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How to Profit with a Market-Focused Approach

The most profitable companies are the ones which fully understand their markets and their competitors. According to the CEO Refresher, there are six ways to deliver customer value by becoming more market-focused:
  1. Develop a sense of purpose around creating superior customer value and communicating this purpose to your entire organization. This approach also requires you to reward and encourage your employees to think in such ways.

  2. Understand your customers better than they even understand themselves. Do this by conducting market research on what these customers want and need, either expressed or unexpressed, and by distilling and disseminating this research throughout your organization.

  3. Understand the short- and long-term strengths, weaknesses and capabilities of your current and potential competitors. To do this, the authors state that you need to distill your competitors' strategies and tactics into meaningful evaluations.

    What this means is that you must assess their capabilities within the competitive environment, and then determine how this will impact the competitiveness of your own organization. As with the previous step, you again share your findings with your organization.

  4. Use a collaborative approach to develop and evaluate new products and services to meet the needs of your customers. Two recommended ways of doing this are by internal cross-functional training and by external "value-creation" partnerships with suppliers or channel partners. The goal here is to be profitable in creating customer value via collaborative methods such as these.

  5. Develop your decision-making to focus on the long-term relationships you will be building with your customers. To do this, you must establish clear criteria for emphasizing the long-term, profit-oriented decision making. The article gives a great example with Toyota's shift in the early-1980s in wanting to be number one in market share to number one in satisfaction. The results for the company - in both categories - have been tremendous.

  6. Finally, there must be strong leadership from the top. The CEO must develop a shared vision of strengthening the company's market culture that demonstrates commitment and involvement right from the top. This is demonstrated by the actions and behaviour of the CEO, and from how the organization rewards employees who share in the vision.
Read the complete article.

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Tips for Entrepreneurs: Mastering the Pitch

Having the ability to deliver a concise and effective sales pitch is an absolute must for entrepreneurs. In his article, "Learning to throw," Canadian Business magazine columnist Jeff Daniels provides some good advice for those wishing to perfect their delivery to potential investors, such as: explaining who you are and what "pains" your company is addressing; what solution you are offering to address this pain; what your business model and competitive advantages are; and how you are going to reach your customers and assess the external environment and your competitors.

If you are looking to hone your sales pitch skills, read the article here. Additionally, you may want to explore some other web resources which make the process of coming up with an effective sales pitch all the more easier. The website 15SecondPitch offers the ability to quickly put together an introduction that summarizes who you are and what you can offer. Try it out here.

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How to create a marketing plan

If you're running a business and are looking to market your products or services for the first time, there is an excellent article online with a comprehensive step-by-step guide detailing what you'll need to do and how you'll need to do it.

This thorough guide from the KnowThis website shows you how to do a situational analysis, a target-market and competitor analysis, as well as how to promote, price and distribute your products. Some of the more interesting sections include tactical marketing strategies, and of course, the actual implementation plan.

At 22-pages long, the guide is quite extensive, but if you're trying to market your product for the first time, this detailed guide should be quite helpful to you and your business.

Read the full tutorial here.

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How and why to do a cost-benefit analysis

The other day I came across an interesting article on the reasons why you should do a cost-benefit analysis. The article provides an example scenario and shows you how to run the numbers when doing this type of assessment.

Author F. John Reh explains, that the cost-benefit analysis need not apply only to financial situations, but rather to any decision that involves some sort of capital outlay:
"Although a cost benefit analysis is most commonly done on financial questions it can be used for almost anything. Not sure whether that proposed marketing campaign is a good idea? Do a cost benefit analysis. Worried about which health care plan to select for your employees? Do a cost benefit analysis. Should we outsource our call center to India, Jamaica, or Canada? Do a cost benefit analysis."
Read the full article here.

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Developing a consumer-oriented marketing strategy

Not long ago, marketing activities were constructed to simply promote product sales and focus on building market share; strategies that focused on how companies could move the most units of merchandise were considered the right way to go. In today's competitive business environment however, marketing activities are constructed to fulfill the needs of consumers.

Consumer-oriented marketing strategies give the marketing manager the tools required to examine which stores/distribution channels should carry the product; the price-sensitivity of the product or brand, and which segments of the population are the purchasers of the product.

Therefore, for an organization to take on a consumer oriented approach, it will have to ask the following questions:
  1. How is the market segmented? For instance, are the primary consumers brand loyalists, cost-conscious, or conspicious consumers looking to purchase luxury items for status?

  2. What is the profitability of each of these segments? Once the segmentation of the market is known, the organization should then determine the size and profitability of each of these segments. The potential for large, underserved segments of the population to exist is there and organizations that have clearly identified these potentially profitable segments can find great success.

  3. What are the common characteristics of the consumers in each segment? Now that the company has defined the segments and the profitability of each one, the marketing management must then look at the characteristics, habits, values, and influencing factors of these potential customers. By doing so, the managers can better predict whether the segment is more likely to grow or to shrink in the future. This will undoubtedly have an impact on future campaigns and marketing strategies
A final point worth mentioning is that marketing management should also ask themselves if the existing customers are actually satisfied with the current products and services offered by the organization. Ideally, this is done after the market segmentation has taken place; this way the organization can better tailor its offerings to the needs of specific customers.

By determining who the customers are and customizing and tailoring their offerings to these customers, marketing managers can benefit by: a) fulfilling the needs of underserved consumers; and b) creating long-term value and growth opportunities for their respective organizations.

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How to price your products and services

In the article "The Secret to Small Business Success," by Fire Wheel Design, the author makes a case for why small business owners must not be afraid to raise their rates. The author Josh, explains how he has successfully used what is known as cost-plus pricing in determining the rates for the products and services offered by his website and says that other small business owners should use this method for determining exactly how much they should charge.

Although not mentioned by the article, the alternative to this form of pricing is what is known as demand-based pricing. This is a form of pricing that uses consumer-based demand in order to determine and set the rates. In my opinion, it would be well worth a small business owner's time to consider both approaches before determining the prices of their products. By neglecting consumer demand, business owners are effectively allowing their competitors to seize the opportunity of appropriately positioning their products in the minds (or the "perceptual maps") of consumers.

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A new service for print and media professionals

There is a new way to find fonts for your print or online media needs, and the way to do it is via a service called TypeNavigator. Rather than having to search endlessly through alphabetical lists of fonts, the service gives you an interactive, visual way to choose the font you're after.

Once you've selected all of your type options (such as font weight, serif, width, angle, and so on), TypeNavigator will display a list of fonts that match your criteria (as shown above).

It's a pretty smart idea that I'm sure will catch on with picky marketing and web professionals looking for the perfect typeface for their ads and websites. As for me however, I'll stick with the ones that come for free.

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Chevy's write-your-own-ad approach

Chevrolet has made news for taking on a user-generated advertising approach in creating ads for its 2007 Tahoe SUV (pictured inset). This type of advertising is apparently catching on lately as companies look for new ways to create interactive advertisements for their products.

Last month, Chevrolet introduced a website that allowed its visitors to use existing video and sound clips and stitch them together with their own customized message to form a 30 second ad for the new Tahoe. These advertisements could then be sent via e-mail to friends around the world using a popular technique known as viral marketing.

Naturally, however, the most popular advertisements were the ones containing anti-SUV messages, such as the one submitted by one visitor using a scenic wintery backdrop in the ad with the message: "Like this snowy wilderness? Better get your fill of it now. Then say hello to global warming."

Nevertheless, the company understood the risks involved with taking on a user-generated ad approach. Said Chevrolet spokeswoman Melisa Tezanos on the new approach: "You do turn over your brand to the public, and we knew that we were going to get some bad with the good. But it's part of playing in this space."

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