What is Marketing?

The traditional definition of Marketing is ” the activity and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging products or services that have value for customers”. Therefore marketing is extremely important for the survival of all businesses because its “marketing” that drives revenue.

Marketing is generally thought of as a task that only medium and large companies can afford to worry about, but if small businesses want to survive they need to understand the best way to add value to customers. My view of marketing is that the process (marketing plan) helps small business identify how and where they add value, and what makes customer buy from you and not your competitors, therefore in many ways its a reflective process.

The problem is that small business does not have the resources to dedicate to the task of “marketing” so this blog is designed to demystify what is meant by the word marketing for small businesses.

I like to use a simple definition of marketing for clarification:

“find out what the customer wants and give it to them”

Marketing has moved from the notion of “telling and selling” to that of building long-term relationships. Small business is perfectly placed to build long-term relationships with customers because they;

1. Generally have smaller customer bases
2. Can remain closer to customers 
3. Often have passionate owners who are involved in the business

Small business can excel at marketing if they spend adequate time and resources on all three of the following.

• understand customer needs
• develop products or services that offer superior value
• communicate effectively

My view is small business is often good at one or two of these but struggle to excel at all three. The key to success is  you must have all three.

Now the above list sounds obvious but small businesses often fail because they are so focused on developing superior products or services  but they fail realise that either; its not really what the customer wanted, or customers don’t know about the great product or service offered.

1) Understand customer needs

When was the last time you asked a customer for an honest feedback.?

Have you lost a sale recently did you ask why?

Its not good enough to ask existing customers for feedback, you need to know what potential or lost customers think of your product or service offering.

Do you involve your customers in new products or services decisions?

Many technique exist for knowing what your customers want, often the simpliest is a simple call directly asking for honest opinion from your customers.

2) Develop products or services that offer superior value

This is the area most small business focus all time and resources to and therefore most do this well. The problem comes when you spend all your time doing this and nothing else.

2) Communicate effectively

These two words describe many activities in the marketing process. This is the part of the marketing process Style can help you with. At Style we are experts in providing small business with print related marketing material which is a big part of communicating effectively.