Attractive Thinking. Chris Radford
thing that a business must focus on: The customer. Drucker’s definition connects several important themes in a business. The Attractive Thinking approach builds on this. The purpose of business is to solve a customer problem and address a need. When purpose is framed liked this, then it is apparent that our business purpose is our core activity, not a nice to do ‘add on’.
In Part I, I will examine research and evidence about how customers think and behave to understand why this works. In Part II, I will show a practical framework that will help ensure our business
• gets more customers so we can grow;
• delivers value for money so that people will come back for more;
• creates growth so we can survive and prosper;
• delivers a profit today, tomorrow, next year and beyond;
• manages costs so we deliver profitable growth;
• motivates the team to deliver more, innovate and drive productivity;
• makes this a fun place to work;
• attracts staff so we can do all the above.
Attractive Thinking drives a much better focus and much better decisions than just setting out to maximise shareholder value. Attractive Thinking helps you to take the idea that we exist to create a customer and translate that into a sustainable profitable business in both the short term and the long term.
The role of marketing and the CEO
The responsibility for driving a customer-first or customer-led agenda and setting out the purpose of the business rests firmly with the CEO. But often the CEO needs a team to support them in doing that. The Marketing Society in the UK asserts that this is the job of marketing. Marketing is not just there to produce the websites, the brochures, run the exhibitions and manage the advertising. In the most successful businesses, the marketing function sees itself in the role envisaged by Drucker:
to create a customer
The Marketing Society13 states that the job of marketers is ‘to create sustainable growth by understanding, anticipating and satisfying customer need’. This is the function of marketers, the CEO and business owner/managers. The CEO is the lead marketer in any business, he or she does have other jobs, but being lead marketer is one of them. And the Marketing Society then goes on to explain the task of the marketer and say that creating sustainable growth requires marketers and CEOs to focus on three things:
1 Define your future vision of how the organisation will succeed.
2 Engage and inspire the organisation to be customer led.
3 Deliver by creating value for customers.
Figure 0.2 from the Marketing Society explains how this works to create sustainable growth.14 This is quite different from how marketing is seen and talked about in many businesses. Marketing is often thought of as the function that does the advertising, produces the brochures, the website, runs the promotions and maybe handles any market research.
Figure 0.2 Source: The Marketing Society, June 2019
This definition makes marketing more central and fuses the role of the marketing function with the CEO. Marketers must ‘understand, anticipate and satisfy customer needs’. This underpins the Attractive Thinking approach.
However, there is some way to go to make this happen in all organisations. At the time of writing this chapter, Marketing Week15 published an article reporting on new research by Dentsu Aegis Network. They reported: ‘According to research by Dentsu Aegis, just 25% of UK marketers identify “leading disruptive innovation” as a core functional priority’. This suggests that only one-quarter of marketers agree with the Marketing Society view that marketing is not just about marketing communications but is responsible for creating value, creating growth and driving the customer agenda throughout the business.
Attractive Thinking believes it is important that the CEO and the marketers are not just charged with maximising sales and profits from what we make and sell today, but are also responsible for deciding what we produce, deliver and sell in the future. The Attractive Thinking principle is that to attract more customers, we must understand what they want now, anticipate what they will want in the future and then ensure we produce and deliver it.
What you will get from this book
You will learn about an Attractive Thinking approach that makes the job of creating a customer a lot easier.
In Part I we will explore why Attractive Thinking works. We look at why attracting more customers is better than extracting more profit from the customers we already have. We will explore fundamental principles that work for both consumer and B2B brands. This is split into three chapters.
In Chapter 1, we examine why we must always start with the customer and how to do this in our business and what might stop us. This begins with setting out that our business purpose is to solve a problem and address a need that our customers have.
In Chapter 2, we will look at how to understand customers, how market research can help us and where it does not help us, and when we need to find alternatives. We will study some universal rules of customer behaviour that must guide our brand strategy and marketing plans.
In Chapter 3, we will look at why it is so difficult to get this right and a few pitfalls where we might stumble and challenges we must overcome. This includes the role of unconscious biases, the influence of randomness and unexpected events, the hazards of trying to predict the future, and why we must be wary of common sense and conventional wisdom and instead look at science and empirical evidence.
This sets up the idea that we need to make our businesses ‘antifragile’. This means our business is not just robust but is also dynamic and able to thrive on unexpected shocks.
In Part II, we look at how to apply the Attractive Thinking method. This is a five-step process to create a brand that will attract more customers and not just extract profit from existing customers. We will avoid marketing jargon. Each step has a name and creates the answer to a question:
1 PINPOINT – Who are our customers and what are their problems?
2 POSITION – How can we solve their problems and stand out?
3 PERFECT – How do we create a product, service or message that delivers this?
4 PROMOTE – How do customers find out about it and where do they buy it?
5 PITCH – How do we engage our shareholders, board directors, colleagues and customers?
At the end you will have a brand strategy that everyone is convinced will work. Throughout this book, I want to work with you. I will adopt the approach that we are embarking on this voyage of discovery and planning together.
Part I
Why does Attractive Thinking work?
Chapter 1
Start with the customer
Something strange happens to people when they cross the doorway into their workplace.