This Stuck With Me: Everything You Definitely Don’t Know About Marketing (But Should), From 4 World Leading Experts!
1. Prioritize Product Quality & Innovation
Focus on creating a superior product, excellent design, and an outstanding user experience, as modern branding is driven by actual product quality and innovation, not just intangible associations.
2. Optimize Bottom-Funnel & Repeat Purchase
Before investing heavily in broad advertising, ensure your conversion rates and customer retention are strong, as a bottleneck at the bottom of the funnel or poor repeat purchases will waste marketing spend.
3. Balance Brand and Performance Marketing
Allocate marketing expenditure with a general ratio of around 60% to brand-building (mass media) and 40% to performance or digital marketing, as these approaches mutually benefit each other.
4. Cultivate a Strong Brand for Advantage
Invest in building a great brand because it simplifies marketing efforts, increases customer forgiveness for product flaws, and allows you to command a premium price for your offerings.
5. Deep Customer Understanding is Key
Thoroughly understand your target audience by knowing where they spend their time, what they are curious about, and what problems you can solve, allowing you to attract their attention effectively.
6. Proactively Manage Your Personal Brand
Recognize that you inherently have a personal brand; actively shape it by understanding and leveraging your unique strengths and weaknesses to present yourself authentically.
7. Anticipate Cultural Shifts & Lead
Strive to position your product or message ahead of emerging cultural trends and societal conversations, enabling you to ride the wave of change rather than constantly chasing it.
8. Embrace Naivety & Intuition for Innovation
Allow yourself to approach problems without preconceived notions or reliance on conventional playbooks, as this ‘first principles’ thinking can lead to truly innovative and effective solutions.
9. Implement Customer Reactivation Campaigns
Target past satisfied customers with specific offers to encourage repeat purchases, as the cost of re-engaging an existing customer is often very low with high potential for return.
10. Leverage Happy Customers for Word-of-Mouth
Recognize that satisfied repeat customers are a primary and highly effective source of marketing, as their positive word-of-mouth referrals can attract new interested buyers.
11. Creative, Grassroots Marketing Tactics
Employ unconventional, localized, and personal marketing methods, such as leveraging insider access or distributing physical flyers, to build initial traction and community.
12. Seed Curiosity with Counter-Intuitive Messaging
Use disruptive or intriguing tactics, like signs prohibiting other popular apps while subtly introducing yours, to psychologically pique people’s interest and make them curious.
13. Reallocate Ad Spend to Distribution/Experience
Shift resources from traditional broadcast advertising to enhancing your product’s distribution channels, in-store experiences, or digital platforms, making them part of the product consumption.
14. Study Supply Chain & Design
Prioritize learning about industrial design, supply chain management, and analytics over traditional advertising courses, as these areas are increasingly crucial for success in an innovation-driven economy.
15. Acknowledge Big Data Limitations
Understand that big data is derived from past events and has limitations in predicting future market shifts, especially after significant disruptions like a pandemic.