Old School Marketing

With all of the airplay today in the marketing world about branding, buzz, stickiness, conversations, relationship marketing and "verticals," I find that what really works are the old-school, main line marketing approaches.

Here's what I'm talking about:

- Segmenting your market
- The five C's: customer, competition, cost, communication and collaboration
- Product rationalization and structuring
- Research
- Hard hitting messaging built around clearly articulated & proven benefits
- Well-placed and well-designed ads with great copy
- Compelling news stories placed in targeted publications
- A tightly and effectively articulated unique selling/value proposition
- Thougtfully engineered sales processes to support marketing
- Flawless product/service delivery to back up the marketing

I'll give you all the buzz and conversations that you want, but if you don't have a firm grasp and a deep understanding of the items mentioned above, your marketing program will be inefficient at best and completely unsuccessful at worst.

When I listen to prospects and clients talk about selling into "vertical markets" it often tells me that they do not have an understanding of their markets, those corresponding needs, their features/benefits and their unique selling (or value) propostion.

Here's to the old-school marketing geniuses!