Follow The Leader

Sometimes it just doesn't pay to be innovative.

Tweet

If you are like most company presidents I know, you stay up nights wondering what kind of marketing you should be doing. The answer is: as little as possible.

That may sound like heresy at a time when marketing is being widely hailed as "the new priority," the key to business success in the 1980s. Savvy marketing, it is said, will cure all your company's ills. The secret, we hear, is to be creative and innovative -- to come up with some clever technique, or slogan, or medium, that will blow your competition away. Don't believe it. The fact is that the best marketing a company can do is often no marketing at all.

Marketing is nothing more than activity undertaken to promote the likelihood of sales. Period. It's as simple as that. Marketing is not an art form; it is a way to increase business. The goal is not to be ingenious or elegant; it is to build the top line. Frankly, if you can do that by doing nothing, you might as well avoid the expense. But most companies cannot increase sales without doing some marketing, and that's where problems arise. Instead of focusing on the real goal, they try to be creative and innovative.

This is odd, when you think about it.After all, few companies want to be known for their creativity in other areas of business -- accounting, say, or operations. Rather they want systems that work, that handle a function efficiently and well. And how do you come up with such systems? More often than not, you look at what other companies do and imitate them.

In this regard, marketing is no different from any other business function. There is certainly nothing new about it. All the important techniques were invented long ago and are being practiced by successful companies in every industry, every day. So how do you figure out what kind of marketing you should be doing? My advice is simple: be a copycat marketer. Find out what works for other companies, particularly the leaders in your field, and do the same.

This notion, I admit, flies in the face of what you generally hear and read on the subject. That's because most experts in the field think of marketing in terms of the mass-market, consumer-goods giants. Talk to marketing specialists, and they will tell you stories about Federal Express or Coca-Cola. Read the business best-sellers, and you will learn about the exploits of Chrysler or IBM. It's all very entertaining, and sometimes even inspiring, but it has absolutely no relevance to the vast majority of American companies.

When a huge corporation embarks on a full-fledged marketing campaign, it is like a battleship in action. The spectacle can be awesome, and the fireworks thrilling. You would be foolish, however, to think you could do similar things in your dinghy.

To begin with, most companies can't afford to market on that scale. Six hundred thousand dollars might sound like a lot of money to spend on advertising, but it's a mere drop in the bucket of big-time marketing: it will bet lost so fast your head will swim. What's more, big-time marketing doesn't scale down well. Tonnage counts. The whole idea is to drive the marketplace by molding consumer attitudes, which demands a marketing budget in seven or eight figures. If you don't have one, you can forget about competing in that particular arena.

Thanks to the sheer size of their budgets, moreover, the giants are able to play by their own set of rules, turning the usual relationship between selling and marketing on its head. In big companies, the sales department executes to the marketing plan: marketing creates the right environment for selling, and the salespeople follow up. Almost everywhere else, the opposite is true. Sales does not support marketing; marketing supports sales. Indeed, marketing, at least as it is practiced in most companies, might better be called sales support or sales promotion.

That's only as it should be. In most well-managed companies, marketing means such things as keeping sales literature up-to-date; setting up a telephone system that can handle customer calls quickly and efficiently; or making sure that leads are qualified and followed. It means preparing good proposals and having backup material available. It means educating salespeople about where profits come from, who the best customers are, which ones are likely to account for the company's future business, and why, and how.

Granted, all this lacks the glamour and splash of a multicolor catalog with six die cuts and four gatefolds. Or a 28-projector slide show in an auditorium the size of the Astrodome. Or a six-story trade show booth whose space rental charge is roughly equivalent to that of a Manhattan city block. But that sort of thing is self-indulgence, not marketing.

Real marketing, the kind that successful small companies do, is not a glamorous activity. It's done one-on-one with key customers at sporting events, in restaurants, and around hospitality suites. It involves working a cocktail party for an evening while nursing a single drink. It's hard work, requiring long hours and careful follow-up, and it won't get you into the next business best-seller. But it might get you three new accounts and pay for part of a new building.

This is not to suggest that there is a single, "correct" way to go about marketing. There isn't. The general rule is to figure out how to get more by spending (or doing) less, but the specifics vary from industry to industry, and region to region. You can find some clues in your own experience. What has worked for you in the past? What has brought in new business? What have you found to be the best routes to the market? Do your printing bills exceed new account sales? Do you target your efforts to high-potential customers? Do you follow up, and follow through, consistently and effectively?

Beyond that, you have to look to your competitors, your counterparts in other regions, your industry leaders. What has been working for them lately? What trade shows do the market leaders attend? To what extent do they rely on direct sales? Who are their sales representatives? How are they dealing with the marketing challenges that you are facing? Remember, the goal is not to be innovative; it is to be effective.

By way of example, consider the case of some New England car dealers I know, who found themselves caught in a bind when their market changed. They had grown accustomed to a world in which cars were traded every 18 to 24 months, and service was just an extra. Then the cost of a new car began approaching that of a modest house, and the trade-in window opened to 50 months. Service was no longer an extra: it was crucial to the dealers' long-term survival. So what could they do to market their service departments?

Looking around the country, they discovered that other dealers were having success with a "planned maintenance" program, developed by a former Chrysler dealer named John Fisher. The program was built around a computer-generated booklet of coupons for preventive maintenance, each good for a prearranged appointment with the dealer's service department.

The idea was to encourage new car buyers to bring their automobiles in for regular checkups, thereby allowing a dealer to build long-term customer relationships, and to turn the service department into a strong profit center at the same time. Best of all, the program required no significant up-front investment, just a monthly service fee to Fisher, who would process the coupons as they were used and send the owner reminders of upcoming appointments.

It was a simple idea, and not an original one, but it went a long way toward solving the problem of the New England dealers, who signed up right away. They have been counting their service-department profits ever since.

You can find these kinds of marketing solutions in almost any industry. The trick is to watch what the winners are doing. Copycat marketing may be tough on your creative ego, but it is easy on your pocketbook. What it produces in results and income, moreover, should more than compensate for the fact that you won't be written up in Ad Age.