INTRODUCTION

IF YOU PICKED this book up, you are probably looking for some

new ideas. You might be a marketer yourself, you might be an

entrepreneur or small business person, or you might just want to be

able to drop in a few good ideas at the next meeting. This book will

help with any of those aims.

Marketing is, above everything else, about creating profi table

exchanges. The exchanges should be profi table for both parties—

fair trade always makes both parties better off, otherwise why would

people trade at all? What we are aiming to do is offer products (which

includes services, of course) that don’t come back, to customers who

do come back. One of the basic concepts of marketing is customer

centrality—in any question involving marketing, we always start

with looking at what the customer needs. This does not, of course,

mean that we are some kind of altruistic, charitable organization:

we don’t GIVE the customer what he or she needs, we SELL the

customer what he or she needs. Note that we defi ne needs pretty

broadly, too—if a woman needs chocolate, or a man needs a beer,

we are there to ensure that they do not have to wait long. Most of

the ideas in this book offer you ways of improving the exchange

process, by encouraging more of it or by making the exchanges

more profi table.

Marketing goes further than this, though. Marketing is also

concerned with creating a working environment, with managing

the exchange between employer and employee for maximum

gain for both parties. In service industries, employees are a major

component of what people are buying—the chef and waiters in a

restaurant, the stylists in a hair salon, the instructors in a fl ying

school. Some of the ideas in the book are about internal marketing:

keeping employees on board and motivated is perhaps the most

important way you have of developing competitive edge.

This is not a marketing textbook. There are plenty of those around,

and if you are a marketer you will have read plenty of them. There

is very little theory in here—only one or two examples when they

help to illustrate the reasoning behind some of the ideas. The aim of

the book is to offer you a set of “snapshot” ideas for marketing. The

ideas all come from real companies. Some are big, some are small,

some are service companies, some are physical-product companies.

In some cases, you will be able to lift the idea completely from the

book and adopt it for your own business: in other cases you might

be able to adapt the idea. In still other cases, the idea might illustrate

how a creative approach can help you, and perhaps it will spark off

a few ideas of your own.

The ideas often came from the companies’ own websites or from

published sources, and in other cases came from direct experience

of dealing with the companies themselves. If you keep your eyes

open, you will see examples of slick marketing all around you—a

creative approach is all it takes to be a winner yourself.

Ultimately, good marketing is about being creative. Successful

companies are the ones that develop their own unique selling

proposition (the USP) that marks them out as different from their

competitors. The USP might be almost anything—an improved

level of service can make all the difference to a fi rm selling a product

such as cement, which is essentially the same whoever sells it. At the

same time, a retailer with an exclusive range of physical products

can create a strong competitive advantage over another retailer who

is equally attentive to customers and has just as nice a store. Copying

ideas directly is usually not a good idea—but adapting them from a

different industry can be extremely powerful.

A common mistake many fi rms make is to try to please everybody.

For all but the largest fi rms this is impossible—and even very big

fi rms tend to do it by splitting themselves into various subdivisions

and sub-brands. You can’t therefore adopt all the ideas in this book:

you will have to be a bit selective, because many of the ideas will not

apply to your industry or your individual circumstances. For small

to medium-sized fi rms, specialization is the way forward—but

specialize in customers, not products. Customers give you money,

products cost you money: stay focused on customer need!

Ultimately, without customers there is no business. This is true of

staff, stock, and premises too, of course, but they are all a lot easier

to get than customers—after all, everybody else is out there trying

to get the customers’ hard-earned money off them. I hope this book

will give you some ideas for getting more customers, keeping them

for longer, and selling more to them.