L'art de (se) diriger ( le blog de Laurent Pellegrin)

According to Mike Myatt, Chief Strategy Officer of N2Growth, my favourite blog, "The best way to insure that your marketing doesn’t wander off course is to gut check your marketing and branding initiatives against the following four points to determine whether or not your message is accretive or dilutive to your objectives:

• Customer Focus: Mark my words – any marketing endeavor conceived in absence of a customer centric mindset will fail. At its core, marketing is about engaging with customers, meeting their needs, solving their problems, sparking their passion, earning their trust, and cementing their loyalty. (...) Marketing isn’t about egos, it’s about results - you cannot achieve results without the customer.

• Leadership: There are a number of ways to get in trouble here…poor leadership, no leadership, or fractionalized leadership can all be quite problematic. Marketing is not a part-time endeavor, and if you don’t have a qualified C-level marketing executive leading the charge, don’t just trust things to the most vocal staff member. Lastly, don’t decentralize marketing…consistent messaging across markets, mediums and constituencies is critical. Don’t be guilty of mixed messaging because the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing.   

• Alignment: A fundamental precept to all marketing initiatives is that they must be in alignment with the corporate values and vision. Remember that good marketing adds value, leverage, and velocity to your vision. It should never dilute it or distract from it. Most importantly good marketing is never in conflict with corporate values…compromise in this area and trouble will most certainly follow. If your marketing doesn’t uphold your brand promise or if it’s not advancing core business initiatives, then you have an alignment issue.

• Managing Outside Vendors: Remember that consultants work for you, and that the decisions should be made by you and not the vendor. Good consultants build consensus and unify management focus, they do not splinter opinion. If you have a management team that is split down the middle on a marketing or branding issue then you have not arrived at the right decision.

Bottom line…solid marketing and branding initiatives are mission critical to sustainable increases in growth objectives. That said, flawed marketing or branding initiatives have crippled many a good company. Don’t allow yourself to be bullied into something that doesn’t resonate with your sense of discernment. If something is important enough to implement, it is important enough to do well."

Read the full post at : http://www.n2growth.com/blog/marketing-gone-awry/