Great Advertising Precedes Great Research

It’s not difficult to turn up a marketing pro who will tell you that the three most important things to do to market anything successfully are to test, test, and test. That is a pretty good advice. But it is unrealistic for those with resource poverty, who cannot shell out big bucks for sophisticated research.

The big secret is that you need not shell out any money to learn about your market. If you know what to look for and where to find it, you can obtain critical information for nary a cent. Here below are some of the things you might want to find out:

• What should you market – your goods, your services, or both?
• Should your marketing feature some sort of price advantage?
• Should you emphasize yourself, your quality offerings, your selection, your service, or merely the existence of your business?
• Should you take on your competition or ignore all competitors?
• Exactly who are your competitors?
• Who are your best prospects?
• What income groups do they represent?
• What motivates them to buy?
• Where do the live?
• What do they read or watch or listen to in the way of media?

The right answers to these questions can prove invaluable to a marketing effort. The wrong answers, or no answers, can prove disastrous. Do what you must to get the right answers. In most cases, great advertising is preceded by great research.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

 

Designing Strategies

Corporate strategy shows how a complex organization achieves its mission, while the business strategy shows how each business within the corporation contributes to the corporate strategy. These strategies typically include decisions about shared values and beliefs; industries to work in; amount of diversification; businesses to start, acquire, close or sell; type of products to make; organizational structure; relations with customers, suppliers, shareholders and other stakeholders; geographical locations, and targets for long-term profitability, productivity, market share, etc.

Consider three factors while designing strategies:

1. The mission, which gives the overall aims and context for other decisions.
2. The business environment, which includes all factors that affect an organization but which it cannot control, such as:
   1. Customers—their expectations and attitudes;
   2. Market—size, location, and stability;
   3. Competitors—the number, ease of entry to the market, their strengths;
   4. Technology—currently available and likely developments;
   5. Shareholders—their objectives, returns on investment, profit levels;
   6. Other stakeholders—their objectives and amount of support;
   7. Legal restraints—trade restrictions, liability and employment laws;
   8. Political, economic and social conditions—including stability, rate of growth, inflation, etc.

The business environment is similar for all competing organizations, so to be successful you need a distinctive competence.

1. The distinctive competence, which includes the factors that set your organization apart from the competitors. If you can design new products very quickly, innovation is a part of your distinctive competence. A distinctive competence comes from your organization’s assets, which include:
   1. Customers—their demands, loyalty;
   2. Employees—skills, expertise, loyalty;
   3. Finances—capital, debt, cash flow;
   4. Products—quality, reputation, innovations;
   5. Facilities—capacity, age, value;
   6. Technology—currently used, planned;
   7. Suppliers—reliability, service;
   8. Marketing—experience, reputation;
   9. Resources—patents, ownership.

The strategic plans show how the organization can achieve the mission.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Designing Strategies

Corporate strategy shows how a complex organization achieves its mission, while the business strategy shows how each business within the corporation contributes to the corporate strategy. These strategies typically include decisions about shared values and beliefs; industries to work in; amount of diversification; businesses to start, acquire, close or sell; type of products to make; organizational structure; relations with customers, suppliers, shareholders and other stakeholders; geographical locations, and targets for long-term profitability, productivity, market share, etc.

Consider three factors while designing strategies:

1. The mission, which gives the overall aims and context for other decisions.
2. The business environment, which includes all factors that affect an organization but which it cannot control, such as:
   1. Customers—their expectations and attitudes;
   2. Market—size, location, and stability;
   3. Competitors—the number, ease of entry to the market, their strengths;
   4. Technology—currently available and likely developments;
   5. Shareholders—their objectives, returns on investment, profit levels;
   6. Other stakeholders—their objectives and amount of support;
   7. Legal restraints—trade restrictions, liability and employment laws;
   8. Political, economic and social conditions—including stability, rate of growth, inflation, etc.

The business environment is similar for all competing organizations, so to be successful you need a distinctive competence.

1. The distinctive competence, which includes the factors that set your organization apart from the competitors. If you can design new products very quickly, innovation is a part of your distinctive competence. A distinctive competence comes from your organization’s assets, which include:
   1. Customers—their demands, loyalty;
   2. Employees—skills, expertise, loyalty;
   3. Finances—capital, debt, cash flow;
   4. Products—quality, reputation, innovations;
   5. Facilities—capacity, age, value;
   6. Technology—currently used, planned;
   7. Suppliers—reliability, service;
   8. Marketing—experience, reputation;
   9. Resources—patents, ownership.

The strategic plans show how the organization can achieve the mission.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please visit www.asifjmir.com, and my Lectures.

Living Through Product Leadership

Companies that pursue the discipline of product leadership strive to produce a continuous stream of state-of-the-art products and services. Three challenges must be met to attain that goal.  Creativity is the first challenge. Creativity is recognizing and embracing ideas usually originating outside the company. Second, innovative companies must commercialize ideas quickly. Thus their business and management processes need to be engineered for speed. Product leaders relentlessly pursue new solutions to problems. Finally, firms utilizing this discipline prefer to release their own improvements rather than wait for competitors to enter. Consequently, product leaders do not stop for self-congratulation; they focus on  continual improvement.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact Asif J. Mir

The Profit Chain

Starting from end of the chain, a firm makes profits by offering  products or services at a lower cost than its competitors or by offering differentiated products at premium prices that more than compensate for the extra cost of differentiation. The question is , how do low cost and differentiated products come about, and why is it that some firms can offer them better than others?

A firm’s competencies, or skills are its ability to perform the activities that underlie the offering of low cost or differentiated products or services to customers. These abilities can be in anything from designing high performance automative engines to finding attractive markets and locating the right products in the right position in these markets. Endowments are attributes other than skills, such as brand names, patents, reputation, geographic location, client relations and distribution channels, which allow a firm to leverage its competencies and get more out of them. Competencies and endowments reinforce each other and together underpin the firm’s profitability. They are themselves a function of technological and market knowledge.

My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations where people have the freedom to be creative, a place that brings out the best in everybody–an open, fair place where people have a sense that what they do matters. For details please contact Asif J. Mir.

Market Leadership

 

To be a market leader one has to be the industry leader in developing new business models and new products. The organization should be on the cutting edge of new technologies and innovative business processes. Its customer value proposition through and through should offer a superior solution to customers’ problems. The products have to be well differentiated and the business must move faster than the competitors. My Consultancy–Asif J. Mir – Management Consultant–transforms organizations, makes them relevant, and suggests solutions for succes. For details please contact 

 

 

 

Asif J. Mir