Lee Naylor: Marketing in a chaotic world

By Lee Naylor (left), managing director, The Leading Edge Australia

Marketing is getting more and more complicated, right? It seems like every other day there’s an article about disrupters entering the category, programmatic buying, channel issues, and digital versus traditional media – just to name a few. So, how are todays marketers coping in such a complicated world?

Well, I think I have the answer. Can I suggest that marketing hasn’t changed? Marketing is still about understanding and executing on the product, price, promotion and positioning of your offer in the market in order to meet the long terms goals of the company. We seem to have forgotten the fundamentals and created a lot of noise in order to make marketing seem more complicated than it really is. So let’s take a step back and simplify marketing into three questions we need to answer and three things we need to action.

Three questions every marketer needs to answer:

1.    Who are my current customers, what do they want and how well am I doing in meeting those needs versus my current and potential competitors?

2.    Who are my potential customers, what do they want and how well am I doing in potentially meeting those needs versus my current and potential competitors?

3.    What is likely to change in the future in terms of my customers and potential customers needs and how well am I placed to meet that versus my competitors and potential competitors?

Three actions every marketer needs to make:

1.    How can I meet my current customers’ needs better than my competitors using my product, price, promotion and positioning with a strategic, not tactical, focus on meeting the goals that are set?

2.    How do I meet my potential customers’ needs better than my competitors using my product, price, promotion and positioning with a strategic, not tactical, focus on meeting the goals that are set?

3.    Where should I be innovating or changing in order to ensure that I am more relevant to my customers and potential customers in the future than my competitors and potential competitors?

Stripping back to the fundamentals of marketing can help guide us all through this increasingly complex territory. Do not be deterred by short term uplifts and falls, but ensure any short term tactics fit with the larger strategic goals – play the long game.

Rinse and repeat – but not once a quarter!

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