Take it to the streets
To reach a narrowly defined customer base, you need to go against the grain of widely accepted mass-marketing principles. You don’t want to cast the widest possible net; you want to home in with laser-guided accuracy on the customers you’re trying to reach.
Often, that means thinking smaller, not bigger.
“Sometimes, more marketing isn’t better,” Cape says. “It’s about being focused, being efficient with your marketing. To me, it’s not how much you’re spending but how you’re spending the money you have. As you get into a tough economy and cash and available marketing funds are reduced, you have to get smarter at it.”
At Quick Lane, smarter means knowing what corporate management can and can’t do. Corporate management can define what the company brand should stand for, can establish overarching goals and can work to keep the organization pointed in the general direction of those goals.
What corporate management can’t do is come up with a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy that will get customers into stores from Maine to California and all points in between.
Realizing that, Cape and the Quick Lane management team have given individual store operators a great deal of latitude in tailoring their marketing style to fit the potential customers who live and work within a 15-minute drive of the store. Store operators had one ground rule to observe: Convey the brand’s consumer message, “convenience with confidence.”
“We have a brand style guide where we make suggestions to store operators regarding how they brand and advertise,” Cape says. “We do provide a road map to be consistent and uniform, so that it supports the brand. But the road map isn’t a mandatory marketing program. We try to structure things in a way where there are choices. What we’ve found is that when the dealers have more choices than they could leverage at one time, they still find what is best for them.”
Cape says taking a big-picture marketing philosophy down to the customer interface level requires a balance. You can’t let each store owner or salesperson take your brand in a different direction, but you want to stimulate small-scale innovation and creativity.
To ensure continuity without stifling creativity, you need to communicate with your people and make sure you are giving them an opportunity to communicate with you. The representatives in the field need to know in what direction the company’s compass is pointing, and upper management needs a clear view of what is and isn’t working in the field.
“Your employees are the ones on the front lines dealing with consumers,” Cape says. “They understand what the consumers are telling them. In our case, they might understand why a consumer may not want to buy a set of tires at that moment. If your front-line people are listening to the consumer, they’re going to understand the consumer’s wants and needs.
“Then, they’re going to come back to you and talk about the trends they see, which helps you understand how to tweak things from a marketing, pricing and process standpoint. In the end, it’s all about serving the customer. If we can meet customers’ needs in terms of being timely, affordable and having a good consumer experience, they’re going to continue to choose us.”
