Since my last post, I’ve been musing further on what makes a good marketing mindset because, certainly, some people are more marketing minded than others. I’ve blogged before about the pleasant surprise in working with a GPs practice where I’ve found that everyone from the doctors to the health assistants seems to ‘get it’ so easily – more so than many business people I talk to. Are they ‘natural marketers’? Do they have an inbuilt ‘marketing mindset’?
Customer focus is the classic of marketing thinking and it always bears repeating. I find it all too common to come across business people who ‘do what they do’, ‘make what they make’ or ’sell what they sell’ and seem to just expect people to give them money for it. The question of whether there are sufficient people out there who want these things badly enough to part with money for them has barely crossed their minds.
It’s often a revelation, too, when it dawns on clients that the reasons people do buy from them might not be the ones they suppose; that the ‘emotional customer’ prevails over the ‘rational customer’; that communicating in the customer’s language from the customer’s point of view can be so powerful.
Your customer base needs investment too! All too often businesses are set up with the owner happy to invest in developing a product, improving a service, or buying stock. Of course, if you don’t invest in what you sell, you haven’t got a business. But if you haven’t got anyone to sell it too, you also haven’t got a business – and yet so many business owners fail to invest in developing their customer base. It’s called marketing and it’s necessary!
Creative thinking is vital for successful marketing in so many ways. It is a vital part of the innovation process that comes up with new products and services in the first place. And creativity is equally essential in maintaining a competitive edge; as it becomes harder to differentiate your business in evermore crowded markets, a creative yet focused approach to putting your message across will be the one that makes you stand out. Which brings us to…
The Growth Mindset that is so important to sensure that you and your business keeps learning - from competitive intelligence, from drawing ideas from businesses in other sectors, from simply knowing ‘what’s out there’ and from customer feedback – which brings us full circle back to our customer focus.
One thing I found when I set up my own business was that my marketing background was so valuable – and would have been so even if the business wasn’t marketing consultancy. The ‘marketing mindset’ stops you becoming inward-looking and oblivious to the world your business operates in. It keeps you focused on those vital customers, on your long-term goals, and on your ability to adapt to changing world.
Francine Pickering
Clarity Marketing Ltd.