Two Seminars, Key Lessons Learnt
August and September were two monumental months for me as a business owner, where after more than two decades in high flying corporate roles, I found myself somewhat vulnerable at times during the events!
It’s not so much as trying to prove myself again as I learnt recently speaking to someone with eons of experience managing their own business. It’s more re-building a different brand than my own personal brand.
Marketing our own company’s brand is sometimes seen as more difficult than marketing another company’s brand. That is because we usually won’t have huge amount of resources, be it time or funds. What we have are usually huge doses of self doubt, especially when we face rejections.
Rejections were aplenty, especially when I was hosting my own exhibition booth at The Business Show Asia and it works both ways - I rejected others and others rejected me! On hindsight now, I see it as more misalignment in objectives and expectations aka the wrong fit. On that, I have learnt to qualify early and quality better.
I relieved the days where I was in a more junior position, setting up events from scratch, pulling up banners, packing gifts to printing tags. But I did it with way more pride now than before because I am now at a place where I truly appreciate the value all the little things can help to contribute to the eventual success of an event. If you don’t take pride in it, it will certainly be apparent to your customers!
Overseeing the planning by myself versus working with others to co-organize are also valuable experiences. Though working collaboratively as a team is nothing new to me and people who have worked with me before often tell me that they appreciate the trust I placed on them. I believe in walking the talk as a leader - we are all in it together and if the going gets tough, we face it together but ultimately, if I can provide the air cover as their leader, I certainly will and should! On this, lessons are aligning expectations to make sure everyone is on the same page.
Preparing for the worse and seeing the rainbow at the end -that’s another valuable lesson learnt as things can and often will go wrong in many ways. What we can do are to manage well what we can predict and make the best of what we cannot control.
All that said, I have thoroughly enjoyed myself and learnt a lot from both events. The highlights are always the interactions with people in person; that’s irreplaceable! The insights exchanged also inspired new ideas and perceptions. It also made me realized that we all don’t need to be absolute experts in every topic that we bring to the seminars - everyone is still learning, exploring, listening and forming their own enhanced observations through the sharing by others.
Next - I’m looking forward to October and November’s series of speaking events - Singapore > Bangkok > Singapore > Dubai > Singapore - Bring it on!
If you’re interested to watch key highlights and takeaways of the panel discussions held during these events, check here and follow our YouTube Channel!
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Are You Selling a Product or a Solution?
Brand purpose and value creation are two things that go hand in hand for a successful and sustainable business. A business does not sustain for long, based purely on the sole purpose of making money, instead of solving problems.
The former can capture a market quickly in the short term to capitalize on a specific trend or lowballing the competition with an attractive pricing or promotional incentive, but the latter will help the business with real customer value creation.
This is easier said than done of course, similar to carving out your brand purpose and why customers should care about you. Actually, they don’t and they don’t have to. They care about themselves and the value you bring to them, which in turn is also why your brand purpose is relevant to their needs and/or wants.
Many brands simply talk too much about themselves and how good they are. This is passe and no one cares, really. Your customers want to know why you are good for them. Period.
Many brands are also simply selling a product and it’s obvious when they just call out the product’s features but not their intrinsic benefits for their customers and how it solves their problems.
E.g. - if you are a tire company:
if you’re selling a product, you might say things like - we sell tires for your cars. Our tires are made of quality rubber made to last. Buy now for xx% discount for a limited time period.
If you’re selling a solution, you might say things like - we are the reason mummy and daddy can drive home safe during wet weather or we can save you up to xx% in annual cost since our wheels are made to last.
The above is just a generic example with the second point highlighting potential customer pain points around:
concerns with road safety and enhanced protection against wet weather road conditions where cars are more likely to skid and get into accidents
concerns with costs in maintaining their cars and saving them the hassle of having to swap out their tires too often
There could be more pain points thus it’s critical to first understand the problem you are trying to solve for on behalf of your target customers. Selling a product means they are solving your problem instead by lining your coffers but you are simply enticing them for the short term to get a quick purchase. It doesn’t always work for the discerning customer and your competition can easily out-do you with a better discount.
When you move on to think about value creation and solution selling, it changes the narrative and you become 100% focused on addressing your customers’ needs. You start thinking broader as well what else you can add to your slew of products and services that can more holistically address their pain points.
It’s not as simply as bundling a bunch of products and calling it a fancy name as that is ultimately still product pushing; worse, it’s pushing a bunch of products now that might not even be what they want or need.
It involves insights from customers and non customers. It includes consumer trends, their purchasing behaviour, feedback and proactive research to really tease out useful insights. It’s not a bunch of your internal stakeholders sitting down and narrating what they think. It requires empathy as well as a genuine interest in consumer behaviour.
So, are you selling a product or a solution?
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally and Advisor for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.
Why Brand Management is Everyone’s Responsibility
Something I’m sure that has every marketing leader or brand leader tearing their hair out besides seeing their brand scores tank is when they get all the blame for it. If only brand preference building and management is as easy as putting out your brand ad on a big bus, taxi or whichever platform that gets as many eyeballs as possible. If so, why not just put it on a huge sky scrapper (hey that’s done before actually!).
Such tactics (I call them tactics and not strategies) work better for “will you marry me” types of wedding proposals but to build brand preference, it takes way more than that. Similar to good customer experience management, brand management takes the whole organization, including your client facing employees and your client facing touchpoints to help uplift your brand.
Firstly, your brand needs to serve a purpose and address a need or multiple needs for your defined target customers. Secondly, you need to know what differentiates you from your competitors even if you are selling the same things. Just like Pepsi and Coca Cola, both are cola drinks but both have their differentiating factors and ultimately, appeal. Thirdly, is your brand voice, message and identity that you are bringing to life through your marketing campaigns, news about your organization, things that your client facing teams are telling your clients or prospects, right down to the things you do in the broader public facing community. Finally, you need to clearly define as well as upkeep the key channels you are positioning your brand on that serve as a communication touchpoint with your target audience.
Many business leaders think the buck stops with the marketing campaigns but the trickiest part about brand management is how to make your target audience see you the way you want to be perceived. This approach leads to a dystopia state of brand reputation and perception as you will see almost conflicting activities and messages being shared from your organization by various business functions working in silos but not realizing they are all trying to steer the same ship to avoid hitting an iceberg. This is because everyone ends up trying to chart their own course to reach the same destination instead of playing to their strengths and working as a team.
There is nothing more dysfunctional than multiple teams trying to launch different variations of what they think your brand stands for in order to meet their own KPIs (key performance indicators). A tactical offer, is not a brand management strategy, a segment representation is not a brand management strategy and a campaign telling people how good you are is certainly not a brand management strategy but all this will affect the perception of your brand. Companies need to take a giant step back to reflect on what you are trying to position out there in terms of your brand identity and whether that still stays true to the fundamental reason you deserve to exist as a brand that customers care about.
The third and last part of the brand management aspect is actually also the hardest to maintain. You have to make sure your client facing touchpoints are keeping up with the demand from a tech, process and user design perspective so nothing falls through the cracks for your customers trying to engage with you. Concurrently, you need to have a joint-up approach in what you do and say to your target audience, including the timeliness and/or appropriateness of certain actions or messages. It goes beyond having a good crisis communications protocol.
For example, if your digital platform or servicing touchpoint is having a breakdown, you definitely do not want your key spokesperson to go out with a media commentary boasting about how great your digital or client servicing capabilities are or run an ad showcasing “seamless digital or client servicing capabilities”.
It’s more important to ensure business functions are working collaboratively as part of business-as-usual in keeping each other abreast, including your brand, marketing and communications team when something breaks or if they are preparing for a major enhancement so they can pre-empt the customer impact for the better or for the worse. Your management meetings should have a cadence to exchange such information so it can be cascaded to working group level to formulate a pre-emptive and proactive communications and customer management approach.
Simply said, the brand is the soul of the company and everyone is responsible for brand and reputation management but in the right way and not just checking off a list.
About the Author
Mad About Marketing Consulting
Ally for CMOs, Heads of Marketing and C-Suites to work with you and your marketing teams to maximize your marketing potential with strategic transformation for better business and marketing outcomes.