Which P is your company's focus?

In the vast majority of organisations around the world, the focus of the marketing mix can be depicted as follows:

Product - Price - Promotion - Place - People

As you can see, promotion dominates the resources of most marketing departments, followed by price ... with product, place and people taking out a distance third place.

In my opinion, this represents illogical thinking. This implies that it is most effective to heavily promote products that haven't been given the necessary budget to develop, and an unjustifiable amount of time pricing them.

Immutable logic says that the resources allocated to the marketing mix elements should look more like this:

Product - Price - Promotion - Place - People

In summary, promote products that people really want. Then, you can reduce your promotion budget by the word of mouth factor created by great products. And, promote those performance predictors that will flow naturally from the great products.

The most powerful performance predictor of them all (potentially)

So, what is the most powerful performance predictor of them all, and why have I added potentially?

A brand is potentially the most powerful performance predictor of them all. And I say potentially because when branding is executed poorly it has the reverse affect - it becomes a performance detractor.

Branding is commonly misunderstood, even by marketing people. A brand is no more than a promise of performance delivered in advance of actually experiencing the service or using the product. Another helpful explanation is that a brand is the organisation's reputation.

A well developed brand (that is, one which highlights deliberate attributes in a powerful way) willl make perspective customers feel like they have already experienced the service or used the product before they actually have. Clearly, this performance predictor has great potential to fast-forward prospective customers into the future.

Fusing performance predictors into products

Unlike the traditional relationship between product manufacturers and advertising agencies, performance predictors should not be bolted on to a product as an after thought.

Instead, performance predictors should be fused into the products before, or during, development. This will ensure greater alignment and authenticity between the product and associated marketing communications.

For example, if a restaurant wanted to use a celebrity chef to endorse the establishment, it be would be most effective to have that chef involved in the development of the actual menu (i.e. methods, ingredients, etc.) rather than just promoting the restaurant via marketing communications.

Similarly, rather than have the product development team develop the product and hand it to the marketing team to develp a risk-reversal guarantee, why not have the marketing team involved in the product development and the product development team involved in the development of the guarantee?

Consumers shouldn't be able to tell where the product ends and the performance predictors start.

Human-uniqueness Performance Predictors

Every single human being on the planet is unique. Some in big ways, others in small ways. But regardless of the extent of these differences, the fact remains, we are all different.

For this reason, there are performance predictors which will be relevant to some consumers and not to others (in some cases, no others!).

For example, in Kevin Roberts excellent book Lovemarks, he quotes the following comment left by a visitor to the Lovemarks website:

"A tradesman came to my house to give a quote - but when he pulled out his Palm Pilot to check his schedule I knew I would give him the job ... When you come across another Palm Pilot devotee you have found a friend, someone on your wavelength, someone who understands." [Consultant, Australia]

So, for this consumer, the tradesman owning a Palm Pilot was a critical performance predictor. But does this mean that all tradesmen should go out and buy Palm Pilots because they are an important performance predictor? Perhaps, but probably not.

The Palm Pilot was a human-uniqueness performance predictor for this particular person. And the dichotomy here is that there may be other consumers seeking the same performance predictor, but the question for tradesmen to ask is: Are there enough consumers in this category to warrant buying and using a Palm Pilot?

What I am saying is, before running off and implementing every single performance predictor suggested by individual consumers, it would be wise to consider the greater impact this performance predictor may or may not have on your target market.

100% User

Imagine if all your staff (regardless of the size of your organisation) all used your products 100% of the time when requiring a product in your particular category. That would be a powerful performance predictor indeed, would it not?

To ensure even the most skeptical of consumers are impressed by this type of performance predictor, insist that all staff (including yourself), actually pay for the products they use. Don't include your own products as part of their remuneration package.

On the flipside, imagine if a key customer saw one of your executive team, or you as the owner, making a substantial purchase from a competitor. What message does that send? How about, "The owner thinks the competitor's offering is better than her own". Scary thought.

The impact of all staff being 100% users would have a 'sideline benefit' too. The user-feedback generated via the staff could provide many useful insights. With all staff experiencing a customer-perspective and a staff-perspective, their feedback should be at an entirely new level of depth.

A belief in your products is most effectively communicated with '100% staff use', not slick salesmenship.