The 4 B’s of Marketing

In 1960, E. Jerome McCarthy introduced the 4 P’s of Marketing as a way to describe the mix of factors required to successfully market a product. McCarthy labeled the 4 P’s as Product, Price, Place (distribution), and Promotion. The idea was that if you could identify the right combination of these elements, your marketing would succeed. Since then, many have proposed that there are really 5 P’s, suggesting Positioning, Packaging, or People as additions to the mix.

Maybe it should be replaced by the 4 B’s of Marketing?

1. BE Real: Your marketplace is crowded with competitors, and your prospects are besieged with marketing messages. For your message to find its way through all this noise, it must be exactly on target. In any field, it’s not y how your work helps them solve problems and reach goals, and the benefits and results they can expect to see from it. What this targeted messaging requires is that you become very specific about not only who your offer is for, but what it will help them do, and why your solution is the right one for them.

2. Be Pulling vs. Pushing: In the classic marketing formula, the emphasis was on promotion – pushing your message out to the world at large. You need to pull toward you exactly those clients you want. Push-style marketing includes cold calling, unsolicited mail or email, paid advertising (online and off), promotional events like trade shows, and some forms of PR, like blasting out press releases. Pull marketing, on the other hand, is focused on building affinity and connections. To attract clients in your niche, you might develop referral partnerships, become visible at networking events, get booked as a public speaker, have articles published or build a content-rich website. You’ll find it much easier to make a sale when clients contact you as the result of hearing about you from someone else, or after sampling your expertise for free.

3. Be interesting: You must position your business in the mind of your prospective clients as the best possible choice for exactly what they need. Broadcasting a muddy or generic marketing message won’t be enough. Your clients need to understand “what’s in it for me?” Be the place they go when they need something. 4. Be there: Clients are wary – and justifiably so – of committing to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on something they haven’t been able to experience in advance. Without tangible evidence to go by, they base their decision on how much they trust you. A significant portion of your marketing activities should be aimed at increasing your credibility. But one of the best ways to build trust is also the simplest. Allow clients to get to know you, be part of their everyday life. Use of your website, services, ideas and advice that you can offer are all important mixes.

4. Be Fast: In today’s world, the most important. The key is hitting the right client at the right time with the right product in the right way, the first time, because you may not get a second time. You have to identify their need or problem, provide the solution, understand the resources needed and the decision process they will use. You have to have a process in place for doing this or the process itself will lead to slow and inaccurate decisions. Effective companies have processes that drive decisions, not delay them.

And this is all marketing!

Food Brand Resorts to Open Innovation & Crowdsourcing

In this aggressive and competitive market, every enterprise
wants to capitalize on maximum market share and have top recall value.
So why is it that some succeed phenomenally, where as others stagnate
after making some profit? More than extensive R&D, branding,
advertising, marketing and PR initiatives, what works most today is “out
of the box” thinking. The key to exponential growth and increased
consumer goodwill is effective idea management techniques that are well
implemented. Apart from coming up with innovative product development
strategies, streamlined idea management techniques helps in establishing
a deeper audience connect that helps a brand to communicate and expand
better.

Co-creation through open innovation and crowdsourcing
is what most companies focus on in order to capitalize on the
creativity and intelligence of the worldwide audience. Multinational
food manufacturing company Kellogg’s, United States undertook a creative
initiative that helped them in a creating a new product the Cereal
Straws. This project initially commenced in Spain where nine to ten
years old children discussed their breakfast concerns and ways to
resolve them. What came up from these detailed discussions was an idea
that one should not only drink milkshakes through straws but also should
be able to eat the straw afterwards that should be crunchy and taste
good. The outcome was a brand new product called Kellogg’s Cereal Straws
that already had its target audience defined way before the product
release.

Efficient techniques for idea capture not only helps
companies attain creative inputs for new product development but also to
let their consumers know that their views and ideas count. Sometimes,
brands make use of open innovation and mass idea sharing process in
order to boost up their existing product range both for attaining
increased revenue and product awareness.

Leading noodles brand Maggi sometime backannounced an open innovation
campaign where consumers were asked to share the ways in which they have
used Maggi in their lives. What was evident from this idea sharing
campaign was that people cooked and consumed Maggi not only as noodles
but also used them in other food preparation. Other than this, when the
ideas were shared in an TV ad along with the contributor’s name people
also got to know quick easy snack ideas that was tasty and not time
consuming. Through this open innovation Maggi established a better
audience connect by making people realize that their ideas count.

In today’s fast expanding and competitive economy it is very crucial to
understand the pulse of your target and potential consumers.
Enterprises who are able to master this art are the leaders in their
segment. The best way to go ahead with this is through innovative idea
management campaigns and open innovation.

Are Energy Companies and Brand Marketing Strategy Like Oil and Water

Every so often, an oil company experiences an environmental catastrophe of disastrous proportions. As evidenced by the recent Gulf oil spill, the Exxon Valdez oil spill and countless other eco-disasters, these occurrences are a tragic occupational hazard of the energy industry. In theory, they should not be a surprise — anymore than an earthquake in California would be a shocker. Of course, a big enough tremor in Los Angeles will generate nationwide news coverage. The question from a brand marketing standpoint is simple: is there anything oil companies can do, given the probability of an oil spill?

In order to answer this question, it is helpful to back up and look at the consumers’ view of the industry. When it comes to the consumer, oil companies have a unique advantage over, say, a perfume company. This is that the oil companies offer a necessity. Everyone needs oil; perfume is a luxury.

From a branding and marketing standpoint, this advantage actually has negative connotations. The oil companies are really big and really profitable — even when the economy is in the proverbial toilet. In the deep recession year of 2009, when almost everyone was suffering financially, the oil companies made billions of dollars in profits. A 2006 FTC study of gas price manipulation found that the record increases in gasoline prices were “not substantially attributable to higher costs.” It seems the oil companies always take advantage of their financial opportunities with no regard to consumer goodwill. These companies are often viewed as monopolistic, money-grubbing, price-gouging, predatory goliaths. In a 2008 Harris poll of 20 major industries, only the tobacco industry had a lower rating than the oil companies on the topic of how good or bad a job they perform in serving the needs of consumers.

You could say, from a branding perspective, energy companies are already starting off on the wrong foot. After all, what is there to love about an oil company? Do you trust them? Do you have any affinity to any oil company? Do they do anything for you as a person? Do they make you feel good in any way? This makes it all the more difficult for an oil company to perform branding and marketing tactics that prepare for the worst. The energy industry has to rank among the worst PR and branding industries. We know all about the 1989 Exxon Valdez nightmare which was widely considered the worst corporate PR fiasco of all time. But what has the industry done to counter its image since then?

One could argue they actually have made some positive strides. Let’s take the current Gulf oil spill. BP has a real disaster on its hands, and they have clearly learned a lesson from Exxon’s PR disaster. The CEO of Exxon was nowhere to be found until six days after the Valdez disaster. When he finally did appear, it was only to hold a press conference to deny responsibility to disclose the plan to clean up the mess. He also blamed the media for turning the spill into a big deal. His refusal of media interviews and complete lack of remorse highlighted one of the worst PR gaffes in history. It conveyed an “ivory tower-esque” tone of arrogance. To his credit, the CEO of BP, Tony Hayward, has learned from Exxon’s PR mistakes and has been on air and is taking full financial responsibility for the spill cleanup.

Top 3 trends in energy PR

Energy PR trend 1:

Integration of conference, social media, and traditional media. To illustrate this trend, let me tell a story around one of our clients–MyCelx, a company that removes oil from water streams to 99.9% purity, and works globally. This year for Offshore Technology Conference, we submitted an application for their consideration as New Technology Spotlight. As a first time OTC attendee, the company was thrilled to be selected by the Society of Petroleum Engineers for this honor–which given the competition level, USED to be enough to drive booth traffic and create a terrific event. But in today’s more integrated age, close coordination with the on-site newspaper, with the pre-show weekly enewsletter, and Twitter outreach on site is what created an outstanding presence. No one thing can be identified as a “game changer” in today’s energy public relations successes–given a great product or service offering, the game-changer tends to be “integration.”

Energy PR trend 2:

Social Isn’t Stupid. To put it bluntly, while you can hear that the decision makers in energy aren’t on social “yet” and so it’s a waste of effort, two key groups ARE on social media–major business and trade journalists, and energy consumers. Enough said. Not all publicity is designed to reach only a c-level executive at a multi-billion dollar company. One of Write2Market’s energy PR clients was recently interviewed for an hour during Energy Week on MSNBC–terrific placement for investors and building the firm’s value. One of the anchor’s last questions was, what’s your Twitter handle. He created one right after the segment.

Energy PR trend 3:

Weave Awards. Often overlooked, as different media properties such as Forbes, Inc Magazine, Crain’s, and Platt’s are pressured to distinguish themselves and develop deeper reader followings, one of the avenues is by creating a signature award. Winning these awards takes a terrific application, but our energy public relations clients like Mansfield Oil have found awards to be a key component of building better relationships across the industry. For example, by winning both the top energy award from Information Week 500 and one of the top 10 CIO awards, the downstream distribution giant has hard evidence to help convince the Fortune 250 that their IT infrastructure is second to none in the sector. Not only that, but they get “in the room” with other CIOs and industry leaders with whom relationships can be forged.

What’s your favorite trend? We’d love to find out! Connect with us on Facebook, Twitter, or email.

Energy PR:

As the leading Atlanta PR firm, we at Write2Market evolve and constantly monitor the progressions of numerous industries. With energy PR, we have offered some insight in how we observe the industry to be headed in a direction of increasingly integrated media platforms. Contact us today to learn how we create industry leaders.

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