One of the most important principles, if not THE most important principle of marketing, which is repeated in the majority of marketing books, is this: Do not make a key and then run around looking for a lock for it. Instead, find a lock, and then carefully fashion a key, meaning, first figure out who your target audience is and then make a product. Never the other way around, unless you want to make your work a thousand times harder and unefficient both for you and your audience.
Idea number one is: The Lock and The Key. During a part of his career, Zig Ziglar was a salesman of pans and pots, a common job at that time. The traditional way of doing this job included the salesmen loading their cars with as much pans and pots as they could possibly carry, and then hitting the road one village at a time, selling a few pots to those who are willing to buy, and after a few days moving on to the next village, but Zig decided to try a different approach.
He decided to hunker down at each village and rent a room for weeks at a time, and in doing so he didn't just sell to the few who were ready to buy in the first interactions but also earned the trust of many of the others who were ready to buy only after they got to know him better, and his sales skyrocketed. Idea number two is: Frequency. In his book permission marketing that was published in 1999, Seth explained how permission was the opposite of spam.
Instead of running distracting ads that everyone hates, he promoted the delivery of useful, consistent information that will educate and will be delivered to readers who showed interest in it. Two of the common mediums through which it could be done is a blog or a newsletter, which are also called permission assets. So how do we know that we own a permission asset?
Not by having the legal permission to contact our receivers, or a few lines in our privacy policy, rather, by knowing that the receivers would miss us if we were gone. Idea number three is: Earn your permission. So have you ever asked yourself why do the exact same products by different brands cost differently?
That's because the brands that price themselves higher, give you a different emotion. You may pay a high price for a brand that you see as trustworthy. On the contrary, if you don't have emotions for a brand you will only prefer it because of a lower price.
But it also works the other way around if you don't know the brands you will probably assume that the higher-priced one is more trustworthy and the lower-priced is a commodity. Low price is a sign of a marketer who ran out of ideas. That was idea number four: Price is A Part of Your Marketing Humans are social beings, therefore, it is our primal instinct to care about how we interact with others.
We may sacrifice a lot to be viewed in a certain social position. That's why one of the first things we should consider when developing a service is how it is going to benefit the status goals of the potential customer. Keep in mind that people don't always want to increase their status mostly they would want to maintain it, or sometimes even decrease it.
And so, we may spend extra tens of thousands of dollars on a car, just because we think it will give us a high status, or we can avoid taking a free car because we might think it will decrease it. In another case, at a business meeting at a restaurant, when we want to avoid challenging someone, we may try to decrease our status by paying for a cheaper meal. Or we may go with the least known company or most known company because we perceive ourselves as outliers, or because we want to be like everyone else, accordingly.
If something seems irrational look for status roles at work. That was idea number five: Status is a Primary Drving Force Harvard marketing professor Theodore Lewitt once said: "People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill bit they want a quarter-inch hole", what he means is that if someone is coming in your store, and he wants to install a shelf don't tell him about how good the drill bit is, rather tell him about which drill bit is the best for installing a shelf. Idea number six is: Nobody Needs Your Product In 1967 Lester Wunderman first coined the term "Direct Marketing".
Since then it became a widely used term in modern marketing. In essence, the difference between Direct Marketing and Brand Marketing is that Direct Marketing is action-oriented and is measured, and brand marketing is culturally oriented and is not measured. Examples of direct marketing may be: Direct mail, email, and social media, while Brand Marketing includes: Newspaper, Roadside, Radio and TV ads.
Idea number seven is: The difference Between Direct and Brand marketing.
