Hello everyone and welcome to The Shades of Entrepreneurship – this is your host, Mr. Gabriel Flores.
Today I welcome an international entrepreneur, Executive Director of 9Boxes and ThreeBy3, Brooke Chapman. ThreeBy3 is big on business strategy and has trademarked 9Boxes™ methodology.
In short, the 9Boxes™ frameworks helps build a marketing strategy.
What is a marketing strategy, why is it important, and why should an entrepreneur care?
Oddly enough I have neve spoke on marketing strategy before, and in truth I know little about market strategy. Marketing strategy is a plan of action designed to promote and sell a product or service, and I have cover various aspects of such as Marketing vs Advertising and What Is a Brand Guideline on The Shades of E™ blog, but about marketing strategy.
And I feel like I cannot talk about a marketing strategy without talking about the four P’s: product, price, place, and promotion. A quick overview for those unfamiliar with the four P’s of marketing.
According to Investopedia, Neil Borden, an advertising professor at Harvard, created the idea of the four P’s in the 1950s, and published an article in 1964 titled, "The Concept of the Marketing Mix," to show the use of advertisement tactics to engage consumers.
Eventually the concept landed with this dude named Jerome McCarthy, a marketing professor at Michigan State University, around the 1960’s who refined Borden’s concept to cowrite the book, Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, and giving birth to the marketing four 4’s. I am hearing there are more P’s floating around but I am not going to talk about those.
The Marketing Mix 4 Ps:
Product - The Product should fit the task consumers want it for, it should work and it should be what the consumers are expecting to get.
Product is the baseline of a marketing strategy. No marketer should move forward without some understanding of what the product is because the goal of the marketing strategy is to help define, in the simplest terms possible, what the product is and why the consumer should find it of value.
For the entrepreneur it is very important to understand the product lifecycle and have a plan in place on how to promote the next product.
Place – The product should be available from where your target consumer finds it easiest to shop.
Think of those well-placed billboards vs this hard to see signs. A good marketing plan has the brand positioned in high visual areas. Maybe that is the front of a super market, a billboard, etc. – again, it all goes back to understand the target audience and where they will most likely see the placed product or service. Our competitor bought a billboard in front of our hospital – you don’t think that caught our attention, and that of our customers?
Price – The Product should always be seen as representing good value for money.
One of the toughest jobs for a marker may be linking a real produce to a perceived price while examining supply chain costs, discounts, competitors price, etc. The marketing strategy will help determine when season products should go on discount to draw more customers or give off the appearance of exclusivity.
Promotion – Advertising, Public Relations, Sales Promotion, Personal Selling and, in more recent times, Social Media are all key communication tools for an organization.
Listen – out of sight, out of mind. If an entrepreneur is not tactfully or organically promoting their product or service, nobody will know about it.
These four items should be outlines in a marketing strategy, and that is why this is important. Having a sound marketing strategy with value propositions can help keep the business aligned with their core values – the reason consumers were attracted to the product or service in the first place, or why they should be attracted to those same products and services now.
In short, a marketing strategy is the blueprint to marketing activities throughout a specified period of time, and this next entrepreneur is here to help guide the entrepreneur through this process.
Just another entrepreneur helping other entrepreneurs, in a community of entrepreneurs.