Although marketing communications can help brand your business, differentiate you from the crowd and even increase sales, it cannot make your business succeed. To succeed in business, you have to provide something useful or necessary–a product or service people want or need. And you have to provide that something consistently. You can have great advertising, but if your product is not available or is not of good quality, guess what? You are going to get nowhere fast.
Lots of people spend time on their marketing strategies. And they develop great websites and fabulous collateral materials. Some people spend lots of time coming up with fancy names and lovely logos. But what they fail at is defining AND providing their product/service.
This morning I read an article from the Philadelphia Business Journal about two local small businesses: a gas/service station and a dry cleaner. Both business owners work very hard and show up every day to run their businesses. People can count on them. Neither business does much in the way of marketing because they don’t need to. If you need your car fixed, you go to one, and if you need some shirts cleaned, you go to the other.
Yesterday, I came across this post over on Copyblogger. It is about how it doesn’t matter whether you have a beautiful website if you don’t have a message. I would go further–you have to know what you are doing, and to quote Nike, just do it.
Time and again I meet successful business people. You know why they are successful? Because they provide the goods. On the other hand, how many times have you seen a restaurant fail? Probably dozens of times. You know why restaurants fail? Because people didn’t go there to eat. And why didn’t they go? Probably because the food was bad or the service was bad.
Basically, it boils down to having the product or the service. Of course, if you want to increase your market presence and/or let people know you are there, you are going to have to engage in marketing. But marketing alone will not get you business.
About Deborah Brody
Deborah Brody writes and edits anything related to marketing communications. Most blog posts are written under the influence of caffeine.
Good article Deborah,
I realy think it’s time to get back to basic Stratregic and Marketing values, it seems like “new media” (among other things) has gotten us all believing that we have to speed up, change quickly, find some hitherto unthought of solutions or positioning or we’ll get left behind.
There’s a lot to be said for a good old fashioned marketing mix, business plan, startegic plan etc. It focuses the mind on what it is we’re trying to do, to what end and at what cost?
I think the world is tired of shoddy, tired of cheap, tired of fast and lord knows tired of self service.
Time to re-look at how Global Icon Brands, built such vast and strong consumer franchises. They did it by offering tangible/realizable value, consistency and credibility.
Cheers, Thanks for the insights.
Steven.