Attractive Thinking. Chris Radford
payment. If we are selling textiles to garment makers that might be some functional things such as the fabric, the quality, the colours, patterns, the quantity, the delivery timing. It might also be some emotional things such as the brand name, the presentation and logo, the sales relationship, the previous experience of our service.
If like Dent we are selling a training course, it could be the business results I could expect, the networking and people I will meet, the track record of the trainers, the number of hours of training, the training materials. It will certainly be some emotional stuff about how I feel towards the trainers and the people I meet and see around me.
If it is food brands then taste, quantity, packaging, convenience, availability when I need it, how well it fits with my needs or meal occasions. There are also important emotional responses to how the experience of the food and the brand makes us feel. Brand reputation, packaging style, brand name, logo, what my friends and family think, perceptions of quality and fitting in with my lifestyle all matter.
The things described so far make the value proposition relevant to the customer. They ensure we design a product or service that answers our customer’s need. But relevance is only the base line for getting started. The successful business needs to go further and be distinctive and differentiated. By distinctive, I mean capable of being recognised and noticed and understood. So, for food brands that is usually a combination of great visibility and availability in lots of shops and sometimes topped up with TV or other media advertising and sponsorship. It also includes packaging, naming and descriptions that attract customers and make it clear what it is. By differentiated, I mean just how many other people offer the same as we do. In what way is our product different and distinctive?
So, for example, just how many people offer entrepreneur training targeting the same need to the same people that Dent do? What is it that makes the Dent offer stand out? In their case, it is a whole mix of things. The network their clients get to meet, the success track record of the trainers, the intellectual property (IP) in the way they explain their tools and methods, the way they run their workshops, the way they run their sales process.
In many markets the opportunity to differentiate is much harder. In food brands there are so many me too products and brands with marginal differences. Think about yoghurts, orange juice, biscuits, soft drinks, chocolate bars. The leading brands end up focusing on being available in more places and using their superior marketing budgets to create awareness and recognition in the customer’s mind and invest in visibility in the shops.
We will explore the whole subject of creating value propositions that are relevant, distinctive and differentiated in PINPOINT and POSITION.
Communicate with sufficient power
As we get into the ‘How to do it’ section of this book in Part II, we will learn that the Attractive Thinking approach to brand strategy and business growth is simple. What we must do is to create a product or service that solves a customer’s problem. Once we have done that, we need to let them know about it. When the customer discovers our offer, provided we have perfectly solved their problem, they will buy it. We do not need manipulative marketing methods and do not need to trap people into buying things they don’t need. We just need to let them know about it and make it easy to buy.
When I worked in big food brands, I did not really understand how simple this is. We were always under pressure to shift more product. The factory was making it, we needed to sell it. Now this pressure to keep the factory busy and sell is real, essential and perfectly proper for a food-manufacturing business. But in the midst of this we would forget that it would be easier to sell what the customer wants than what we have already got.
This became much clearer to me when I started selling consulting services to marketing directors and CEOs. I tried all sorts of means to persuade them that they needed the Differentiate brand strategy process and this included all the usual techniques of advertising, direct mail, telephone sales, speaking at conferences, getting trade press coverage and writing articles. But one day it dawned on me that the only time we ever got any business was when a client prospect called us. It was never when we called them. When we called them, they were busy and preoccupied with other things. When they called us, they wanted to talk to us about a project where they needed some help. Their need had arisen, they had a problem they needed to solve and we could discuss it.
The clear lesson from this was that we had to concentrate on a process that led to them calling us when they needed us. What did that mean? It meant researching what the client’s biggest problems were that we could help them with. Then designing a service that addressed these problems and then finding ways to let them know about it and keep reminding them that we existed so that when the time was right for them, they called us.
This is the Attractive Thinking approach to ‘communicate with sufficient power’. For the Attractive Thinker, this just means let enough people know about what we offer as frequently as possible, so that when they need it, they remember we have the solution and are able to get hold of us or our product and then buy it.
Those successful businesses I mentioned earlier all have significant budgets attached to letting people know about it and making it easy to buy. Dent advertises and promotes its scorecard and brand accelerators as in-store ‘product for prospects’ and uses telephone sales to follow up leads. Food brands use advertising in TV, print, outdoor, digital and sponsored events to keep in the consumer’s mind and use in-store merchandising and promotional activity to draw attention to their products in store or online. Litmans (a lace and fabric supplier to the garment trade) attends the major trade shows to get buyers’ attention as well as some limited advertising. This is followed up by telephone sales and appointments.
In PROMOTE, we will explore how we come up with a budget and get this right for our businesses.
Making sure we deliver it every time and every day
This is a simple idea but hard to do. When we satisfy customers and make them happy, customers tell others about it and they come back and buy again. If we fail to deliver the quality or the service and the customer is frustrated, then we run the risk of losing them as they start to consider alternatives.
In food brands there can be a tussle between the commercial need to hit annual targets and the marketers’ desire to protect the reputation and quality of the brand. Small ‘adjustments’ to product specification will improve profit margins and create an instant rise in profits. If we do this once no-one notices, but if we do this several times the reduction in quality starts to show. Version 2 may be similar to version 1, version 3 very similar to version 2, version 4 very similar to version 3, but version 4 ends up quite different from version 1. Some big food manufacturers have been doing these product tweaks or ‘value engineering’ for decades.
This has opened up the opportunity for niche quality food suppliers and new brands. The opening for these has often been created by quality reductions amongst the big brands. For example, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream and more niche companies such as Purbeck Ice Cream have changed ice cream markets. The bread and baking business has enjoyed a resurgence away from the big bakeries of Hovis and Mother’s Pride in favour of handmade artisanal and sourdough breads.
In contrast, Mars, who are the world’s biggest private chocolate maker, have stuck to their guns on product quality. This is partly because they are a family-owned business and the family have chosen to protect product quality rather than inflate short-term profits. They continue to quietly grow sales even in their mature markets and consumers still regularly trust and buy their products. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for some other chocolate manufacturers who have been financially engineering products and moving manufacturing to new locations (in food, location affects product quality). This has opened the door for quality providers such as Lindt to move in and pick up more of their customers.
Similar things happen in other industries. In service industries, we put in fewer hours or miss a deadline and the client notices, or we put on cheaper junior staff to support the project. In tech, the support for when things go wrong is not there; the customer cannot get an answer and drifts away.
In