What is marketing?
Ask ten people what marketing is and you will hear ten answers: advertising, branding, social media, lead generation, storytelling. Each is a piece of the elephant and none is the whole animal. So the first principle, the one everything else hangs on, is to keep it simple.
Marketing is changing behaviors by changing beliefs.
Someone behaves a certain way today. You want them to behave differently. The only durable way to move a behavior is to move the belief underneath it. That definition forces you to be specific: a real person, a real behavior, a real belief. Four questions keep you there.
Three kinds of behavior change
When you want a new customer to buy, you are asking for one of three things, and each is a different degree of difficulty:
- Switch brands: leave another provider they already use.
- Switch from a substitute: stop relying on something outside your category.
- Start something new: adopt a behavior they do not do at all.
Name which one you are asking for. A plan that ignores the difference misjudges both its message and its cost.
The only four pathways to growth
Break revenue down to its basic elements and something clarifying happens. Revenue is customers multiplied by revenue per customer. Split each of those in two and you get the only four ways any business, in any industry, has ever grown.
- Acquisition: winning customers you did not have before.
- Retention: keeping the customers you already earned.
- Frequency: getting customers to buy more often.
- Purchase size: getting customers to spend more each time.
That is the entire menu. Instead of drowning in a hundred tactics, ask one question of any idea: which of the four pathways does this move, and by how much?
Start reporting the four building blocks
Most businesses review revenue only by product. That tells you what happened but not why. Put a metric against each pathway and review them monthly, even if you have to estimate a few at first. An approximate view of the right four numbers beats a precise view of the wrong one.
Your product is your most important marketing
Imagine a lemonade stand and a hundred clever ideas to sell more: a catchy name, bright signs, samples, a punch card, a jingle, a viral dance. All of them can help. But the most important marketing decision is missing from the list: make great lemonade.
Promotion only accelerates the truth about your product. If the product is good, promotion compounds it. If it is weak, promotion just helps more people discover that faster.
The best marketing idea you will ever have is a product worth talking about.
Define your benefit
The benefit is the change the customer experiences, not the features you built. “Freshly squeezed” is a feature. “The superior taste of real lemons” is a benefit. State yours in one sentence a customer would recognize. If you cannot, that is a product problem, and it is the first thing to fix.
Then find out why people are not buying
Once the benefit is clear, growth runs through understanding why people who know about you still do not buy. Those reasons fall into just four categories, the four benefit barriers. Earn the right to promote: get the lemonade right first.
The five steps
The marketers and owners who actually grow their businesses tend to walk through the same five steps, in the same order. Everything else in marketing either supports one of these steps or is a tool you reach for when you need it. Each guide follows one running example, Revive Lemonade, a small fresh-squeezed lemonade business, so the numbers stay consistent from step to step.
Start with Step 1: the customer view of sales.