Golden Practices Blog

The Five Basics of Marketing (a la Kotler)

The good folks over at Brand Autopsy have a great post on THE 5 basics of marketing. They refer to an excellent and brief article on CNN.com sharing the expertise of Kotler with his "five top tips for marketing success." Snippets, here, but go read the whole article on CNN.com. It's a gem.

Note the emphasis on emotional appeal, creating a customer experience, strategic choices in product, continual differentiation and commitment to being superior at whatever you choose to go into. 

1. Come in under the radar

"The key to brand-building is to have something good that you roll-out in a very intelligent way. Maybe even invisibly for a while because you want to be under the radar screen of competitors." (a la Corona Beer, the largest selling in the U.S.)

2. Know your customer

"There are still too many CEOs who identify marketing with selling and advertising... Don't just go after everyone. Define the target market carefully through segmentation and then really position yourself as different and as superior to that target market. Don't go into that target market if you're not superior."

3. Own your branding

"We are not in a state of competition anymore; we're in a state of hyper-competition. So people are desperately looking for handles -- functional features, emotional appeals -- that will draw people to their product. We should think of owning a word or a phrase that helps to build customer retention and loyalty."

4. Stay ahead of the competition

"The worst thing is that if something works, your competitors are going to clone it and before you know it anything that you had as a differentiator is imitated by the others. So you're in the business of constant innovation. Constantly asking yourself, 'Three years from now, what will our differentiator be?' ... Markets change, so marketing has to change."

5. Make it an experience

"There's a big movement to say, 'we're not just adding services to our business and our product, we're actually trying to design an experience.' You'll see that language being used. We're in the experience design business."

Havens on Branding

Andy Havens is my hero. I wish I could write like this man. He delivers his messages with such style and humor! That's why I love his Legal Marketing Blog. I've enjoyed his discussion list posts for a long, long time, but his blog is "Andy unleashed"!

See his post on branding. He covers lots of excellent points on the subject including the fact that advertising isn't a necessary element of establishing a brand: a common misconception. He explains why.