Clarity of focus

Jack Trout doesn’t want you to be confused any longer. The fact of the matter is, marketing your company can get very tricky and can lead to a short career for those leading your marketing group. You’ve no doubt had multicolored spreadsheets and data reports thrust before you, begging thatyou act this way now. To combat that, Trout has hit the streets to separate the confusion from the facts for his book, “In Search of the Obvious.” His goal: Figure out the core of marketing to help people cut the clutter and get back to basics. Here, Trout shares some of the reasons that many marketing programs miss the mark.

Understand the problem

Chief marketing officers have a shorter tenure than National Football League coaches. CEOs may average only 44 months on the job, but CMOs get only 26. The problem is that 70 percent of the companies don’t know what they’re looking for when they recruit a CMO.

Jeff Jones, who was the chief marketer at Gap for two years, reported that he discussed 22 CMO positions over a five-month period. Not one coherently spelled out what he would be accountable for.

I decided to take a closer look at this problem to determine what is going on. Is tarted with a Peter Drucker quote that I’ve often written about that’s worth repeating: “Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two — and only these two— basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business.”

In other words, what is it that makes the company or product unique and different? That’s the assignment. The idea is the nail. The program is the hammer that drives it into the mind of the prospect. What couldbe simpler?

See the solutions

During my research, I came across an interesting study of 600 senior marketers by Advertising Age. In this research, they asked respondents to rank the marketing concepts that they pay most attention to in their jobs. The top 10 was clouded with more than 80 percent of people responding that it was things like customer satisfaction, customer retention, segmentation, search engine optimization and so on.

That is why CMOs are being fired left and right: Differentiation doesn’t even make it onto the chart. Forget all about data mining or number slicing or niche segmenting. Why should a customer buy your company’s product instead of the 10 or so competitive choices chasing the same customer? That’s the question you should be answering, and you should be building a program around the answer.

Don’t expect the advertising agency to come up with this answer. Chances are they will try to sell you emotion or entertainment or something that doesn’t supply that reason to buy.

Figuring out the right positioning strategy is only the beginning. You’ll have to avoid line extensions that just undermine what the brand stands for in the mind. And you will have to get around the Wall Street focus on quarterly and monthly results.

All you can do to fight off the financialsharks is to point out that without thatpoint of difference, you had better have avery low price. And very low prices meanvery low profits.

SPECIAL AUDIO CONFERENCE OFFER: Soundview Executive Book Summaries will host a 90-minute interactive audio conference with Jack Trout as part of the Beyond the Books series at 1 p.m. (EDT) on Thursday, Jan. 29. To sign your company up for a live connection to this conference so your managers can hear Trout’s advice first hand, call (800) 775-7654; mention Smart Business to earn a special discount or go to www.sbnonline.com/trout.