Understand and profile the target customer so well that you produce a product that sells itself. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
Fundamentally, marketing is an exercise that starts before the product is developed or acquired.
Research by Peter Drucker, one of the key management and business thinkers of this century, brought him to a single factor that he concluded was most accurate in predicting the success of a new business or product: marketing. He wrote, “The aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.”
Postmortems of failed products and businesses reveal that lack of marketing is the main culprit. Yet, most entrepreneurs start a business without adequate marketing. Companies launch new products without marketing them, hoping somehow they will meet some people’s needs and this will translate to sales.
Marketing itself is a term least understood and practised, even by the elite and big firms. Many people equate marketing with promotion, advertising, sales or even customer services. Whereas these are elements, they don’t constitute and cannot substitute marketing.
Fundamentally, marketing is an exercise that starts before the product is developed or acquired. The main goal is to know, understand and profile the target customer so well that you produce a product that sells itself.
It is finding out what customers need and are capable of buying and aligning it with your interests. Thus marketing must seek to arbitrate the self interests of the business and the needs of the customers. Marketing elements such as promotion, advertising and sales can only yield fruits if adequate work has been done prior to producing the product so that it serves both the interest of the buyer and the seller.
Unfortunately, few business people take this approach. In fact, most people, especially novice start-ups, buy or produce a product they like or are passionate about first, and then think of who can buy it and ways of promoting and selling it. This makes the exercise a herculean task.
There is no amount of promotion, advertising or persuasion that can sustainably help sell a product that does not adequately address the needs of buyers. Thus the greatest secret of success in business is doing marketing long before you produce your product. You need to find out exactly what the target customers need and how they want it.
Your role will be chiefly to inform the customers that the product is in the market and at what price. This is where promotions and advertising ought to begin.
Most of the money, time and other resources spent on trying to push products could have been saved if not eliminated had producers taken time to establish target customers and profile them. Product and services developed after thorough marketing research are easier to sell. This is what Drucker meant when he said “the aim of marketing is to make selling unnecessary.”
The habit of developing a product first and then looking for customers to buy it leads to frustration. Doing it the other way round makes business exciting and rewarding.
All smart and successful sales people understand their customers well. They don’t waste time and resources guessing who will buy their products. The spend most of their time socialising and interacting with their prospects to understand what else they need and how they can source or produce it in a manner that meets the customer’s expectations.
Mr Kiunga is the author of The Art of Entrepreneurship: Strategies to Succeed in a Competitive Market.
