Why your marketing does not sell anymore
and how to fix it
(if you have the pockets of a large Corporation)
(if you have the pockets of a large Corporation)
the Crisis is not the only reason why your orders don’t fly.
We are in a new era of marketing, with new rules never seen before.
The power is now on the Demand side, not on the Supply side.
Yesterday’s organizations were built to cope with scarcity:
Resources were limited, talents were limited, networks were local.
They were built to avoid supply famine: building huge warehouses
of semi-finished goods and “Fort Knox protected” piles of know-how
and rolodex of addresses.
Today’s organizations are flooded with abundance:
Finished goods and services are shipped to them by same-day delivery,
and former rolodex contacts are searched for them by Google.
There are no barriers anymore.
You can get the same stuff everywhere.
(And this has a lot to do with the annoying déjà vu feeling
that grasps us by the throat when we are crossing the fashion windows
of any downtown around the world…)
In these same years the degrees of separations
among any two people on the planet passed from 6 to 3:
practically you can tap in anyone, anywhere.
Finally in 2006 the “mobile revolution” made all this possible everywhere, anytime.
Practically we are all living in an era of abundance where everything is here, now.
All this has shifted the Demand/Supply balance to the Demand side.
Buyers look for solutions only when they need it, in a self-serving mode.
What does it mean for us, willing to sell our stuff?
Why?
And if this could be not fully true on B2C – consumer marketing.
This is dramatically true in B2B – business marketing.
We have been raised to be the greatest toolbox of all the times.
Schools, Universities, Corporations, Business Schools and their “Continuous learning” programs,
have forced as to digest an immense number of tools (and not a single solution):
School programs were stuffed with so much know-how,
that we needed twice the nominal time to complete them:
When I was at university, the average graduation time for a MSc
of Aeronautical Engineering at Politecnico di Milano was 8 years and 9 months.
It took me 6.5 years to graduate and when I crossed the finish line I felt kind of miraculously saved.
The few of my friends that graduated in the regular 5.5 years were regarded as super-hero:
they could compete with the rethoric of Cicero, the memory of Pico della Mirandola and the genius of a Mozart.
But in the words of my Professor Amalia Finzi, I was built as a blank sheet:
something that a Corporation could write over any kind of dream.
And it was exactly like this: I went to Danieli Spa, a steel machinery maker,
and I was able to build a FEM model of a new long product rolling machine in 3 weeks.
This sprang up a discussion with a team of German baby boomer engineers,
until I was able to demonstrate that their design was weak and that we needed a different one.
But I was just young graduated!
The same happened to me in ATOP and in General Electric
where I always solved all kind of difficult problems I was faced.
I was no exception, most of my colleagues did the same.
(after all, we are the ones that built the internet…
not the baby boomers, not the millennials … guess why…;-) )
Millions of my colleagues are left home everyday. why?
Because of the 2nd Marketing Revolution.
Today, no company is interested anymore in amassing resources
( in our case: “brains”) for LATER USE.
Today, a company can google: “steel rolling machine” and get all sort and all kinds. NOW.
The same holds true for valves, gas turbines, probes and fittings… and alike.
You “google” it and you get it shipped next day from New Zealand.
Same quality – lower price.
Not before, not later, right then.
……“The only way to achieve this is to assure that you talk to the world about your solution….”
NOOOOOOOOOO!
Wait a moment… do customers search for solution?
NO, they search for problems!
They search for the problem.
They want to understand it, get informed on it and get the needed results – no matter the solution.
Now, look at how we have been built:
Do you still wonder why your sales force does not sell a nut?
It’s time that we embrace the 2nd Marketing Revolution too.
The First Good News is that we are fully equipped to do it.
We have the power of an immense toolbox.
We only have to start using it in a different way:
stop tracking the sun around the earth but tracking the earth around the sun.
Our fathers (the baby boomers) are no more interested in it, our sons (the Millennials) have always lived like that. We are caught in the middle and have to move out of our hole.
The second Good News is that having all this power, may hurt the buyer too.
It is true that the BUYER HAS THE POWER … BUT:
And I could go on…
No: they are more useful than before:
strategizing, segmenting, targeting, building strong positioning, creating:
is of paramount importance.
Today, no company is interested anymore in amassing resources
( in our case: “brains”) for LATER USE.
Today, a company can google: “steel rolling machine” and get all sort and all kinds. NOW.
The same holds true for valves, gas turbines, probes and fittings… and alike.
You “google” it and you get it shipped next day from New Zealand.
Same quality – lower price.
The old 4P have been just shifted a level up:
from “product” to “information” level,
from “solution” to “problem” level.
and at this level, we, the Mr. Fix, are the one with the best toolbox.
Hope this helps,
Flavio
