This morning my email bing-bonged with an invitation to an East Midlands international trade seminar on, wait for it…"brand essence” – this really made me chuckle… So what’s brand essence then - a magical mist that’s carried on international trade winds?
Our colleagues across the pond call this “vanilla essence” – a bland phrase that lacks real meaning like “world class” or “end-to-end solutions”. It's so easy to fall back on marketing cliches when we don’t have enough information about our customers' needs, experiences and values. When you’ve walked in your customers shoes and felt their pain, you can offer them a meaningful solution with well-defined brand values. It's all about capturing the data…
I think marketing in the UK is often seen as something of a black art. Market research and market segmentation are well established practices of course, but sometimes predicting behaviour, targeting customers and honing your offer feels more like navigating the market by omens and portents than a cold science. OK, hand on heart, can you express the value and social benefits of your product and service to the customer in exact pounds and pence? The more innovative US corporations can and the trendy name for these companies is “The Value Merchants”…
In the US, marketing is a serious business. It’s a career, a profession and a quantifiable system. If you can't express value in dollars, ‘you aint doin it right'. I’ve spent the day sitting in seminars on building customer value models and value propositions which have more in common with military strategy sessions than business support seminars. It's exciting to know that there’s a tried and tested marketing methodology but be warned – it involves a lot of algebraic formulas and frowning - I had to dig deep to dredge up my school girl maths on delta values and reverse equations.
American and global corporations see business as a transaction. They’re looking for a win-win that can be both demonstrated and documented. Here’s the stop-the-press definition every small business needs to know…
“Value in business markets is the worth in monetary terms of the technical, economic, service and social benefits a customer firm receives in exchange for the price it pays for a market offering.”
And the symbol of that value is your brand.
What have I learned today? That marketing has more to do with Sun Tzu’s The Art of War than Harry Potter’s Goblet of Fire…