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What Business Are You In ?

What Business Are You In ? 

Marketing determines the answer to that, and marketing just changed.

1. For more than a century, successful organizations have been built around traditional marketing. Marketing was an expensive investment, but it was worth it. Take an average product for average people and spend enough money promoting it and you were likely to make a significant profit. TV was a miracle worker, the secrets to leveraging the miracle were an efficient factory, consistent products and willingness to spend money to tell people about those products.

2.  The New Marketing has really shaken up traditional marketers. First, excessive clutter and new media alternatives have ended the guaranteed effectiveness of TV. Just when the old rules were changing, new techniques — ranging from Web sites to Google ads to digital Word of Mouth — came along to pick up the slack. To a traditional marketer, an effective New Marketing technique is an even better miracle than TV. Very fast results at almost no cost !
3.  But New Marketing doesn’t work for all and it doesn’t work, as well as some
     would like. Marketing Consultants are asked all the time, “But how can we make this new stuff work for us ?” There is frustration because this is the wrong question to ask. This blog is about that right question. Not “How do we use the cool new tools to support our existing structure ?” but “How do we become an organization that thrives because of the New Marketing ?” The wrong question is, “How do we use this New Marketing to maintain business as usual ?” The right question is, “If we’re not growing the way we’d like to, how can our business itself be altered ?

4.  Ask not what the New Marketing can do for you. Ask what you can do to thrive with the New Marketing. Successful organizations became so by leveraging what worked. They built factories and gave people (and the media) what they wanted, in quantity. Average stuff for average people, delivered straight from the store to you. I call this a meatball, a commodity, a branded item of little differentiation and decent quality. We’ve always needed meatballs. Call them staples or commodities or the basic building blocks of civilized society, but we need them advertised and we need them in quantity. Yes, you can still sell plenty of meatballs. But if you’re in the meatball business, bad news looms ahead. The media you depended on to sell average stuff to average people is fading. Network TV, newspapers, telemarketing and cold-calling are in trouble.

5.    Tactics from New Marketing are taking the juice out of Old Marketing, without 
    completely replacing it. Traditional organizations can’t thrive if they rely on the New Marketing to do their Old Marketing for them. So, we’re at a crossroads. One path is ever-increasing frustration as harried Marketing VPs are challenged to use some of that New Marketing “Internet stuff” to prop up traditional organizations. The other path has nimble, intelligent organizations that are poised and prepared, ready to be propelled by the fresh tactics of New Marketing. New Marketing is lousy at selling meatballs. Today, growth comes from an integrated approach, one that combines New Marketing tactics with fundamentally different products and services.

6.    Are you stuck with meatballs ? Everyone knows how to make and market a 
    meatball. That approach appears safe and straightforward, but it doesn’t lead to growth anymore. You can’t grow with meatballs because they’re ubiquitous. New Marketing is whipped cream and a cherry, a collection of techniques that offer huge payoffs — but New Marketing works only for organizations that can get in alignment, stop making meatballs and start making something that goes very well indeed with hot fudge and marshmallow sauce. There are fourteen trends that are completely remaking what it means to be a marketer. While these trends are transforming organizations that have the right products and the right approaches, they are crippling the organizations that are stuck with nothing but meatballs.

Once again, Marketing is transforming how we will connect with the customer.

Call now to know how We can Work Together

About the Author    
    Dr.  Sunil Pevekar  is a PGDM from IIMA and  a PhD from USA. He is an expert on
    10X   Business   Growth  and  NonTraditional  Marketing.  He  can  be  contacted  on 
    drsunilpevekar@gmail.com or +91 9324225347.

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