Good marketing
is about listening, not talking

Owners of small and medium-sized
businesses tend to have more faith
in sales than they do in marketing,
but this is often due to a
misunderstanding of the marketing
process.
Marketing has
traditionally received a lot of bad
press. It is regarded by many
business owners as a vague,
ill-defined process that involves
spending a lot of money on
persuading people to buy something
they might not necessarily want –
often with few tangible results.
Good marketing,
however, is not about persuading
someone to buy something you have –
that is selling. Rather it is about
understanding the needs of the
marketplace and providing goods or
services that fulfil those needs. In
other words marketing is matching
your product or service to people’s
genuine needs.
If your
marketing is working well, you will
need to do little more than inform
prospects and customers of your
products or services. If you are
providing something they really need
you will not have to persuade them
that they need it.
This is not to
say that persuasion does not play a
part in marketing – it does. In a
competitive market, for example, you
need to convince prospects and
customers of the relative benefits
of your product or service as
against those of your competitors.
But if you have understood the needs
of the marketplace well and
differentiated your product or
service accordingly, the benefits of
what you are providing should
largely speak for themselves.
We hear a lot
of talk about ‘Unique Sales
Propositions’ (USPs) but the time to
be unique is when you are
positioning your product or service
in the marketplace, not when you are
trying to sell it. Perhaps it might
be better to call them ‘UMPs’ –
Unique Marketing Positions.
The best way to
steal a march on your competitors is
to listen carefully to customers and
prospects, understand their existing
and emerging needs, and constantly
modify your products or services to
meet those needs.
The problem
with emphasising sales over
marketing is that you tend to put
more effort into talking to
customers than into listening to
them. This might help to drive up
sales in the short-term, but no
business can build lasting success
on trying to persuade customers to
buy what it already has if it does
not listen to its customers and
provide what they actually want.
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