MARKETING: FROM A CUSTOMER’S VIEWPOINT
What is the first rule of marketing?
According to Mark Riston; the first rule of marketing is "you are not the customer."
Let me rephrase; whatever you are selling or you're going to sell, whether it is a service or a product, you have to consider the customers/consumers who will be buying your products or using your services, first, because they are the consumers, and you are selling to them.
In other words, their comfort and satisfaction are paramount to you which is also tantamount to the success of your business.
It sounds so simple, right? But the evidence shows that with extensive study, marketers will make better decisions if they can have this rule hands down.
Imagine two people applied for a marketing post in a company that sells baby products, and one of them is a primary school teacher with 13 years of experience with working with children from ages 3 to 12, and the other one is a civil engineer who is keen on taking up new challenges but with zero experience of the game or prior interest in baby products.
Who do you think is the best candidate?
You can argue that the teacher has an inmate and extensive knowledge of the game, making him the ideal candidate. But you can also use that experience against him. He is an educationist, not a normal customer, and his deep and widespread knowledge of the game might stop him from empathising and ultimately converting amateurs to buy into the brand.
Similarly, the civil engineer inability to tell one end of the racket from the other can be a blessing in disguise and can be used as a strong point in hiring him. But, then again, taking someone with no knowledge of baby products forces that person to study the market more carefully and removes a lot of overconfidence and innate biases that prior experience often brings.
Of course, the correct answer is that either candidate might be superior to the other. It will all depend not on their background but their marketing proficiency.
In marketing, knowledge is power.
That is, a good marketer who is well trained will have been equipped with the right knowledge and will have been schooled in the discipline which will afford them the exposure to grasp the concept of market orientation.
But this does not guarantee success in marketing if you are still missing out on the first rule of marketing that you are not the market. It will be a waste of time when you pour money, time, feelings and effort into things like advertising, pricing and packaging - it will be like putting the cart before the horse!
In the school of marketing, learning to separate your instinctive feelings and thoughts from the actual insights from who a real consumer is is the first thing a trained marketer learns to do well. Yes, you help produce the product, that goes to say, you are not the consumer of it.
The big question will be whether marketers understand that they are not consumers?
If the teacher can bracket his experience and knows his onions well and use it to generate good qualitative insight, then produce clear quantitative results from samples of the target market, I would hire him. If the civil engineer can do better, I would joyfully welcome him to join the team.
Women can market men’s product and vice versa. The key is not who you are but rather your ability to be market-oriented and look for ways where you can yield results.
"We are not in a gender or age range market, and we know from groundbreaking work by a host of American academics in the 1980s and 90s that the more market-oriented a manager and the company she works for is, the faster it will grow, the more profit it will make and the more successful its innovations will be. It turns out knowing you’re not the customer bestows massive marketing advantages," says Mark Riston.
This knowledge will create market-based research and insight that will prove monumental to drive sales and growth.
