Mindshare Marketing

Any entry into a new market needs to be taken in steps - the first of which is brand advertising.  You need to build brand awareness and demand for your products long before you make your first sale.  This can be costly, but not nearly as much as a premature product launch.

Previously, I talked about brand advertising.  It is an absolute necessity when you begin to build any new brand - even when you intend to re-release an existing brand.  Brand advertising builds a public knowledge of your project and creates anticipation of your product release.  It is easiest to enter a market when people are already waiting for you.

A good example would be the fast food chain Sonic.  For the longest time, there were no Sonic locations near where I live - none in this part of the state at all.  However, Sonic still advertised on local television networks.  When there was a commercial, everyone would gripe about the lack of availability of their food.  They would promote their newest milkshake - the closest imitator we could find, though was Burgerville.

Then Sonic started opening locations in the area, and business is booming.

Sonic built a customer base in a new geographic market without actually having a presence there.  Imagine how hard it would have been to gain new customers without this existing interest in their food.  Chances are good that Sonic would have struggled to cover its costs in the first year, and most of the people I know might never have patronized their restaurants.

As you have probably learned by now, marketing is an on-going process of both self- and competitive- analysis.  You need to understand who your company is, who your customers are, and who you are competing with - information that can stay fairly constant over time, or suddenly change overnight without warning.  Analysis must start from the day you first enter the market, and there is a very effective tool for quickly understanding why you are and what you are up against.

SWOT analysis is a common business tool.  It’s an acronym standing for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.  In a SWOT analysis, you first look at the company and define your own strengths and weaknesses.  Then you look at the market as a whole and define new and emerging opportunities and threats that may exist for your business.

Hermawan Kartajayaclaimed that the SWOT analysis is backwards when it comes to marketing.  He turned the tool around to force “business executives to look at the marketplace from an ‘outside-in,’ rather than an ‘inside-out,’ perspective.”  I cannot agree more.  A TOWS analysis helps us first understand the market - who is the competition, who are our customers - before studying ourself.

Targeting the perfect customer mean you are building your business model to serve them, not existing strengths and weaknesses of the company.  Looking first at the market and the customer gives us a better lens to use when analyzing ourselves.

You have probably used a SWOT analysis at some point in your career; compare your experience with that tool with the promise of the TOWS analysis.  Which do you think is more useful for your business?

Author’s Note: Mindshare Marketing came back online at 9:30 this morning.  Thank you to everyone who helped figure out what went wrong in the upgrade!

The first thing any entrepreneur looking to enter the market must do is survey the landscape.  While standing atop a hill and peering down at the city might sound like a fun activity, this has nothing to do with the landscape I’m talking about.

There are three questions you have to answer in detail before entering the market:

1) What is the market?

Without a clear concept of the market (or market segment) you wish to enter, you have no grounds on which to build your brand or product.  A concise yet accurate definition of the market helps you determine your customer, the most effective channels of distribution, avenues for advertising, and your overall brand image.

2) Who is already there?

Nearly every market has existing competitors.  Knowing who your eventual competition is and where they started will help you define your own path.  Nike was not built in a day, so you cannot hope to match their market offering immediately.  Know who your competition is and how they got to where they are in the market - this will help you define new market opportunities and the best route for growth.

3) Does the customer really need another product?

Why bother re-releasing something your customer already has?  Unless you can contribute a significant new feature or in some way eliminate more of the customer’s pain, there is no reason to replicate an existing product.  There are several outdoors apparel companies in the world, so Nau was faced with this question while they laid the foundation for their company.  Rather than being just another outdoors company, Nau sought to define its products as “capable of contributing positive, lasting, and substantive change.”  Without this distinction, there is no reason for Nau to exist - a fact its managers admitted from day 1.

After answering these three questions, you are ready to begin the rest of the branding process.  If you cannot answer just one of these questions, there is a very good chance your brand will fail before it ever reaches the market.

Would you add a fourth step?  If so, what would you add and why?