Why Good Marketing Starts Before the Marketing Department
The strongest brands are not built by communications alone. They are built into the customer experience.
How global connectivity is creating a seamless customer journey. © Picture House Media
Businesses often treat marketing as the final stage of the commercial process. Develop the product. Set the price. Build the website. Then ask marketing to make people want it.
That order is increasingly difficult to sustain commercially.
Some of the most powerful marketing decisions happen long before an advertisement is written. They happen when a business decides what the customer will experience, what problem it will solve, how easily it can be bought, how it will arrive and crucially, what somebody will say about it afterwards.
Marketing, in other words, is not simply the promotion of a business.
It is the design of reasons to choose, as the customer sees one business
Internally, organisations have departments, customers, do not experience them that way.
A customer does not necessarily distinguish between marketing, operations, customer service, technology and logistics. A beautiful advertising campaign followed by a frustrating checkout is simply a frustrating brand. The same applies in reverse.
A remarkably thoughtful delivery, an unexpectedly helpful employee or packaging somebody wants to photograph can communicate more about a company than an expensive advertising campaign.
This is where consumer behaviour becomes commercially important. Businesses understandably concentrate on acquisition, How do we get another customer?
A better question is: What happens after we get them?
If the experience creates satisfaction, recommendation and repeat purchasing, marketing begins to compound. If it disappoints, the company continually has to pay to replace customers it failed to retain.
Distinctiveness matters
Digital commerce has made it easier to launch a business. It has also made businesses remarkably easy to imitate. Competitors can see your prices, products, advertisements, social media and website within minutes. That makes superficial differentiation fragile.
A stronger competitive advantage comes from building something recognisable across multiple points of contact, language, service, product, experience, visual identity and organisational behaviour. The objective is not simply for consumers to recognise the logo.
It is for them to recognise the business without needing to see it.
Data explains what, People explain why.
Modern businesses have access to extraordinary amounts of information. We can measure clicks, conversion rates, abandoned baskets, repeat purchases and customer acquisition costs with increasing precision. Those numbers are indispensable. But a spreadsheet can tell us that somebody abandoned a purchase, it cannot always tell us why.
Was the price wrong? Did delivery feel expensive? Was there insufficient trust? Did the customer intend to return later? Did a competitor simply make the decision easier? Did we adequate Market Research.
That is why quantitative performance data becomes considerably more useful when combined with an understanding of human behaviour.
Numbers tell us what happened. People tell us why.
The strongest commercial decisions need both,
Marketing should create business value. The temptation in digital marketing is to confuse activity with progress. A company can publish every day, accumulate followers and generate millions of impressions without necessarily creating a stronger business.
The more useful measures are often less glamorous, customer retention, recommendation, consideration, conversion, lifetime value and profitability.
Marketing should ultimately make the business easier to choose, easier to remember and more difficult to replace. That requires marketers to understand considerably more than advertising. They need to understand customers, operations, technology, finance, culture and the commercial model surrounding the product.
Perhaps that is the more useful way to think about the discipline.
Marketing does not begin when a business has something to sell.
Marketing begins when a business decides why anybody should care.
