Be Different or be dead

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
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January 25, 2021

Why marketing needs to stop some old ways and start new astonishing ones

Source: Pexels

Why marketing needs to stop some old ways and start new astonishing ones.

Success in today’s highly changing and unpredictable markets requires your marketing strategy to be more powerful; marketers to step up and leave their traditional tools behind in favor of new approaches made necessary by heightened competition and changing customer demands.


If your marketing strategy is to become a truly powerful and successful element of your business plan, certain practices need to stop; others need to start.

STOP!

— Stop the obsession with mass markets. Mass markets don’t exist because the underlying assumption is that people in the crowd all look the same.
There is no such thing as an average customer that looks the same as every other person in the crowd; there may be a ‘lowest common denominator’ but that’s about as far as it goes.

Every person is different in some way. The challenge for the marketer is to discover their differences and market to each one of them individually with unique solutions that meet their needs specifically.

— Stop using price as the main tactic to sell products and services.

It won’t; it’s lazy marketing and it’s not a viable long-term strategy. Price moves can and will be easily copied by the competition. Furthermore, price competition squeezes profit margins for every player and contributes nothing to building customer loyalty.


If you want to compete on price, you’d better have economies of scale and scope in your business where being the low cost supplier is critical.


— Stop benchmarking. Copying what the best in class marketing organization does is a catch-up tactic and does nothing to gain strategic advantage.
Again, it’s lazy marketing that sometimes gets referred to as innovation. It’s not. Being like someone else is merely an effective way to lose your identity.

Try coming up with an original (imperfect is ok) thought; you will be handsomely rewarded.


— Stop trying to be better; this incremental approach is neither effective nor appropriate. You can’t incrementalize your business to success. You need to make a move to stand out from everyone else — to be distinctive and unique from the competition.

Make competitive moves that create the ‘wow power’ to catapult the organization out of the herd.

— Stop trying to make small incremental changes to products to make them appeal to a broader market. So, the classic approach is to introduce a product intended to satisfy a specific need, and then to modify the product to try and give it a broader appeal.

The problem is that this ‘round-the-corners’ marketing dilutes the crisp value proposition that made it attractive in the first place and produces a boring solution that satisfies no one. Keep products edgy and vibrant.

Source: Pexels

START!

— Start looking for ‘stepping out’ opportunities that make the organization the ONLY one that does what it does in the markets it serves.

Rather than continually striving to improve your product and service portfolio exclusively, start spending time on answering the question, “Why should I do business with you and not your competitors?” as the way of creating a unique place in the marketplace.

My ONLY Statement has proven to be an extremely successful strategic tool for marketers to express an organization’s uniqueness: “We are the ONLY ones that…” is the elevator sound bite that cuts through the clutter and expresses how your organization stands apart from all others.

— Start asking the customer service team more for input on how offers are being accepted by customers, what the ‘pain points’ in operations are, and what the competition is doing.
Use customer service as a primary customer learning and market research source.

— Start focusing on creating experiences for your customers as opposed to flogging products and services at them.
Deliver happiness rather than push product features down their throat.
A product delivers happiness for a limited time only — a new SUV soon becomes a used car — a memorable experience stays with us forever.

Emotion marketing represents a huge opportunity so start delivering solutions that have emotional layers that surround your core offering. Make it more than just a product.

— Start discovering the ‘secrets’ and innermost desires of your target customers to unlock their marketing potential.
Needs-based marketing is passe because most everyone already has their needs satisfied.

Marketing to what people need (herd behaviour) is no longer sufficient to be noticed in the market and stand out from the aggressive competition.

— Start establishing customer learning as a core competency in your organization.
Be ‘always on’ to learn what customers desire every time they touch the organization, whether it’s a personal contact or a visit to a website.


AI isn’t the complete answer. Humans need to lead the way with customer engagement that probes what people covet.
Relying on technology to understand what customers want is an incomplete algorithm at best.

— Start developing packages — not bundles — for high-value customers rather than offer them individual products and services.

Learn their broad holistic desires; seamlessly integrate multiple products to yield a broad value proposition that is difficult for competitors to match.

— Start cutting the crap, the non-strategic and no-longer-relevant marketing programs that marketers are working on, in order to make room for new projects and programs aimed at creating long term value. Purge the old practices that have outlived their purpose.

Falling in the crap category could be: price promotions (produce no long-term competitive advantage), new customer acquisition programs (encourage churn and anger existing customers who are denied the same offers) and customer appreciation events (mostly satisfy looky loo’s who want deals rather than rewarding existing customers).



A powerful and successful marketing strategy is all about continually providing relevant and compelling value to people, and in order to do that, it must refresh itself, take on a new purpose and let go of traditional methods.

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

• Posted 1.25.21 at 06:29 am by Roy Osing
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January 1, 2021

Why does business survival depend on being irresistible and different?

Why does business survival depend on being irresistible and different?

Never has it been more important for your business to be distinctive—to be different—in the marketplace than it is today.

Consumers are spending fewer discretionary dollars. Competition is intense as businesses jockey for the winning formula to attract customers, remain profitable and survive in this challenging environment. Those that don’t face this reality slowly wither and eventually fail. 

In BE DiFFERENT or be dead: Your Business Survival Guide, I show you how businesses can navigate the turbulent waters of the contemporary economy. 

Drawing on what I learned and successfully implemented over my career as an executive leader, and entrepreneur in the telecommunications industry, and as a business consultant, I give you the real deal: performance enhancement and survival ideas based on solid business principals that work in the real world.

I focus on strategies that I personally developed and executed: things you can do today to immunize your organization against performance decline and business failure tomorrow.

Practical and proven.

For business strategy executives, marketing and sales executives, customer service executives and business owners and entrepreneurs alike, BE DiFFERENT or be dead is an invaluable resource for any leader looking to create a competitive edge for their organization and build long term success.

Key concepts

Here are only a few of the groundbreaking and unheard-of topics in my book you won’t find anywhere else:

— Cut the CRAP.
— Never chase Yummy Incoming.
— Plan on the run.
— Execute first, plan second.
— Get your business plan just about right.
— Customer share: the new marketing measure of success.
— Serving customers: the NEW customer service.
— The customer experience roadmap.
— Service Recovery = Fix the mistake + Surprise the customer with what they don’t expect.
— NEW Sales Mantra: LOSE THE SALE!
— Benchmarking sucks.
— Craft The ONLY statement for competitive differentiation.
— Product flogging is disgusting.
— ME! NOW! marketing is replacing mainstream marketing.

What some of my readers say…

“I had trouble putting this book down. In these challenging times this is exactly what business leaders need to weather the storm. BE DiFFERENT or be dead by Roy Osing is bang on for sales people, marketing executives, entrepreneurs and owner operators. Learn from Roy…I did!”
— Dr. Peter Legge, OBC, LL.D (HON), CEO/Chairman/Publisher Canada Wide Media Limited

“BE DiFFERENT or be dead is one of the top business books in the U.S.”
—Soundview Executive Book Summaries, Concordville, USA

For business strategy executives, marketing and sales executives, customer service executives and business owners and entrepreneurs alike, BE DiFFERENT or be dead: Your Business Survival Guide is an invaluable resource for any leader looking to create a competitive edge for their organization and build long term success.

BE DiFFERENT or be dead: Your Business Survival Guide is available here.

Cheers,
Roy
For all of my books, check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 1.1.21 at 12:00 pm by Roy Osing
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January 1, 2021

How marketing can improve and survive in an unpredictable world

How marketing can improve and survive in an unpredictable world.

How can your marketing strategy survive the storm in today’s world? Marketing is in serious trouble! Its effectiveness is extremely limited.

If you are practising traditional text book marketing, this book is your wake-up call. You are subjecting your organization to enormous risk.

Why? The playground for organizations today is not what it used to be.

Today’s environment is NOT relatively stable, predictable, and slow changing, where a handful of competitors tussle for business.

It is NOT a marketplace where customers dutifully accept what organizations produce with little recourse if they object and are dissatisfied.

It’s anything but.

The Storm is today’s world: turbulent, chaotic, powerful, violent and life-threatening. Where a plethora of hungry and aggressive competitors fight to live or die; where people are connected, well informed and engaging.

Storm consumers wield their power and punish companies who don’t live up to their expectations; they change their minds in a heartbeat and move to greater value and a better deal.

The Storm denies traditional marketing which is risky in current market dynamics. Doing more of the same-old, same-old marketing practices in destroys value and kills businesses.

Companies need a completely fresh and different approach. One that is completely in synch with new world realities.

One that is a shocking change from where we are in marketing today as opposed to a more lethargic shift in thinking which really doesn’t result in much change at all.

Storm marketing throws out the old and creates the new. It asks “What does marketing have to look like to thrive on and survive The Storm”? not “How can present marketing practices be modified and adapted to changes in our operating environment?”

The Storm demands disruptive and audacious thinking.

In this book, discover a new platform for Storm marketing; the essential marketing competencies organizations must take on and consistently demonstrate if they are to weather the maelstrom.

Key concepts

Here are only a few unbelievable concepts in the book you won’t find elsewhere:

— Serve people; stop flogging products and services at them. Respond to their agenda not yours.
— Learn about individual people; stop studying mass markets because they don’t exist.
— Dig for what people crave; merely satisfying their needs won’t give you a differential competitive advantage.
— Create customer experiences to build customer loyalty.
— Be the ONLY organization that does what you do; better and best don’t describe a long term winner.
— Be a premium priced in the markets you serve. Add extra value to your offerings and charge premium prices. Competing on price is insane marketing.

— Shed the strategy of being a fast follower; you’ll still be a copycat.
— Build barriers to customer exit; don’t fuss with competitive entry.
— Target to earn 100% of each customer’s business. Corollary: measure share of customer more than share of market.
— Shun benchmarking; it is a the tool of sameness. Copying lowers the bar it doesn’t raise it. Corollary: benchmarking has no strategic value.
— Focus on your loyal customers to grow your business; leave new customer acquisition to the second rate players.
— Stop product bundling. It’s price discounting in disguise.

— Build a customer learning competency to be able to shift with customer change.
— Grow revenue fast-and-easy during chaos.
— if you say you’re customer focused, choose your words very carefully.

What some of my readers say…

“Roy nails it again! Marketing in the Storm discusses the unusual disturbance of the once normal conditions of the business atmosphere, manifesting itself by winds of unusual force or direction. Today’s business is often accompanied by a rebellious climate of uncertainty, new rules, procurement, trust and lack of client know how. He’s scary correct with his insights. Read it and maybe survive.”—Frank Palmer, CEO DDB Canada

“Osing shouts out a convincing argument for smart marketers to heed: Take the time to respect your customers’ uniqueness, or get tuned out.”—Lori Leavitt Evans, Serial Entrepreneur and President, Lori Leavitt Evans Consulting

“I just love Roy’s books. Short, crisp, relevant, focussed and hard-hitting. Marketing in the Storm is 45 pages of dynamite to help marketeers understand what is important for today’s customers and what keeps them coming for more. He is right….it is about “experiences”, not “products”.
This book is highly recommended not just for new marketeers but also seasoned ones who still play by yesterday’s rules. The quote from Nelson Jackson, ” I do not think you can do today’s job using yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow” is the essence of Roy’s book. Loved reading it.”—Nerio Vakil, President Total Business Solutions, Mumbai India

Check out Marketing in the Storm at retailers here.

Cheers,
Roy
For all of my books, check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead book series

• Posted 1.1.21 at 08:00 am by Roy Osing
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