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Consultants can play a positive role in helping companies reappraise
their market opportunities, strategies, and tactics. Consultants provide
a client company with an outside-in view to correct the company’s
tendency to take an inside-out view.
All firms have competitors. Even if there were only one airline, the
airline would have to worry about trains, buses, cars, bicycles, and
even people who might prefer to walk to their destinations
Michael Porter popularized the notion that a company wins by building
a relevant and sustainable competitive advantage.17 Having a
competitive advantage is like having a gun in a knife fight.
It has been observed that there are four types of companies:
1. Those that make things happen.
2. Those that watch things happen and respond.
3. Those that watch things happen and don’t respond.
4. Those that didn’t notice that anything had happened
Among the most important skills in marketing are communication
and promotion. Communication is the broader term, and it happens
whether planned or not. A salesperson’s attire communicates, the
catalog price communicates, and the company’s offices communicate;
all create impressions on the receiving party. This explains the
growing interest in integrated marketing communications (IMC).
Companies need to orchestrate a consistent set of impressions from
its personnel, facilities, and actions that deliver the company’s brand
meaning and promise to its various audiences.
Change, not stability, is the only constant. Companies today have to
run faster to stay in the same place. Some say that if you remain in
the same business, you will be out of business. Note that companies
such as Nokia and Hewlett-Packard gave up their original businesses.
Survival calls for self-cannibalization.
Most marketing is business-to-business (B2B) marketing even
though textbooks and business magazines devote most of their attention
to business-to-consumer (B2C) marketing. The disproportionate
attention to B2C has been justified by saying that (1) B2C is
where most of modern marketing concepts first arose, and (2) B2B
marketers can learn a lot by adopting B2C thinking. While these two
statements are true, B2B is having its own renaissance, and maybe
B2C marketers have a lot to learn from B2B practices. B2B, in particular,
has focused more on individual customers, and B2C is increasingly
moving into one-to-one customer thinking.
. A leading brand in
the past could safely charge 15 to 40 percent more than the average
brand; today it would be lucky to get 5 to 15 percent more. When
product quality was uneven, we would pay more for the better brand.
Now all brands are pretty good. Even the store’s brand is good. In fact,
it probably is made by the national brand to the same standards. So why
pay more (except for show-off brands like Mercedes) to impress others?
In recessionary times, price loyalty is greater than brand loyalty.
Customer loyalty may reflect nothing more than inertia or the absence
of something better. As someone observed, “There is nothing
that a 20 percent discount won’t cure.”
Everything is a brand: Coca-Cola, FedEx, Porsche, New York City,
the United States, Madonna, and you—yes, you! A brand is any label
that carries meaning and associations. A great brand does more: It
lends coloration and resonance to a product or service.
