When it's Time to Realign Your Marketing

People have no money. They’re feeling the pinch. No-one’s doing any business at the moment. No-one’s making purchasing decisions right now.

Is that so? Here are a few facts for you:

• Michael Jackson announces 10 concerts. They sell out instantly. He announces 10 more…and 10 more. They all sell out. Top ticket prices £1,000+


• Aston Martin launch and start to successfully sell bespoke £1.2m car


• Whitbread can’t physically can’t find enough land and build Premier Inn hotels fast enough to keep up with demand


• Domino’s Pizza & Mc Donald’s report large increases in profits
  Aldi, Morrison’s & Sainsbury’s profits up


• Sales of the Nintendo wii top 50m worldwide


• Gaming sector up


• Adult clothing and toys, erm, up


• Cinema advertising up


• British tourism up
• Business networking group 4Networking recording record membership levels

There are hundreds and thousands of other examples too.

Money is still around and growth is being achieved – you may just need to realign your business to succeed. You can realign by changing your market focus to the sectors that are enjoying growth. Realign by changing the message about your product. Realign by selling something new to your existing customers. Realign by taking your resources and employing them differently to solve a different problem. Realign by changing your position in the market.

Your realignment might at first look crazy – £1.2m car in a recession anybody? But the craziest thing you could do is to fail to realign with where the money’s being spent.

Zero to Hero – It’s All in the Headline

Celebrated by journalists, advertisers, marketers and astute business people for hundreds of years, great headlines are zero-or-hero, loved-or-lonely, make-it-or-break-it important. And it becomes more so every day. We live in a world where the headline is everything – whether we take notice, what we’re going to think about what comes next, how much time and credibility we’re going to allow something. It’s like this because we no longer always have time to try to work out whether stuff is relevant or interesting to us or not. There’s too much choice, too much information, too much to take our attention.

Give me the headline! I can then work out:

• Do I read this email?
• What’s this document trying to tell me?
• Is this magazine worth buying this week?
• Is this brochure worth picking up?
• Does this website help me?
  

It’s the difference between engaging people or being ignored. No one gets to the opening paragraph or looks for the subheadings if the headline hasn’t interested them first.

And headlines don’t just come in text.

• What’s the headline that your suit shouts in a first meeting with a client?
• How do I trust you’re going to solve my problems? Easily? Courteously?
• When you answer the phone like you don’t care what have you told me in BIG CAPS up front

Everything we do communicates something. And people will understand you more easily when you communicate – with everything you do – like a classic newspaper article; winning headline first, then bold opening paragraph giving an overview, followed by paragraphs broken up with subheadings.


How would your communication look in print? What (and where) are your winning headlines?

Owning Your Business' Space

Which space does your business (or product) own? This is a fundamentally important question for all businesses for four reasons:


1, It encourages you to think about your prospects geographically

2, It forces you to define your prospects by type and/or sector

3, It makes you develop your unique propositions

4, Because to ‘own’ that space you have to continually be in people’s hearts and minds


If you can’t define your space, you can’t ever own it and you’ll struggle. Or fail. However, if you can define it (from 1&2) and you can clearly communicate your benefits over and over again (3&4), then you’ll become the choice of the people that you’re aiming at and you’ll stake out your territory.

Overly simplistic?

Why? Show me an easier way than doing this? Sure, it won’t negate competition or suddenly cure all the world’s problems, but it’s a lot, lot easier than wasting time, money and opportunity on soul-destroying hit ‘n’ hope marketing campaigns.

2020 Vision for Your Business

Do you remember all the fuss about how businesses were going to be affected when the smoking ban came in? And of course, businesses were affected – some negatively, some positively. Ultimately though the move was a sensible one for the health of everybody whether you individually liked it or not.

Now the Scottish parliament is looking at drastic ways to cut alcohol abuse. There’s already uproar amongst retailers about how it will affect business but if it becomes law then I’d imagine that the laws will eventually become statute all across the UK and may well influence the tightening of alcohol laws internationally because western society has an increasing issue with alcohol.

Then there’s the car industry, an industry that’s been churning out massively under-efficient products for years. It’s been fighting change rather than embracing it (for its short-term good rather than everybody’s long term good), and is now faced with the ‘perfect storm’ of unacceptance and recession. Given that the ‘green issue’ has been on the world’s radar for at least the best part of a quarter of a century it’s entirely feasible that the industry could have avoided this whilst making the world a better place.

We also live in a world where lending, health, drugs, family, stress, pollution, education, welfare state, pensions and so many other issues need serious political and social intervention because our current systems are outdated, irrelevant, expensive or socially unacceptable. And we need to address this in a world which is going to spend years in debt. Over the next ten years our political leaders are going to have to make some very radical decisions and changes. Decisions that can no longer be avoided or introduced softly.

But this tune isn’t about politics.

The point to take away is that the world is about to go through a decade of change like we’ve never seen before. You might think you’re used to fast-paced change, but the handle’s about to get cranked. Big time. The world’s going be a very, very different place by 2020 and it’s not just our political leaders that will need to make tough and sometimes thankless decisions. As business leaders we need to be looking at how we can position our businesses – in terms of revenue and recruitment – to take advantage of changes that will be sweeping and all but instant.

Resistance will be futile. You'll just go up in smoke.