5 Common Misconceptions Misleading Your Marketing Strategy

Without customers, there’s no enterprise. The very survival of a business and its growth depends on a company’s ability to acquire and retain an ever-increasing number of people who’ll buy its products and services. Failure to plan for the acquisition of customers puts the very viability of the organization at risk.

In short, a business requires a marketing strategy, without which it’s unlikely to realize its ambitions. Yet when putting together a marketing strategy, many businesses make fundamental mistakes which call the viability of the strategy and its likely success into question. Below are five common misconceptions which prevent companies from achieving their objectives.

1. Mistaking tactics for strategy

In order to defeat the city of Troy, the Greek army left a hollowed-out horse outside the city gates. The Trojans, thinking it was a victory trophy to the goddess of war, Athena, brought it into the city. That night the Greek soldiers came out of the hollowed-out horse and opened the city gates to let the rest of their army in. Troy was left in ruins.

Some people are under the misconception that the horse was a strategy, but it was actually a tactic. The Greeks had laid siege to Troy for ten years with no success. Consequently, they decided to change strategy. They decided that the only way they could defeat Troy was from within. Once they’d made this strategic decision, they needed a tactic to get inside the city. That’s when the idea of the horse was developed.

People tend to talk about tactics because they’re tangible and easy to understand; they’ll refer to a ‘great social media post’, a ‘brilliant TV ad’ or an ‘amazing direct mail campaign’, all of which can capture the imagination. Ultimately, however, marketing is a strategic discipline, and without coming up with a really robust strategy, it’s very unlikely that a business will form ideas and devise tactics that will really work.

2. Having a lack of clarity around the offering

Once it’s understood that there’s a requirement for robust strategic thinking, one of the fundamental questions that must be answered is what the value proposition is to the customer.

When companies think about their value proposition they often speak in terms of the benefits of their product or service, why people should use them and what they can offer. In order to really understand the value that they provide, enterprises need to focus on the customer and - their challenges, problems, objectives, hopes and fears.

For example, a high-class restaurant can communicate its great tasting food, award-winning chef and convenient location. These are all positive attributes, but none of them address the fundamental motivations of buyers. Marketing is about seeing the world through the eyes of the customer. Why would someone choose to frequent an expensive restaurant?

When thought about in terms of a customer’s challenges, problems, objectives etc., the buying motivations might be around:

• How do I mark a special occasion?
• How do I make someone feel loved?
• How can I create a lasting memory?

Unless a company chooses the challenge that it wants to solve, the objective that it wants to enable its customers to achieve or the fears that it wants to allay, it will never create messaging, promotions and campaigns that are truly effective.

3. Failure to target the appropriate audience

In order to achieve real clarity around the value proposition, another fundamental part of the strategy is to decide who target market is.

For example, a high-class restaurant could be targeting businesspeople who want to leave lasting impressions with prospects and clients, or couples who are romantically involved and want to make sure that their significant other feels nurtured and loved. Alternatively, the restaurant could be targeting people who are having birthdays, positioning it as the ultimate destination to mark that special occasion with friends, family and colleagues.

Differentiation often comes not from what a business does, but for whom it’s done. While there could be a number of high-class restaurants, in a particular area, serving a similar standard of cuisine, the nature of the experience would change whether it’s targeting businesspeople, couples who are romantically involved or those using the venue for a birthday dinner.

This, of course, is the same both in the business to consumer world, like our restaurant, but also in the business-to-business environment. For example, an HR consultancy specializing in working with manufacturing businesses still performs all the expected services any HR consultancy would deliver. Therefore, it’s not different in ‘what’ it does.

However, by concentrating on working with manufacturers, it may be able to produce specialist guidelines, utilize specific and relevant case studies and provide a deeper understanding of market trends that are particular to running production lines and employing a significant number of blue-collar workers. In other words, ‘how’ it delivers its service is adapted to the distinct marketplace it serves.

4. A misunderstanding of the competitor landscape

When deciding on both the value proposition and the target audience, an organization also has to have a real understanding of the marketplace. This means evaluating the competitive landscape appropriately.

People often think of a competitor as someone in the same category as them, for example an accountant competing with another accountant or a recruitment company competing with another recruitment company. However, a competitor is anybody that’s going after the same spending dollars.

For example, in the case of Harley Davidson, market research has shown that when people are thinking about purchasing, they often choose between the bike, a holiday of a lifetime or a conservatory at the back of the house. Similarly, for a special birthday, someone might choose between having an expensive watch or a lovely camera. Suddenly Nikon and Omega find themselves competing, even though they do completely separate things. Therefore, when considering competition, it’s important to evaluate the context in which the purchase will be made and, consequently, the alternative options that the target market may consider.

Today, even within the same category, competition can look very different. For example, Hilton Hotels would traditionally be competing with businesses that look very much like them, such as The Holiday Inn or Marriott. Today, they’re competing with Airbnb, a business with a very different model. Similarly, conventional television broadcasters are now competing with entities such as Amazon Prime, Netflix and Disney +, companies with contrasting modes of operation.

5. Failure to consider the ‘emotional proposition’ to the customer

In his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains how human beings have two modes of thinking: System 1 and System 2. System 1 thinking is fast, instinctive and subconscious, whereas System 2 is slower, reasoned conscious and effortful. What’s significant to note, he points out, is that most decisions are made by System 1. As Daniel Kahneman said, “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it, but they would prefer not to”

More often than not, the conscious mind merely post rationalizes decisions that have already been made. This gives us the impression that most of our judgments are logical and reasoned when they’re not. As the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt explains in his book The Righteous Mind, “the rational mind thinks of itself as the Oval Office when actually it’s the press office”.

This makes defining the emotional deliverable of vital importance for any organization. It’s not that the subconscious mind is itself emotional, but rather emotion is the way that the subconscious communicates with the conscious mind.

It doesn’t matter whether a company is working in the realm of B2B or B2C. The way human beings cognitively process and make sense of information doesn’t change simply because one is in a corporate setting. If the subconscious mind, through the emotions evoked, is the primary driver in making decisions, this is the case regardless of whether it’s a business or consumer purchase.

Therefore, for an enterprise to ignore the emotional element when buyers are procuring a product or service is to disregard the dominant consideration affecting the outcome.

Consider this; is an enterprise selling candles or romance? Training or empowerment? Advisory services or certainty?

In order to define its emotional proposition, a business must think about the challenges it solves for its customers and what that means for them emotionally. Ultimately, we don’t necessarily value the products or services that we’re going to buy, but what they’re going to do for us and what they mean for us.

For example, our HR consultancy needs to understand that far from being really motivated for the HR services themselves, what someone really wants is the reassurance of knowing that they’re doing everything compliantly and right.

Marketing is rarely ineffective because people don’t get the tactical execution right. More often than not, it doesn’t work because the strategy hasn’t been well conceived. With a robust strategy, tactics can be tested and measured and tweaked in order to deliver the success for which businesses strive.