Kotler’s Top Five Marketing Tips

From the marketing culture purveyors at Agenda by way of CNN.com, we present Professor Kotler’s Top Five Marketing Tips. (Nothing revolutionary here ... just simple, sound, and super-smart marketing thinking.)

1. Come in under the radar
"Building a brand is a roll-out process, not a drop everywhere in the world at one time. The key to brand-building is to have something good that you roll-out in a very intelligent way. Maybe even invisibly for a while because you want to be under the radar screen of competitors."

2. Know Your customer
"… marketing has evolved to be not only product centered but customer centered. We are saying you've got to understand and choose the customers you want to serve. Don't just go after everyone. Define the target market carefully through segmentation and then really position yourself as different and as superior to that target market. Don't go into that target market if you're not superior.”

3. Own your branding
"We are not in a state of competition anymore; we're in a state of hyper-competition. So people are desperately looking for handles -- functional features, emotional appeals -- that will draw people to their product. We should think of owning a word or a phrase that helps to build customer retention and loyalty.”

4. Stay ahead of the competition
"The worst thing is that if something works, your competitors are going to clone it and before you know it anything that you had as a differentiator is imitated by the others. So you're in the business of constant innovation. Constantly asking yourself, 'Three years from now, what will our differentiator be?'"

5. Make it an experience
"There's a big movement to say, 'we're not just adding services to our business and our product, we're actually trying to design an experience.' You'll see that language being used. We're in the experience design business. Starbucks is a very good example where coffee is coffee but they decided to sell it differently, put a higher price, make it good-tasting and make it an experience rather than just some coffee."

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Comments

[Dustin]

Thanks for the tip on the article John. Good basic stuff. Almost makes one say, "Hey, I do know what I'm doing here."

[Jason Wheeler]

Come in Under the Radar

I think sometimes you have to let it all on the line and take risks. THere have been some very successful full blown product launches. How about Diet Coke. Huge, Huge nationwide launch and within months they were number one in the category. I think if you have a known name there are circumstances where you use your power to dominate. If I remember correctly, Microsoft spent $12 million on a Rolling Stones song for their windows launch. I still remmebr that day. It had more press coverage then almost any news story that year. I say go for it! I understand that Coke and Microsoft were already big brands, but both campaigns were still big risks. Nowadays categories within corporate umbrellas are bigger then whole companies 25 years ago. It is like launching a new brand every time you roll out a new category or product to rival a category.

[johnmoore (from brandautopsy)]

Building the business creates the brand. That’s how I interpreted Kotler’s “Come in Under the Radar” marketing tip.

Take Starbucks. For 20 years, Starbucks was busy building and perfecting their business. No one was thinking about building a brand, they were too busy doing everything right to build a worthwhile business. The result? A powerful brand which connects on many levels with people around the world.

Ditto Whole Foods Market. They concentrated on doing everything right and the by-product was building a strong, profitable business which in turn, created a powerful brand.

Just as there have been successful blow-out brand launches from established companies, there have also been many blow-out brand flops. Remember … McDonald’s Arch Deluxe? McDonald’s McDLT? New Coke? Crystal Pepsi? Miller Reserve? All of these brand failures went the mondo mass advertising route to create a brand when maybe they should have concentrated on building the business to create the brand.

Call me jaded, but that’s my take.

[Jason Wheeler]

I agree. However, some would say that the launch of New Coke was the best thing that happened to Coke. It did not go exactly as planned, but it did far exceed their objective. Coke solidified itself as a cultural icon. Or it least convinced management that is was a icon.