Marketing Tactics – Old Vs. New
Marketing is about influencing people who might buy your product or service, using messaging that conveys value & includes all basic, short-term, and long-term activities. It is necessary to grasp many aspects of the external environment, including technological, economic, cultural, political and legal aspects.
The heart of your business success lies in its marketing it is a must to have it properly to achieve your business goals,but during time as the business environment and the consumer behavior is evolving & changing really fast, so sure the marketing strategies must be evolved and adapt to the new rules that is why nowadays we are seeing many debates and articles regarding Old school/Traditional Vs. New school marketing.
Unfortunately many companies are suffering from the same issues which is how to choose the proper marketing strategy. we can see huge budgets that allocated to marketing campaign and many failed and wasted without proper outcome.
department is one of the divisions that is only consuming money and generate or make it, so the sole job is to help the organization/sales to make money & this is tricky part! as business we all have seen many failed marketing strategist/campaigns.
Again unfortunately these days whenever you asked for the marketing strategy and camping the common answer you get is first to allocate huge pile of cash and the result in many cases is to have ATL,BTL and in some cases TTL and promotions, merchandiser & activities or lucky draw! above have been implemented and executed for god knows how many years with the same thing again and again and again.
We need to understand that the market has been changed dramatically, the consumers are different. this is the first step and of course whenever comes to the change and try new things it takes guts to do that. In many cases changing the formula and creating new approach is considered as a high risk strategy and some of us have faced this before that :
Lets stick to what we have done before, at least we have seen the success and no need to try new things.
We need to understand that today market is now like yesterday, it is the competitive market and it is kill or to be killed. Just remember how many giant died over the past 15 years. It is not the same and it won`t be easy!
I recently had an amazing experience to launch a new brand in new market from scratch. It was Caterpillar Mobile which is a niche brand and it was a new comer so there was not any fancy budget available to spend at that time.So the first thing came on my mid was that it can not be treated as same as the others brands. So I came up with the new marketing tactic which I called it
Pink Cow Tactic.
Lets assume that you are traveling to countryside ,out of the city and on the road you will see many cows, what would you do ? would you notice it, would you get shocked? Like you no one will pay attention to them as it is not an unusual thing to see them on countryside but imagine if there was a PINK COW on the road!!?!!
What would happen then? Could anyone ignore it? of course not !! Everyone will stop to see it, To take pictures and get excited and later on they will talk about it, photos will be shared in social media, and there will be words about it. Today there are lots of Ads,TVCs & billboard for marketing campaign which consumed huge budget.
So this is What I have done for CAT mobile :
I changed all the artworks and materials & I took full responsibility for that. The Brand slogan is Built to Built Tough made smart , so we made it look tough. We used animals pictures like elephant, Polar bear,Whale & Orca in the artworks to echo the uniqueness of the brand features (Water resistant, working under freezing weather and ultra-tough). Customized TVCs in local video-sharing website . We spend really small amount but the we put up really different exciting customized TVC which was so exciting then after a while everyone were talking about it everywhere. The result was amazing. The moment you see the traders started to as k for your stock and sell and buy, this is the reliving the moment that you have done your job and Brand is successfully launched as the demand is there and it is available in trade market.
The issue is that as the market is evolving the consumer behavior is changing as well. Consumers won`t look like the same as before, they have evolved to ignore Ads and they don’t pay attention to billboards, TVCs or flyers anymore unless they are different than the others. So if you want to be successful and increasing your chance to get noticed, you must be a pink cow! then you are right on spot and visible.
This issues is begin acknowledged more today as might see many free billboards or discounts/special offers to have them. Earlier for booking billboards or get the good spot on TV for TVCs you had to wait and book in advance but today there is installment payment available as many knows that it is not an effective approach anymore and the amount you pay to have them won`t do much good. so the ROI does not add up anymore.
So the innovation comes to the play, there are some smarts agencies that are using new designs in billboards . Using many innovative ways to make it different and unique so it would attack consumers attention otherwise if we stick to the old ways it wont do any good.
So my advice is to use Pick cow tactic, do not be afraid of the change, think out of the box and try to be different and get noticed.Think how you gonna address your target audience, how you gonna send the message. consider every option. It will tremendously cost saving.
Be Smart & Choose your approach wisely!
Hope you enjoyed.
The author can be contacted on Iman_sltn@yahoo.com / Isoltani690
Cheers
Iman Soltani