Action Marketing

By Riaan Steenberg ([email protected])

Marketing is one of the most misunderstood areas of business, and so
it often becomes an area that is neglected. What good marketers know is
that marketing is more about putting ideas into action than it is about
having good ideas. Recent thinking about innovation also equates
innovation to one idea and tons of commercialisation.

This gives rise to the concept of action marketing. Action marketing
is aimed at creating a marketing architecture that enables a practical
and customer driven marketing approach. Strangely, action marketing is
not about having better brochures but about understand why and how your
customer expresses their desires and having the brand to accelerate your
impact into these markets. This leads to better brochures and a whole
range of other elements in the business.

The action marketing process proposes that you take some very
deliberate steps to reshape your market impact.

Scan the competitive landscape

All marketers are interested in their competitors. Knowing what
competitors are doing is important – but we need to look at the market
differently and ask who are creating what value in the market and answer
how can we target this value? There are companies that cater for
different target markets, at different price points and with different
unique selling propositions. This allows them to extract value from the
customer. The question the action marketer must answer is how market
shifts will shift the value equation in the market place. Peteraf and
Bergen (2003) argue that while companies may look the same on face
value, that typically they have different capabilities and resources and
that this differentiates them more than their image. Abebe (2012)
highlights that companies that focus on scanning the market and adapting
to customers, competitors and technology (market competencies) are more
successful than organisations focusing on internal competencies such as
process optimisation, debtors and finding better suppliers. Action
marketing asks what capabilities we should develop to change the value
equation in the marketplace.

Drill for insights and create experiences.

What makes it difficult for your customers to buy your services?
Moving initially from intuition to data and then from data to insights
is challenging for most marketers.

The objective of moving to data based reasoning is to find out what
you can do better for your customers and what is creating pain for them.
Initially the focus should be on eliminating the pain with your service
and later to take away the pain experience from your competitors.
Internet based market research allows for a much more targeted
understanding of who is interested in you and who you can and should be
talking to. Modern interactive marketing demands deeper understanding of
customers and their behaviour and how they like to interact with the
company and the ability to deliver personalised experiences, which they
find useful and engaging.

There are few marketing, sales and service situations where an
organisation is not able to gather the logistic, operational, marketing,
sales and service data which tells the corporation whether the customer
has been served well or not, and the number of situations where it
cannot are diminishing (Stone and Woodcock, 2014). Stone and Woodcock
(2014) further state that there is still significant work required to
link business intelligence to customer insights. The action marketer
takes customer insights and turns them into target markets with specific
products and services.

Create brilliant customer journeys

It is not only about the product or service but also about the
experience that gets created and for that experience to be relevant and
memorable for your customer. This is often referred to as the customer
journey.

This customer journey is different for different market segments. Do
you know what the journey is for your main segments? Many marketers
think they should create the journey, while action marketers realise
that the customer is taking a journey and it is your task to discover it
and optimise the experience.

Building the brand

Brands are not all about logos or brand statements. It is about the
vision and values of the organisation and how you convince yourself, the
organisation and the world that this set of values is worth buying into.
There is something that you like or admire about most of the big brands.
This story is one that got told and action marketers know it is about
the story being told around a brand.

Win with social media

The mobile revolution is here to stay and is simply the most
pervasive platform that gets used by the most people. 86 of every 100
people have a cell phone according to the UN telecom agency. That is
more people than have cars, houses or any other utility. Social media
and messaging platforms are critical to positioning your organisation
correctly as it has such a wide reach. It allows you to transform both
B2B and B2C marketing and new strategies for both must have a mobile
component. An emerging idea is also that internal and external marketing
is converging and more people want to be able to peer into your
organisation and “live your brand”. Social media and messaging allows
companies to become more transparent and the most transparent companies
will have the best brands in years to come.

Execute your strategy

Action marketers know that to execute an effective strategy in
marketing requires you to give all your employees the tools to execute
the brand. Every employee and not just the marketing department execute
a customer-focused culture. So marketing starts with recruitment and
goes all the way through to every phone call and touch point with the
organisation. The action marketer understands what happens at every
touch point in the organisation and makes sure the brand “lives” at this
point.

Capture more value

Tactical action marketing requires careful consideration of pricing
and applying price psychology at every turn. The challenge is always to
stay out of low-price competition and to create value and capture
value.

Accelerate your impact

Action marketing is the start of change in an organisation. Markets
shape organisations and action marketers are experts at change
management. The action marketer understands that the business case for
marketing is to accelerate change and that marketing has a direct
contribution to the bottom line.

Conclusion

This article looks at the concept of action marketing and asks if
marketing is driving change in your organisation or if it is simply the
department that is asked to come up with ideas when you need to push
something out. Action marketing requires organisations to use an
external focus, get in touch with customers and optimise their journeys.
It is also a highly iterative and interactive process that requires
marketing to breathe and accelerate change in the organisation and to
help every employee to refresh the product, pricing and positioning of
the brand, its products and its brand identity.

© Riaan Steenberg – all rights reserved. www.riaansteenberg.com

References

Michael A. Abebe, (2012) “Executive attention patterns, environmental
dynamism and corporate turnaround performance”, Leadership &
Organization Development Journal, Vol. 33 Iss: 7, pp.684 – 701

Margaret A. Peteraf and Mark E. Bergen, (2003) “Scanning Dynamic
Competitive Landscapes: A Market-Based And Resource-Based Framework”,
Strategic Management Journal, Vol 24, pp 1027–1041

Merlin David Stone, Neil David Woodcock, (2014) “Interactive, direct
and digital marketing: A future that depends on better use of business
intelligence”, Journal of Research in Interactive Marketing, Vol. 8 Iss:
1, pp.4 – 17