What It Is

Marketing is an essential component of your business strategy. Brands are challenged in a competitive marketplace every day and with so many clamoring for the customer's attention, carving out a market niche and differentiating your company and its products and services is increasingly difficult.

That's where we come in.

We bring a fresh perspective to your marketing initiative, analyzing your current positioning, evaluating your communication tools and helping you create a marketing program that will resonate with your customers and drive more sales. Many companies attempt to drive growth by expanding product lines, service offerings and increasing business channels through mergers and acquisitions. All of these methods require capital investment and can be implemented successfully. Before going down that path, however, we suggest a more promising alternative.

Review your marketing strategy first to see if it's still relevant. Renovation means that you might be able to do a more effective job in leveraging your existing assets and competencies. We can help you distill your message into one core essence and then develop marketing communications to educate and engage your key audiences and drive business. This gives you an opportunity to grow and expand in the most efficient way possible.

What It Takes

Today, companies spend billions of dollars to set themselves apart from their competition and develop an individual brand identity. Some of them succeed, yet others just aren't up to the challenge. Real marketing requires risk and the mind-set that "me-too" is no longer good enough.

Consumers have literally thousands of choices in the marketplace. Businesses face more and more competition from non-traditional sources. It isn't enough to brand everything in sight and partner with anyone that can deliver the tiniest audiences in an effort to build market share. Solid marketing should help people make informed, intelligent choices about your products and services, not further confuse them.

How can marketing leave a permanent mark? We suggest creativity and daring. Differentiation helps you stand out and be noticed. Once you are different in the minds of your target, however, you'll find that you become more interesting, less interesting, or simply invisible. Being just one of the herd doesn't help you stand out. Lacking vision or the ability to innovate doesn't make you different or better. If your marketing effort finds you rapidly becoming a commodity, then you're the same, and being the same is never better than being different. Make the right marketing decision, present it effectively, commit to the direction and then give the plan time to take root with the customer.

Enduring brands are built on a foundation of differences that mean something to the customer. It takes vision, teamwork, execution and consistency over time. Of course, a little courage doesn't hurt, either.

Where are you?

In a study commissioned by the Association of National Advertisers and conducted by business consultancy Booz Allen Hamilton and Brandweek magazine, six distinct types of marketing organizations were identified and defined. Knowing where you stand is the first step in understanding where you're going.

Growth Champions see themselves as "owners" of their company's key growth-support functions, whether or not these fit into conventional definitions of marketing. They lead such general-management activities as product innovation and new business development, and even involve themselves in strategic investment decisions in areas such as new market penetration. Only 8.8% of those studied fell into this category.

Marketing Masters oversee the customer-focused side of new product and service launches and are literally "masters" of company-wide marketing efforts. They enjoy the authority to coordinate with other major business functions. They do not, however, make strategic decisions and seldom lead new business development. Most of those studied (38.4%) belong to this group.

Senior Counselors help guide the CEO on marketing strategy and also serve as primary advisors on marketing strategy for individual businesses. They may lead major advertising or promotional campaigns, but rarely lead product innovation and have limited decision rights over new markets or products. Just less than 1 in 5 studied (16.9%) make up this segment.

Best Practices Advisors work with individual business units to maximize marketing effectiveness and efficiency by bringing best practices to advertising, promotion and public relations, but have a lower correlation with above-average growth than both the Grand Champions and Marketing Masters. Only 8.9% comprise this group.

Brand Builders are efficient providers of marketing services like communications strategy, creative output and campaign execution in support of key brands, but their leadership role and decision rights on strategy and investment are all but negligible. The group contains 12.2% of those defined by the study.

Service Providers have the primary role of coordinating advertising, promotion and public relations at the request of the company's brand and product teams. This group is most correlated with lackluster revenue growth and lower profitability. Service Providers often work in companies that are behind their industry peers and include 14.7% of those identified in the study.