What's a brand with no money?
How theory is used in practice, for brands that just started or don't have money to spend on research.
I'm setting myself a simple challenge. To explain how marketing 'theory' is applied to the lowest budgets. This is the first piece, looking at how marketing is just marketing. And how to actually apply it.
101 - brand/positioning
The terminology *really* doesn't matter here. I’m very sorry Marketing Twitter. What does matter, is figuring out if the intended message is the received message. Those are two different things - so how does a small business with no money do that?
Most businesses will come up with a mission statement or vision, which is their intended brand. It’s what they want the customer to think they are.
Value is in the eye of the customer, better perceptions and you can charge more money. Which means more profit.
However - the cold reality is that your brand is whatever your customer thinks it is, and that's it. The job to be done - is to figure out what potential and existing customers actually think of you.
And whether or not your vision/mission/brand (whatever you call it, I don’t care) matches what people actually think. The point is to balance it, reality versus intention.
You can build on the positive and try to negate the negative, or turn it into the positive. But, either way you need to know.
The simplest way to do this is through talking to your best customers, or through your first customers if you’ve only just started. You want qualitative answers - and the way to get good answers is to let people ramble, then disect the conversations and look for *common* themes in their answers. Not outliers.
Once you've got that juicy qualitative stuff, you can turn it into quant to "proof" it. You won't get representative answers, but that's okay because that's impossible unless you have money to spare - and when I say money, I mean a lot of money. Because good research companies are incredibly expensive, which is why small businesses often don’t both. But you will have more than what 90% of SMEs have if you do - something.
Then, you have two options... you can take that qual into quant and send it to all your customers. But if you don't have many customers, you can send it out to the new customers. And to be honest, I’d encourage an ongoing series of doing both. You're essentially trying to validate what's been said.
Do most people agree with these statements?
If customers say you are Speedy, On time everytime. That's your positioning/brand - whether you like it or not. Move away from the cliches... no more We're innovative, creative, results driven.
You might think that will motivate staff to deliver that, but it doesn’t happen - because it’s about what’s received, not about what’s sent. So figure that out first, otherwise you are just playing guessing games. Which is more expensive, and more frustrating.
By doing this, it will make messaging much simpler, because you have an idea of what appeals to existing customers who will be pretty similar to any new customer.
And when the customer buys, the experience matches the messaging... bingo, they got exactly what they hoped for.