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• It’s been nearly sixty years since industry began to understand the importance of marketing planning and strategies.  Prior to the 50’s most companies didn’t have marketing departments but instead used other departments such as advertising or sales to do the job.

  Today, companies allocate massive amounts to marketing resources, fine tuning the marketing mix to bring a higher level of customer satisfaction. So you would think that marketing mistakes of the past caused by a lack of knowledge, remained a thing of the past… Sadly, we regularly see best practices being shunned and many mistakes are still being repeated, no matter how much attention is directed by an organisation to understanding the marketing process.

  Mistake 1 – Relying on the results of market research to be the deciding factor when making marketing decisions. Users of such information must understand the limitations of market research. It’s notoriously fraught with problems, such as how the research was designed or how it was executed. Yes we should engage with market research as a tool, but only to assist us to make a decision, not focus solely on what the research says.

  Mistake 2 – Thinking that there is a direct relation between how much we pump into promotion and how much we get back in sales.
  It would be great if marketing was this easy – just spend more on advertising and other promotions and we’ll quickly see our sales increase.  More likely what you’ll see is your profits decrease.  Marketing is much more than advertising.  Before deciding to spend more on promotion it probably makes more sense to spend time reviewing all marketing decisions to make sure problems don’t lie elsewhere.

  Mistake 3 – You have the best product on the market – Says who?  You may believe your product to be the best but remember, you’re not buying the product.  It’s your target market that is supposed to buy it, therefore learn from that market, investigate why customers are buying a competitor’s product and you’ll understand more how to position yours. This leads us into mistake number 4.

  Mistake 4 – The boss knows what’s best
  A classic problem in many small businesses is when the person who built the business believes they know what works.  The entrepreneur justifies this by telling everyone that the business is successful because he/she knows what the market wants.  The boss often discounts the advice from marketing consultants as a waste of time and money and worse yet, brushes aside marketing suggestions from others in the organisation.

  Mistake 5 - Our customers only care about getting the lowest price.
  Do they really? Or, do they care about the best value for their money.  Customers first and foremost want to feel comfortable with their purchase and know they’ve got their money’s worth from their decision.

  It’s usually the basics of marketing that tends to get overlooked; this is why we advise our clients to assume the position of an uneducated customer whenever they look at their business. By asking the basic fundamental questions and conducting annual audits you should stop the complacency in your marketing efforts.

Tags: marketing decisions, marketing mistakes, marketing process

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 29th, 2010 at 5:12 pm and is filed under Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.