Hide and seek

I’m constantly amazed by how many businesses seem to love to play hide and seek with their products and services. Having been involved with and overseen a vast number of companies over the years, I have too many examples of places that have exceedingly great products and services but seem to want to make sure nobody knows about them!

Creating a product or developing a service is all well and good but if all your budget is spent on the R+D then you’re simply wasting your time.

R+D is usually looked upon as the fun part or the profitable part yet without marketing, it’s pretty much rendered useless.

R+D is the base of the wheel but with that comes the all important consideration of the environment. Ensuring that you’re not creating an orphan solution – like a left handed tea cup – is definitely for another blog!

Then you build in the development of the product or service which then leads you to it’s positioning (based upon your base research from the first step in the wheel.)

Following the positioning comes the branding process. This is crucial to the development in terms of the product or service’s success because this will be a key element as to whether or not you will be noticed.

Now here’s the biggest missing link for most companies…

… Promotion + Advertising!

This is truly where the game of hide and seek comes into play. If it’s hiding on a shelf, or inside your website, in the store room or, worse still, IN YOUR HEAD…then you seriously need to examine how on earth you expect a consumer to buy it!

The rest of the wheel doesn’t really matter from here if you haven’t got this far with what you’ve got and the sad fact is, is that’s as far as many organisations go.

A strategy must exist as to how to take all that precious time that has gone into the development and actually produce a profit out of it. It’s tantamount to recording a CD with no sound on it. As stupid as it sounds…it’s really what you’re doing.

Changing your mind set from ‘cost’ to ‘investment’ is critical to the success of any organisation when it comes to its marketing – as incestuous as that may be for a marketing company – it’s a fact.

So stop waiting for the consumer to “Come and get me!” and make the game easy for them. Time for a new game. Perhaps “Marco Polo”?