of marketing. It revolves around understanding your clients, their needs, and desires. By placing customers at the heart of your marketing efforts, you can customize your offerings to meet their requirements and provide exceptional experiences. But here’s the catch—it’s not always about saying “yes” to every demand.

The Pillars of Customer Orientation

  1. Customer Understanding: Get to know your customers through market research, surveys, and meaningful conversations. Grasp their needs, preferences, and pain points to tailor your approach accordingly.
  2. Customer Segmentation: Categorize your target audience based on demographics, psychographics, buying behavior, and preferences. Create personas that become an integral part of your company’s fabric.
  3. Customer Value Proposition: Highlight the unique value and benefits you provide to address their needs and solve their problems effectively.
  4. Customer Lifetime Value: While acquiring new customers is important, nurturing long-term relationships is equally vital. Encourage repeat purchases, referrals, and customer advocacy to maximize their lifetime value.

Navigating the Balance

Remember, customer orientation doesn’t mean surrendering to every demand. Accommodate reasonable requests, but be cautious of detrimental decisions. Not all customers are the right fit for your business. Satisfaction doesn’t guarantee loyalty, and it’s better to let go of clients who aren’t a good match. Your best customers will understand and appreciate the value you offer.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

If a customer request aligns with your capabilities and won’t compromise your business, go for it! It demonstrates your commitment and partnership. Allow me to share a personal experience from my time leading the digital learning division of our company. We received a client request that initially seemed overwhelming, but by collaborating closely with the client and finding innovative solutions, we not only met their needs but also generated significant revenue for our firm. Because of our willingness to listen to them, they became a multi-year client, and even better, the product we created for them became a staple of our portfolio for other clients for more than a decade.

“The Client Doesn’t Know What They Want Until They See It”

My teenage children run a successful Etsy store catering to busy moms who need custom signs for events. They understand their customers’ time constraints and limited budgets. When feasible, they fulfill personalized requests, resulting in a catalog of positive reviews and more than 4,000 satisfied customers. They know the power of being customer-oriented and adapting to their clients’ needs.

Wrap Up

The myth of “The Customer is Always Right” crumbles in the face of customer orientation. Strive to understand your customers, offer tailored solutions when feasible, and maintain a healthy balance with your business goals. By embracing customer orientation, you can create lasting relationships, foster growth, and unlock the true potential of your marketing endeavors.

THINK: It’s important to focus on your customers’ needs, but should you always cater to them without question?

THOUGHT: “The customer is not always right … but they are always the customer.” -Don Gallegos

Overcoming Marketing Challenges

There is a story about Xerxes I, the King of Kings in Persia, who was trying to cross into Greece at Hellespont but a storm destroyed their bridge. Xerxes ordered that the water be punished by lashing it and burning it. He also beheaded all of the engineers.

What does this have to do with marketing, you ask? Well, marketing is all about overcoming obstacles and achieving goals. Like Xerxes, marketers face challenges every day that seem insurmountable. It could be a tight budget, a competitive market, or changing consumer behavior. But just like Xerxes, marketers must be determined and find ways to overcome these challenges.

If your marketing isn’t pulling the results you need, don’t punish the water. You need to lean in and address the three “R”s.

  1. Reevaluate your goals. Maybe they are unrealistic and totally unachievable. Perhaps you bit off more than you can chew?
  2. Reassess your strategies. Are they lining up with your key objectives? If not, adjust them.
  3. Resist the unimportant. Your time is valuable—focus your energy on the things that matter most!

Xerxes’ attempt to beat the ocean may seem like a foolish and futile act, but it serves as a metaphor for all marketers to stay in the moment and work for results.

THINK: Are you on track to hit your goals?

THOUGHT: To achieve goals you’ve never achieved before, you need to start doing things you’ve never done before. -Stephen R. Covey

Marketing to the end of the row.

I grew up next to a large apple orchard. I never bothered to count all of the trees, suffice it to say there were a lot and—like all living things—they needed water.

To accomplish this my dad would hook the plow up to the tractor and systematically carve straight and deep furrows down each row next to the trees. 

Then came my favorite part. 

Every couple of weeks we’d get to drop in the headgate which would create a dam in the creek and divert the mountain stream around our property in a series of smaller channels or ditches. When the water got to the orchard it would spill through openings in the embankment and spread down the hundreds of smaller furrows that dad had plowed. However, there were always the furrows that I had tromped down while playing in the orchard which prevented the water from getting to the end of the row. I didn’t know this was a problem until my dad taught me a core principle—to succeed in my job I needed to eliminate obstructions in order for the water to flow down a clear path to the trees. It was simple. No water, no trees. No trees, no apples.

As a kid learning how to irrigate an orchard required a shovel to dig out the dirt I’d kicked into the furrow. As a marketer learning how to attract customers requires the right message and the right channels for that message to reach the right audience.

THINK: Do you need to clean out any marketing furrows? Can you simplify the path to communicate with your prospect? Are there any rocks or weeds you need to clear away?

THOUGHT: “We have neglected the truth that a good farmer is a craftsman of the highest order, a kind of artist.” – Wendell Berry

Yet.

Your clients are waiting for you. They just don’t know it. They haven’t heard the reasons why. They haven’t been told the stories of your product or service. Their friends haven’t referred them to you. They don’t know that they need what you have to solve a problem they don’t realize they have.

What will you do to open their eyes to the real possibility that there is something better than the status quo? Something that will take them further than the “tried and true” of current vendors, solutions, and DIY home remedies.

What will it take to break their minds and turn their heads so they see you—finally. And understand the power of a different choice.

Switching costs are real and this requires change and change is hard. But the market we’re talking about doesn’t even know about the costs of change you want to impose on them because they don’t know who you are.  And they don’t think they have a problem because there’s no pain. And people buy mostly on pain, not the future promise of gain. Once they understand they have a problem and see the effects of the problem on their mission or their goals or their strategy or something even closer to them—their wallet—then their senses begin to kick in. They start to see the problem and eventually it will become so vivid that they can’t unsee it. 

One day my daughter introduced me to an interesting experiment. She said the next time you’re driving look at the other cars and you’re guaranteed to see a green Kia Soul. Then, every day from that time forward you will see a green Kia Soul. Try it. It’s true. The Green Kia Soul phenomenon is at the core of moving people toward your solution. They just haven’t been told to look for it. Yet.

If you only had an albino raccoon.

Raccoon Photo

Who else do you know that owns an albino raccoon? Think of the exclusivity!  You could charge a small fortune for people to see this amazing mystery of nature. There’s clearly no competition.

Unfortunately there’s nearly no market, unless you’re a dad driving through the desert in the American West with kids under the age of 12 who need to stretch their legs after a long ride.

Marketing isn’t just about creative pictures and words, it begins with a business goal. If your goal is just to make a handful of girls happy each year, an albino raccoon is a perfect product. If you want to build a larger business, you need an army of albino animals, plush toys, and a popular kids cartoon.

Ask yourself, what is your business about, and then you can figure out the price, the place, and the promotion.

For the record, despite the pleas from my daughters, I did not pay to see the raccoon.

What is the definition of a qualified lead?

Qualified leads mean different things to different organizations. If you do a lot of live events is someone qualified if they register, if they attend, or if they raise their hand for more information after the event? Or something else?

What about people who attend a webcast? Do you qualify them simply by their attendance or a combination of attendance, request for more information, company size, geography, title, and industry?

What about inbound phone calls? Do you account for the type of request or just immediately qualify everyone and pass them along?

Let’s make one thing clear, you do not want to deliver unqualified leads your sales team because you want to make sure they are following up on all of your hard lead generation work. If you deliver undesirables to them, they’re going to lose trust in the lead flow and then, when a good lead comes in, it will be ignored.

I recently found a great article on this topic, “What is a Marketing-Qualified Lead?” It’s worth bookmarking to review from time to time to make sure your lead gen is organized properly.

Some of the highlights:

  • Define the profile of the lead you want (name, title, organization, etc.)
  • Organize your channels (inbound, events, etc.)
  • Identify the actions the person needs to take to be qualified
  • Make sure your sales team agrees with the definition of a Sales Qualified Lead and a Sales Qualified Opportunity
  • Keep the lead qualification process simple

 

 

 

 

 

Cool Marketing Idea (Weekly Winner)

I really love it when someone proves basic marketing principles, like the concepts I discussed in my previous post about Market, Message, Media.

I recently received a box in the mail (yes…snail mail). Inside was a retro red viewfinder and three slide discs. How can you NOT take a minute to look through this. I did. I looked at it all—primarily because I thought it was a cool marketing piece. But then I realized they were smart and that they did their homework.

They found out who I was and a potential problem I may have (the Market). They wrote great copy to get my attention and their website was spot on (the Message). And then came the Media.

The viewfinder was great. But this morning I received an email with a customized video for me by a sales rep. The video wasn’t a finely polished piece, but that worked in it’s favor. It seemed more authentic, more natural. In the email were a list of dates and times that he’s available for a meeting. Great touch.

In the end, their marketing did two things really fast through some shock and awe. It informed me of their services and it persuaded me to call. Essentially, it got exactly what they wanted from me—a meeting. I’m talking with them later today.

 

Marketing Basics (part 1): Market, Message, Media

I was hooked instantly. Marketing 101 at the University of Utah was what launched my formal interest in the world of marketing and advertising. My professor talked in simple terms, sharing core principles that I’ve never forgotten and that I use to this day.

Understanding the basics of marketing are a look into the life of your potential consumer. First, you need to understand who the person is and the problem they are trying to solve (the Market). It could be a manager struggling to find solutions to keep a highly valued employee from quitting (perhaps something like Jhana could help), or a teenage girl who is looking for a modest prom dress (they actually exist!).

Once you understand who you are trying to reach, and their circumstance(s) you can look at how you talk with them (the Message). I’ve subscribed to Geoffrey Moore’s formula of building an effective value proposition in his book Crossing the Chasm (a must read). It’s a simple template that gets right to the point.

For  ____________ (target customer)
who ____________  (statement of the need or opportunity)
our (product/service name) is  ____________  (product category)
that (statement of benefit) ____________ .

As an example:

For content marketers
who are struggling to find proven methods of lead generation in their industry,
our service is the first open-collaboration library of marketing strategies and tactics
that break down results by target segment.

With your target market and your value proposition in place, you can start looking at the communication channels to reach them (the Media).

It seems that everyone jumps to this step first. Big mistake. You want to understand what establishments your prospects frequent—Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, the New York Times, Interstate 15 between Las Vegas and Barstow—and then build your communication strategy. This will save you time, money, and a lot of wasted resources.

Market. Message. Media. These are some of the basics of marketing that I’ll be exploring in depth in future posts.