Be Different or be dead

February 11, 2021

Why is a craving more important than a need to marketer’s?

Source: Pexels

Why is a craving more important than a need to marketer’s?

‘Crave research’ is the new black in the discipline of determining the triggers that make people buy.

But there still seems to be focus given to traditional marketing research which relies on determining what people need even though most people already have their needs satisfied.

Which means if you remain needs focused you will eventually end up competing on price as the other attributes of your product are the same as other providers - if 2 products are essentially the same in terms of features, price is the only thing left to try to distinguish one from the other.

But competing on price is an ugly place to be. Customers love low prices; organizations not so much, as profit margins are squeezed and competitors can easily copy.

Marketing needs to turn from needs-centric research to ‘crave’ research

The questions to ask in crave research are different than those asked in traditional market research: what do you crave, covet, ache (for), hunger (for), itch (for), sigh (for), yearn (for), lust (after) and long (for) replace ‘what do you need?’

The crave questions address what people spend their discretionary money on these days at premium prices — the marketer’s sweet spot.

The crave game is the new game that will separate successful companies from the mediocre and dying ones.

Crave-based offerings are automatically personalized because no two people crave exactly the same thing. And they command higher margins as people are generally prepared to pay more for an item they are emotionally pulled towards as opposed to one that fills a staple need in their lives. We get upset when car insurance rates go up 15% but don’t sweat the fact that we just financed a high end SAV for $100,000.

In a crave market, the basis for competition suddenly changes; price is no longer the most important element; the strength of the crave pull is.

Competitive advantage in crave markets goes to the organization that best delivers personalized crave-based offers.

A nice place to be — high market share at premium prices that deliver high margins. Nirvana marketing.

Long term sustainable competitive advantage is possible because once the crave research and offer development infrastructure has been developed, it can be sustained as crave factors change.

And the crave marketer is automatically changing with the customer; they are always relevant to the markets they serve.

Do you study what your customers crave?

Observe and ask them.

Build your marketing machine around what you discover.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.11.21 at 05:38 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 8, 2021

6 easy ways to learn more and be more successful

Source: Pexels

6 easy ways to learn more and be more successful.

Successful career development requires staying relevant and this means riding the knowledge curve: if you want more you need to know more.

If you want more success and rewards in your career you need to know more. Expecting infinitely more returns from your current knowledge base is unreasonable; there’s only so much more you can squeeze out of a sponge before you need a bigger one and before you must replenish it with water.

Yet there are too many people who are unsatisfied with their lot in life because they believe they should be able to leverage their existing knowledge base to produce more and more personal benefits. They think they should be able to squeeze more personal benefit from what they’ve learned in the past.

Whereas this approach may work for a while, at some point one has to replenish themselves with broader and different skills and competencies if their end game is to be more relevant and therefore have an opportunity to be more successful.

If you’re no longer relevant, you’re done for future opportunities.

These 6 tactics will help you build your ‘know stuff’ repertoire:

1. Knowledge frontier

What’s the new knowledge frontier? What are the growth sectors of the economy? Which way is the wind blowing in terms of new business opportunities and what skills do you need to possess in order to make a valuable contribution to their exploitation?

It’s not just about what you would like to do; it’s more about exploring what you need to do in order to be relevant in the changing world ahead.
For example, digital technology is definitely headed down the artificial intelligence path and bright people with AI knowledge are needed by companies that want to leverage it for financial gain.
So, if the job growth is disproportionately high in this sector you might want to find a way to play in it.

It’s critical you do your homework on this to discover what know-how will be sought after in the next few years.

Context for learning is critical; make sure your learning curve follows the skills and competencies curve of the economy — learn and stay relevant.

2. Career plan

Update your career plan based on your assessment of where industry knowledge needs are headed.
This is the step where you action what you discover in your knowledge frontier explorations.

For example, you may have been on a financial path and need to pivot to digital technology based on your frontier findings. If so, your career development plan needs an overhaul. Go back to a clean sheet of paper if need be; a new end game requires a different strategy to achieve it.

If you don’t build a specific career plan to exploit knowledge opportunities, you’ve wasted your efforts so far. And nothing will change for you.

Re-read BE DiFFERENT YOU! and a few of my blogs to make sure your career plan is solid and updated.

3. The Magic Question

Ask yourself the magic question as a way to focus your career plan pivot.

The MQ has always served me well in my career. I posed it every time I faced a job change: a new job, a demotion (yes, I had a major one of these), a lateral move, a new boss and so on.
And it guided me to make the right decisions that served me well.

”Now that I’m facing a change, what do I have to do differently” is a requisite for any pivot.

Failure to ask the question is deadly; asking it and getting (in retrospect) the wrong answer at first, but eventually getting it right, at least keeps you in the game. It just costs you time.

4. Someone else’s shoes

My experience is that the wealth of knowledge available when you walk in another’s shoes often goes undiscovered.
Cross training or stepping in to assume someone else’s responsibilities is not seen to be the amazing learning opportunity that it really is.

So look for the chance to do someone else’s job for a temporary period and you’ll be amazed at how rewarding the assignment can be.
Either you might learn that the temporary role is not for you, or you’ll discover some aspect of it that appeals to you and that might lead you to seek learning opportunities on a different track than you were originally on.

Learning based on practical experience in my view is far more valuable than textbook learning only because you learn theory from a real life situation rather than merely hypothetical possibilities promulgated by theoretical experts.

Practical learning makes knowledge real and so it’s much easier to retain and replicate.

5. Paper mentor

The world is at our feet through the internet; there is more online knowledge available than most of us could ever tap in our lifetime.

So, go online and find a paper mentor you can learn from.

For me, Seth Godin has always been an invaluable marketing mentor for me though I’ve never met or spoken with him.
But because he is a prolific writer with an incredible perspective on where marketing needs to go in order to remain relevant, I learn voraciously from his published work.

Find a paper mentor that is in the sweet spot of your career development plan and not only study them but also try to apply what they teach.

6. Young professionals

Go find a younger person who is doing what you would like to do (again, as determined by your updated career plan) and rub shoulders with them.
This is where you probably have to build yourself a new contact list.

Younger people are generally on the cusp of breaking new knowledge so they represent an effective lens for you.
But don’t make it weird if your chronological impairment — aka your age — outpaces theirs.

Find a way to hang with them (probably virtually to begin with), conclude that they have knowledge to offer that you need and then play your relationship networking card to get closer to them.
Who knows? You may even make a friend for life.

The fate of your career development plan rests in your head; whether or not you keep pace with knowledge trends, and your capabilities to implement your new-found learnings in real world situations.

But the truth is, it starts with new thinking and new skills. So, go find what’s hot in the learning space, soak it up and apply it with passion like no other.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 2.8.21 at 04:54 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 5, 2021

8 simple ways you can improve your marketing muscle

Source: Pexels

8 simple ways you can improve your marketing muscle.

There are organizations that emphasize the role of marketing in their business plan. They are proficient at marketing who they are and what value they create.

They exhibit marketing effectiveness.

They have marketing muscle.

There are others, on the other hand, who struggle to get their message across and are not contenders.

Building marketing muscle isn’t just the job of the marketing department; the entire organization must take on the responsibility and work in harmony to deliver it.

Muscle-building routine

▪️Consistently WOW! your customers — Delivering awesome customer service is fundamental to building muscle; it’s the basic platform you need to build a strong sustaining brand. If you don’t serve your customers in an exemplary way (or at least have plans to), ignore the rest of this article.

▪️Lead with innovation — Be the first ones to do something creative and “out there”. Yes, it’s risky to try something new, but if you try often enough you will have the winners that add dimension to your brand.

▪️Surprise your market — Do something that people don’t expect. Muscle builders pulse surprises from time to time, creating buzz and attracting a great deal of attention.
And they don’t surprise just anybody; “delight tactics” are aimed at their loyal customers. Check out Richard Branson to see how it is done.

▪️Earn the customer’s business everyday — Don’t feel entitled to it just because you have it. This is all about never taking the customer for granted; assuming that since you already have them, you don’t have to do much to keep them.

This is a fatal mistake! Investing in deepening your relationship with a customer and earning their trust will not only keep them spending with you, it will also motivate them to “spread your word” to others.

▪️Integrate yourself in your community — People want to do business with organizations that care about the communities they are in; that give back in some meaningful way.

Muscle is built with a HUGE dose of humanity, and social investing is an effective way of allowing your softer side to be seen. And target community investments to programs aligned with your strategic plan; avoid trying to support every cause out there.

▪️Adopt customer learning as a core competency — Learn about your customers as a continuous process rather than a periodic task.

Customer needs, wants and desires change and it is critical to keep up. Muscle strength grows proportionately with how knowledgeable you are about who your customer is and what their top priorities are.

▪️Have fun! — It’s amazing how impactful it is to shed the business formality thing and show an informal playful persona from time to time. Casual language, humour and making fun of yourself are ways to show your customers “it ain’t all about the bottom line”.

▪️Think “ME” — Shift your thinking from mass production to personalized value creation. Narrow your focus to create solutions for small groups of customers rather than trying to come up with one size that fits all (which doesn’t work anyway).

Keep in mind that muscle form isn’t developed overnight; it can take years of blood, sweat and tears before the market sees you as a contender.

However, there is no time like the present to get on with it.

Define your muscle building program.

Start executing.

Don’t look back.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.5.21 at 10:48 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink

February 5, 2021

3 simple ways to give the most brilliant customer service

Source: Pexels

3 simple ways to give the most brilliant customer service.

If you want your customer service to excel, here are 3 essentials.

Essential #1 - set your strategic context to serve customers rather than ‘service’ them.

To provide brilliant customer service, your business plan must give it the priority.

We ’service’ cars and computers but we serve people. The notion of being ‘serviced’ is quite frankly repugnant to me.

Servicing people focuses on inflicting the rules and processes of the organization on the customer. Some analyst in the organization decides that the most efficient way to fulfill a customer’s request and control cost is to do it a certain way. Whether the customer wants to participate in the process is irrelevant.

Serving, on the other hand, requires that systems, rules and procedures are designed to satisfy the service experience expected by the customer.

It may be more cost efficient to outsource your call centre to some distant place in the world where english is not the mother tongue, but if a conversation with one of these reps infuriates your customer, what have you gained?

Too many organizations take this inside-out view of customer service where the needs of the organization are pushed on people.

What is needed is an outside-in perspective where the customer drives how they are served.

Essential #2 - deliver your core service flawlessly 24X7. Core service is the essence of your business; what people get from you. WiFi that works, good food, clean hotel rooms and planes that take-off and land every time are examples of core service.

If you deliver your core service consistently as promised customers will rate you average because they expect your core service to work as promised. On the other hand, failure to deliver satisfactory core service will earn you a fail and your brand suffers as the stories of your shortcomings spread far and wide.

Essential #3 - create dazzling service experiences around your core service. This is the WOW! that surprises people; giving them what they DON’T expect.

Dazzling experiences drive customer loyalty but only if your core service is delivered flawlessly

How to dazzle?
▪️Recruit people that “love” fellow humans and possess the innate ability to serve them.
▪️Create rules, procedures and systems that enable friendly and user friendly transactions.
▪️Turn OOPS! into WOW! by recovering from mistakes and service blunders in a way that surprises and delights the customer.

Don’t expect results over night; serving people in a stand-out manner is a journey.

But start it. Now!

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 2.5.21 at 06:40 am by Roy Osing
• Permalink