It may sound ridiculous but do we really stop and ask ourselves what marketing is and the function it serves? I would suggest, generally not. And I think we are missing a trick. One myth I would like to dispel is that marketing is about sitting in a room with crayons, producing pretty designs, or printing flashy new brochures. Don’t get me wrong, design, brochures, advertising, direct mail and websites are all excellent communication tools and they all have value when used correctly. But the perception that they constitute ‘marketing’ is fundamentally wrong.
In its simplest form, marketing can be defined as “business success via a process of understanding and meeting customer needs”*. So, essentially, if a company is going to succeed, a customer’s wants and needs must be at the heart of the business, to the extent that they receive superior product and/or service to that provided by the competition.
It sounds easy but, as we all know, the reality is more complicated. Sustaining a competitive advantage is increasingly difficult – particularly if you want to be successful and make a profit for your efforts. A business really has to be on top of its marketing in order to achieve this – ie, it must continually ask the right questions and address the issues it discovers.
The right questions
From a general perspective, the main questions are: where is your business now? Where do you want it to be? How might your business get there? Which way is best? How can you ensure your business arrives where you want it to? In essence, you need to: analyse your business and the environment in which it operates; evaluate your findings; build an action plan based on those findings; implement the plan; monitor the results; assess your successes and failures; then start all over again. For the purpose of this article, let’s focus on information.
Whoever said “knowledge is power” wasn’t lying. Established marketing theory suggests that there are macro and micro factors that organisations must consider to create successful business strategies. At a macro level, these factors include: sociological, technological, economic, educational, political, legal and ecological (STEEPLE factors). Looking specifically at the timber industry, these factors might include: government regulation (for example, carbon emissions); sociological, political and ecological pressures on the supply and demand for sustainable timber; similar considerations with the supply of illegal timber within the EU; and the economic downturn in spending.
At a micro level, the principal factors to consider are: suppliers, distribution, customers, the market, competitors and stakeholders (shareholders, employees etc). Again, a timber business might need to examine: current supply levels, to ensure you meet customer demand; the price of diesel, which might dramatically affect your margins across your distribution network; competitor activity, to ensure your service levels are in line with market developments; market conditions for substitute goods, such as demand for steel and concrete, that can dramatically affect demand for timber.
Such analysis can be undertaken by an independent market research company, but this is often costly. I believe there is a wealth of information already available to timber companies – the majority of it free of charge.
Does your business capitalise on the available personal knowledge and experience of staff, suppliers, customers, partnerships; industry bodies and associations like TRADA, TTF, the Forestry Commission, BRE, wood. for good, AHEC, NTC, CPET, TRA, RTA, TDA; trade press and publications; government reports and statistics; the internet; and industry-specific reports? If not, then you are missing out on the most valuable and cost-effective information resource available to your business.
Information is a powerful tool in marketing and should formulate the basis for any thinking within your organisation, pervading throughout your business (whether you are a large, multi-national company or a one branch timber yard). It should assist you in board level decisions (for example, your five-year business plans); your annual marketing plans; your sales strategies; finance; human resources and so on. After all, it is only when you know where you are that you can realistically establish where you are going.
Remember, marketing is about asking the right questions, evaluating the answers, building an action plan, implementing the plan, monitoring the results, then applying what you’ve learned as you repeat the process – always in the pursuit of customer satisfaction and sustaining business success. But, for the record, I am a dab hand with the crayons!
