Understanding, to me, starts with a clear market-focused Mission Statement (as opposed to a product-focused Mission Statement). It makes it clear to everyone touched by your business that you are focused on fulfilling customer needs. The customer, not your product or service, is king.
Here’s one small example from the text I use (Marketing an Introduction/Kotler and Armstrong). A Mission for Facebook – which is more effective?
- We are an online social network (product-oriented)
- We connect people around the world and help them share important moments in their lives (market-oriented)
If you happen to be on a planning team at Facebook, wouldn’t your thinking be broader and more customer focused if you used the market-oriented mission as a starting point? Of course it would!
Do you have a Mission Statement? Is it market-oriented? If not, get a clean slate, and get to work. If your marketing plan goes forward from this point of view…it just has to be better and more effective!
September is a great time to get serious about your 2016 plan. Good luck with it, starting with getting the focus right.
View previous monthly morsels on our Free Marketing Advice page.
