The perfect fruit salad : banana, kiwi and … marketing

Well, it’s true – for me at least. If you want success you have to find a decent balance between the production pipe, developing new products, the actual selling process and marketing everything. It’s like a perfect fruit salad. You have to have bananas, few kiwis, oranges, grapes and apples. This works fine for me. Just like that, the perfect mix can get you the success you desire in your active market : you just need to find your balance.

You can’t have decent fruit salad without …

Just like everything else your business has to express a perfect balance between all the elements that compete in order to push your business forward to success. Perfection is a rare thing and only the best of the best found it’s secret. Companies like Microsoft, Dell, Cannon and many others managed to create good products (practical and with good design) and sell them successfully. They wouldn’t reached success if they had rely only on production or only on design or by ignoring the marketing process that can make the difference. Making all these things work together in a perfect harmony is the result of hard work and years of practice so if you manage to get at least close to this then you’re doing really good : the perfect salad for you. That is why I chose to create this analogy : everyone has it’s own preferences and it’s a matter of find the perfect combination that works for you.

What marketing can do for your business

Simply put : a good marketing strategy can sell your products or services. Any business produces or offers a product or a service. The first thing in a marketing campaign is to ask yourself the question : “Who is my client ? And Why he/she would by my product ?” . Now you are starting to think and to understand your client. First you have to describe him as a human : age, income, marital status, children, education, social status, religion, culture. Then you get to a much more finer part where you are trying to identify the need your product fulfills. We all have basic needs : food, water, clothing, education, religion and so forth. And we all want things that are related in some way to our basic needs. For example we all need to eat but from time to time we want to eat in a restaurant. We all need to travel from a place to another but comes a time when we want our own car and after that comes a time when we have a certain social status and we want a specific type of car. So you have to identify what need you fulfill and what would determine your client to take the decision to buy from you. You can think of few different reasons for a client to buy :

• cultural reasons : this has to do with how he’s been raised. What education he received, what country is he from, what religion he practices and so forth
• social reasons : friends, neighbors, colleagues at work, parents, kids – they all have some influence over your client
• personal reasons : sometimes you make choices because of your age, occupation, social status, lifestyle
• psychological reasons : you can have different motives, different perceptions different emotional status

Marketing helps you find the answer to all these unknown factors. Marketing can influence the way you present your products, the way you sell it and the way you design your products in order to produce it. And you have to realize that not only the marketer you hired for establishing a marketing strategy for your company has to think that way : all of your employees have to think this way. The client could come to you and says : I want to buy that thing. If the sales person doesn’t think beyond what the client wants and he doesn’t try to identify the need that stands behind the clients request then he can miss a few great opportunities to present different services or more complete services to that client(and to make more money).

When you need a Genius ?

Marketing analyzes the client, identifies what need your product fulfills, decides how to design and conceive the product, decides the selling techniques and how to advertise your product. Why you need a genius ? You need a good marketer in order to identify your client and the need your product would fulfill. Once you know who is your client, where to find him and why you are offering him your product then it’s only a matter of determination to succeed. A good marketing campaign will also create a relation between the client and the company, based on trust. A happy client is what you want but a returning client is what you desire. That is why you have to sell different products and all those products fulfill a basic need and all the related needs that would come with that basic one. If you only have one product the client won’t return because he doesn’t have a reason : you have to offer him one.

At the end

So, you see the perfect mix can create the perfect fruit salad but that perfect mix depends on what type of person you are, what market you address and what product you offer. No matter what you do consider investing in a good marketing strategy because in difficult times can it get out of troubles.

So, what’s your opinion on this ? I would love to know.