GarthBox

I reviewed a resume yesterday that listed a skill of “upselling.”

To me, that’s marketing to increase sales in the moment, today, right now.

What about tomorrow?

The alternative is to market for growth by delighting customers, giving them a story they want to share and by caring more that the customer comes back or invites a friend to join her tomorrow.

Brands who focus on how to sell another are losing out to those who are addressing how to make a difference.

A difference often starts with a promise. What promise are you making?

 

Stay Positive & Market For Growth

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Some markets are interesting in that those who were once competitors are now friends .

Consider the cereal market. The entire industry is struggling.

While before it used to be one cereal against another cereal, now it’s every cereal against the latest assortment of competitors: shake supplements, granola bars, and other on-the-go snacks.

It’s worth addressing in any brand strategy, not only who are the current competitors, but who may be future competitors? What might turn your most-feared competitors into your friends? What would have to happen to the market for it to turn into a group fight?

To make a successful business, you can’t just focus on your current competitors, you must have an understanding of the whole industry and where it could g0 and why.

Of course, there are no right answers, but answering right isn’t the point.

Insight, care and the drive to see something last is.

 

Stay Positive & Will Your Business Last?

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Be it customer support, your marketing strategy, pitch or social communication, you’re either pushing or pulling.

Your pushing your ideas, your product, your facts in order to persuade the end user to do what you want them to do.

Or…or you’re pulling at the heartstrings, the universal themes, the real desire of what the end user wants.

Good work often goes to waste when we ignore what the other person, group or customer really wants and, instead, attempt to convince the them that they want what you want for them.

The only person who knows what’s best for them, is them. Are you listening?

 

Stay Positive & What Do They Really Want?

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I witness many frustrated marketers who go to this marketing summit and that marketing seminar only to be disappointed. It’s a fact that marketers over there are struggling with the same things we’re struggling with over here. They leave with no new knowledge.

With marketers, marketing knowledge is generally shared with one another. It’s blogged about, podcasted, seminar’d, and alike. Key insights don’t remain so secret for long because we’re all in marketing for the greater good of connecting people, sharing experiences, and caring deeply.

I remember when I first got serious about public relations and marketing. It took less than a year of regular reading and listening to podcasts and speakers before every book, podcast and speaker started sharing the same lessons. I struggled to learn something new from other marketers.

What I’ve found about new marketing knowledge is that it’s almost always learned from a new target, an industry, a market – not another marketer.

With this in mind, consider using your development fund (personal or work-funded) to go to a food service expo or a mobile video game conference or a yoga retreat or to a different country. You’ll learn more about marketing from those experiences than you will from going to an annual marketing conference.

Sound scary? It’s supposed to. Fear is the indicator you’re close to learning something new.

 

Stay Positive & The More Areas Of Life You Experience, The Better Marketer You Will Be

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A business plan, a conversation, a program is much more clearly communicated when it starts with what it’s not. It gives not only context, but actual meaning around what you are/ it is.

Just as important is who you’re leaving out.

Before you go into who your target is, tell me who you’re excluding.

The biggest brands are better described by what they are not and who they exclude than what they are and who they’re working to attract.

Exclusion builds hype, a tribe, a core network of people and widgets that believe in their importance and self-worth.

And that’s all brand building really is: getting people to have more self-worth by feeling included in something that’s bigger then themselves.

 

Stay Positive & You Can’t Have The Feeling Of Inclusion Without Exclusion, So Own It

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Many of my friends in highschool thought outsmarting monotonous work was done by figuring out how to not have to do the work. Practicing the same math formula was dumb to them, so they used the odd number answers in the back of the book and split up the even number answers among one another to lighten the load.

The reality of it is the actions they took were making them less smart. When it comes to the grunt work of any industry, the only way to outsmart it is by doing it so many times that it becomes easy, it becomes quick, and, if you’re really smart, you’ll find a better way of doing it.

Outsmarting an activity is about making it better, not about avoidance.

In the case of the math-adverse friends, they’ll never learn how to make the formula better, shorter, stronger because they’ve never invested the time in learning how it works to start.

Conquering the monotonous is a privilege, it’s also a gateway, not to showing your peers that you can handle the bigger more dynamic items that life and work have, but that you can construct a wear resistant foundation, a tight-knit understanding of how something simple works.

I’ve found that improving the simple is often more difficult (and rewarding) than improving the big and complex.

 

Stay Positive & Learn To Love The Grunt Work

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Marketers are often quick to assess where to spend the advertising fund.

This platform versus that platform.

Native advertising or referral marketing.

Better, I believe, to take a step back and question where the advertising fund might be better spent in establishing deeper connections.

Where can you delight more?

How can you make your product more remarkable than your advertising?

Often times, the best way to spend an advertising budget is in making your product or service greater, so much so that it advertises itself.

 

Stay Positive & Remarkable Products Are Better Than Remarkable Ads About An Average Product

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