Marketing – why bother?
PT Barnum, arguably the world’s greatest salesman, once purchased a load of salmon at a very attractive price without actually seeing the product. He later discovered the salmon was white instead of the pink that people were used to seeing. Barnum’s answer was to label all the cans “Guaranteed not to go pink in the can”. Not many of us have Barnum’s sales skills (thank goodness) and the most successful marketing strategies generally begin by finding a way to fulfil an existing need, rather than trying to create demand for something you already have. The most successful entrepreneurs are those that spot market opportunities and then collate the resources to put together a solution that fits the market.
The Four Ps, and how not to use them
In the early 1960s, a Harvard Business School Professor suggested that an ideal marketing strategy contained four elements: product, price, place and promotion. These four elements are often referred to as the marketing mix, or the Four Ps, and both terms have become so common-place that they have passed into common usage.
The Four Ps model is most useful, however, when marketing low value consumer products, which are atypical of Enterprise Hub client offerings. For example, services marketing must account for the unique nature of the services offered, and Industrial or Business-to-Business marketing must account for the long term contractual agreements that are typical in supply chain transactions.
Later commentators have pointed out that a serious drawback of the Four Ps approach is that it emphasises the inside–out view (looking from the company outwards), whereas the essence of marketing should be outside–in: that any successful marketing strategy begins with an understanding of your customers.
Company philosophy
Companies with a focus on marketing are often characterised as aggressive. In fact, market-driven companies are usually those with the most cooperative models of business. That can mean developing cooperation with your customers to provide what they want, when, where and how they want it. But it can also be a case of developing cooperative networks with suppliers and complementary businesses to create a symbiotic value network that allows you to supply your customers’ needs more effectively – see WebBrick’s story on page 22 for an example of this. The most enlightened businesses are also realising that their competitors can be a source of support in certain circumstances. Increasingly, large and small companies are coming together to develop market-driven solutions in an ‘Open Innovation’ model.
