How to Choose a Marketing Consulting Firm

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1. Ask them to define marketing. Many people call themselves marketing consultants but cannot even properly explain the term. Marketing, in its simplest form, is everything your organization does to satisfy the needs and wants of your “market” (actual and potential buyers of your product or service). Subsets of marketing include public relations and sales.

2. Ask about their credentials and experience. Are they truly marketing consultants, or are they no more than a public-relations firm? Most qualified marketing consultants have degrees in marketing, not communications, and many have graduate degrees. They also should be able to select marketing components that will work best for your needs.

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How to Choose a Marketing Strategy (continued)

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DISTINCTIONS THAT APPEAL TO A BROAD AUDIENCE Example: American Airlines

After de-regulation of the airlines in 1978, many carriers quickly became mired in price competition and service cutbacks that shortchanged the mainstay of the airline business -the business traveler. Although American used frequent-flier coupons to attract pleasure travelers, the company decided the best way to hold regular prices firm and retain business travelers was to sell service, not prices. It pioneered a two-tier wage structure that held down labor costs, and still managed to stay at the top of the industry in on-time performance, safety and luggage handling. It’s advertising emphasized those statistics, along with the promise to coddle passengers with the best in-flight service possible. American’s market share grew without the company having to resort to cut-throat price competition that knocked some of its competitors out of the air.

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How to Choose a Marketing Strategy

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Finding a market niche Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter argues that companies must choose among four different strategies in order to prosper:

INDUSTRY-WIDE COST ADVANTAGE Example: Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Soap

Introduced in the 19th Century as a premium quality, pure skin cleaner that was far different than the coarse, brown soaps of the era, Ivory Soap for decades was sold as a mass-market good that commanded a premium price. Ads featured women and babies bubbling up with the white soap that was 99 & 44/100th pure. Ivory even advertised a novelty that prevented the soap from getting lost in bathtub suds: It floats! Seventy years later, however, competitors forced a shift in strategy. By the 1950s, white soaps were commonplace and rival soap makers added perfumes and skin moisturizers to their bars. Procter & Gamble decided to change Ivory’s strategy instead of its formula. It cut the price and began peddling Ivory as an all-purpose, no-nonsense family soap. Sales and profits soared.

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How to Master Marketing Tactics

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Once you’re sure of your marketplace, the next question is how to advertise. Nelson is a strong believer in trade magazines because their audiences most closely match your potential customers. She thinks wholesale businesses, for the most part, should avoid television, radio and newspapers.

Telemarketing, which means having your sales force make pitches over the phone rather than in person, should be done only by established companies.

“It’s a waste of time to do it at the beginning,” said Nelson, because people haven’t heard of your business and will probably hang up without getting the pitch. “If they’ve heard of you, they’re more likely to listen to the next 30 seconds.”

The rules of the game for retailers are a bit different. Reaching local customers means knowing your market and competition, running well-planned sales promotions and advertising at key times during the retail season.

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Choosing Software Allies for the Online Marketing Wars (continued)

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*Will the bank’s technological infrastructure be supported with a system that promotes operational excellence? If there is a Web site already in place, the software should enhance it and increase functionality without reinventing the wheel. Further, banks with or without existing sites should seek out developers who can integrate their products with back-end and middleware systems, and who have the power to extract customer information from existing mainframes, proprietary home banking products, and other financial planning and budgeting software already available to the bank’s customers.

The greater the data integration capability, the more successful banks will be at developing the type of one-to-one customer relationships that lead to cross-selling and up-selling while lowering costs. Look for partners whose products encourage data-sharing across departments, a vital step toward a comprehensive, strategic marketing program.

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