Brian Tracy - Marketing

MARKETING

BRIAN TRACY

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2014 Brian Tracy
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THE PRIMARY reason for the success or failure of a business is determined by the success or failure of the marketing effort. According to Dun & Bradstreet, 48 percent of all business failures can be attributed to a slowing down or ineffectiveness in the area of marketing and sales. In our dynamic, competitive economy, marketing is the core function of every successful enterprise. No matter what business you are in, you are in the marketing business.

In this powerful, practical book on marketing, you will learn or relearn twenty-one key ideas, and many sub-ideas, that you can use to improve your strategic marketing resultsstarting immediately.

Strategic marketing is the art and science of determining what your customers and future customers really want and needand can use and affordand then helping them to get it by creating and structuring your products and services in such a way that they satisfy the specific needs of the customers you have identified.

The goal of strategic marketing is to enable you to sell more of your offerings at higher prices over an extended geographical area and achieve market stability, strength, and leadership.

The starting point of successful marketing is for you to remember that customers are always right. They buy for their reasons, not yours. Customers are selfish, demanding, ruthless, disloyal, and fickle. But they are always right, based on their own needs, wants, desires, and ways of thinking. Customers will change suppliers whenever they perceive that they will be better served elsewhere.

Your ability to appeal to their real desires, and to satisfy their wants and needs as they perceive them, will largely determine your success in business.

Marketing is a skill set that can and must be learned by keeping certain ideas and concepts in mind continually, and by asking certain vital questions regularly. If you take the time to think through the answers to the questions in this book, you will sharpen your marketing skills considerably.

The most important part of this book is what you do afterward. It is the specific actions that you take, and how quickly you take those actions, that will determine the entire value of this book for you.

When you read or think of an action you can take to improve your marketing, act on it immediately. Dont delay. Develop a sense of urgency and a bias for action. These are the essential qualities of all great businesspeople.

MANY PEOPLE think that the purpose of a business is simply to make a profit. The real purpose, however, as Peter Drucker explained, is to create and keep a customer. All the efforts of a successful business are aimed at creating customers in some way. Profits are the result of creating and keeping customers in a cost-effective way over time.

The cost of creating customers initially is very high. The cost of keeping them is far lower than the cost of creating them in the first place. If you study the companies that are the most efficient at marketing, you will find that their strategies are all aimed at creating customers and then holding on to them.

Perhaps the most profitable marketing strategy is that of developing your products or services to a high level of quality. Quality is the most powerful and effective of all marketing strategies. Fully 90 percent of your business success will be determined by the quality of what you produce in the first place. People will always buy from a quality supplier, pay higher prices, and return over and over again to a company that provides them with high-quality goods and services.

What is quality? This subject has been discussed and debated for years. Philip Crosby, founder of the Quality College, said that quality is the degree to which your product does what you say it will do when you sell it, and continues to do it.

Perhaps the best definition of a brand, which is your reputation in the marketplace, is the promises you make and the promises you keep. Your quality rating is determined by what percentage of the time your product or service delivers on the promises you made to attract your customer to buy in the first place.

The second fundamental strategy for successful marketing is quality service. According to PIMS (Profit Impact for Marketing Strategy), a study conducted over many years by Harvard University, the quality of a product is contained in two factors: the product itself, and the way the product is sold and serviced.

It is not only the product itself, but the way that you treat your customers, from the first contact through their entire time with you using your product or service. People will always come back to a quality supplier of goods and services, no matter what the price.

There is another critical factor in marketing success, and it has to do with relationships. More and more today we are finding that it is the quality of our business relationships that determines whether we create and keep a substantial number of customers.

Sometimes I ask my audiences, What percentage of peoples decision making is emotional and what percentage is logical?

After they have thrown out a few answers, I tell them, People are 100 percent emotional. They decide emotionally, and then they justify logically. It is how they feel, and especially how they believe they will feel after the purchase, that determines whether they make the purchase at all.

Jan Carlzon, the former president of SAS Airlines who made SAS one of the most profitable companies in Europe, wrote a book about his experiences called