What does marketing do anyway?

[RJP]

Thought I'd split this discussion off from another thread, wherein Clint raised an interesting point.

I think the type of marketing expertise used to sell liquid detergent might help sell many types of scuba gizmo's for sure.

I'm much more interested in the type of marketing strategy that will help fill my classroom with students. Once I do that, equipment is very, very easy to sell.

I'm just not sure strategies used to sell commodities are best suited for my needs.

Assuming that your needs include getting people to give you money in exchange for products and services... marketing is marketing.

It is clear to me that the scuba industry confuses "marketing" with "promotional tactics" in large part. Marketing is a high-level PROCESS. Strategies and messaging and tactics are what come out of the process.

Marketing -- the process -- can and should be applied in exactly the same way to every product or service. Yes, Coke may spend $2 billion a year applying the process to their products... but I can assure you that the exact same process is perfectly suited to your needs. Of course the specific strategies and messaging and tactics that come out of the marketing process for a regulator or a scuba class will be very different than for a detergent... but the process that should be followed for arriving at those messages and tactics is exactly the same.

And, when you understand that the process for doing marketing properly is the same for everything, looking at what marketing can do for a product that is an absolute commodity really underscores the power of following a rigorous marketing process...

Considering that following the well-defined marketing process can get rational people to not only choose one package of NaCl over another but also PAY MORE for the privilege of doing so... imagine what rigorous, insight-based marketing could do for a product or service that was actually different from the competition?

So the next time someone tells you that marketing doesn't work, you can tell them to go pound salt! (But first, figure out whether you want to be in the "$800 a ton" salt business or the $65,000 a ton" salt business. At a minimum... please at least make the decision to be in the $2,449 a ton" salt business.)

 

[clint@uniquescuba.com]

Ray, I completely smell what you're stepping in.

I've always been impressed when it comes to things like dressing up salt or fragrance in a fancy package and getting an absurd markup on those things. It's like why do people pay sooo much for a Starbucks coffee or a Lamborghini? I would say it because guys like yourself have done a very good job of marketing and seduction over the years.

So, how do we get people to pay $1000 for a DSD?

I have no clue. Unfortunately, ground zero of our industry seems to be Dive Retailers. If you have been in very many, one thing becomes clear very quick... they might be good at teaching, but have no clue when it comes to merchandising and retailing.

If you're going to seduce people into paying way to much for a service you also have to have the fancy package.... and we dont!

 

[RJP]

If you're going to seduce people into paying way to much for a service you also have to have the fancy package.... and we dont!

Everyone gets caught up in the "luxury" brands which are on the far extremes. Sure they prove the point... but you don't need to be a luxury brand to make it work.

Does the Morton salt come in a fancy package?

Yet somehow they manage to charge three times as much compared to the exact same product in a Safeway container.

That's the most powerful part of the example.

The fact that there are far more BRANDED commodity products sold than store brand is testament to what marketing can do.

Think of marketing as a branch of psychology. Marketing is the science of understanding human emotions, desires, and needs... and using that understanding as part of a rigorous process that has been proven to get humans to make irrational financial decisions that are clearly contrary to their own economic well being.

So, how do we get people to pay $1000 for a DSD?

It's funny you should ask. That's what I'll be charging.

Seriously.

 

[clint@uniquescuba.com]

It's funny you should ask. That's what I'll be charging.

Seriously.

Yes, I know.. That's why I brought it up

 

[Wookie]

We have a number of questions we must ask before we decide how to market.

Who is our customer? We've spent so much time grateful that anyone comes in the door that we have created a client who treats us like used car salesmen. They come in and look at our stock and then bid a price at some percentage off of the marked price. We encourage this by giving it to them. I could go on about this for paragraphs, but other folks have done it far more elequontly than I. Do we really want some cheap ass like that as our customer? Do the same folks walk into the bike shop, ski shop, or parachute store and beg for a discount?

What are we selling? I know a number of dive shop owners who love to teach. Others love to travel. Some of us drive boats. I am a boat driver. Although 90% of my business is scuba, 50% of that is research for the government, and the 10% that isn't scuba is bird watching. I talked to the local party boat (read booze cruise) operator today. His boat, less of a boat than mine, gets $12,000 per day for a 6 hour charter for 123 folks. Wait, WHAT?? I get $6,000 per 24 hour day food, booze, and diving included, and people complain about the price. I'm obviously selling the wrong product. Don't get me wrong, I love taking divers out. I would love taking birders, drunks, or the homeless just as much. Maybe not the homeless.

What do we want to sell? This may be a completely different answer to the question above. Maybe some of us need to be smacked in the head.

Who do we want as a customer? I will be speaking with Ray soon enough about our marketing. We have positioned ourselves in a very tight market, which worked great when we were in a major metropolitan area, but Key West is a whole different animal. You have to work to get to Key West. Tack $300 onto any plane ticket to get here, or add a 6 hour drive on to it. What I want is the adventure diver who wants to go somewhere that no one else goes like Cay Sal, Tiger Beach, Navassa, Mona, and transits through the Bahamas. Why am I not marketing to them? I don't know where to find them.

This could go on forever, but until we figure out that kids don't answer the phone or return voicemails or e-mails (I read that kids text. That is all.)we will never reach out to the demographic that has money, isn't afraid to spend it, and wants a quick experience, we can't be successful.

 

[clint@uniquescuba.com]

Wookie, given your example as well as ray's I would say you are the Safeway generic salt at only $6000 per day.

I'm looking forward to seeing how ray's marketing magic will spin that into $18,000 per day

 

[RJP]

Yes, I know.. That's why I brought it up

It's all about the process. I didn't just pull the idea out the air by saying "How can I make a ton of money doing DSDs?"

I applied the marketing process.

Let me write up a general overview of the process I used... will be back shortly!

​

---------- Post added December 6th, 2014 at 03:04 PM ----------

We have a number of questions we must ask before we decide how to market.

Who is our customer? We've spent so much time grateful that anyone comes in the door that we have created a client who treats us like used car salesmen. They come in and look at our stock and then bid a price at some percentage off of the marked price. We encourage this by giving it to them. I could go on about this for paragraphs, but other folks have done it far more elequontly than I. Do we really want some cheap ass like that as our customer? Do the same folks walk into the bike shop, ski shop, or parachute store and beg for a discount?

What are we selling? I know a number of dive shop owners who love to teach. Others love to travel. Some of us drive boats. I am a boat driver. Although 90% of my business is scuba, 50% of that is research for the government, and the 10% that isn't scuba is bird watching. I talked to the local party boat (read booze cruise) operator today. His boat, less of a boat than mine, gets $12,000 per day for a 6 hour charter for 123 folks. Wait, WHAT?? I get $6,000 per 24 hour day food, booze, and diving included, and people complain about the price. I'm obviously selling the wrong product. Don't get me wrong, I love taking divers out. I would love taking birders, drunks, or the homeless just as much. Maybe not the homeless.

What do we want to sell? This may be a completely different answer to the question above. Maybe some of us need to be smacked in the head.

Who do we want as a customer? I will be speaking with Ray soon enough about our marketing. We have positioned ourselves in a very tight market, which worked great when we were in a major metropolitan area, but Key West is a whole different animal. You have to work to get to Key West. Tack $300 onto any plane ticket to get here, or add a 6 hour drive on to it. What I want is the adventure diver who wants to go somewhere that no one else goes like Cay Sal, Tiger Beach, Navassa, Mona, and transits through the Bahamas. Why am I not marketing to them? I don't know where to find them.

This could go on forever, but until we figure out that kids don't answer the phone or return voicemails or e-mails (I read that kids text. That is all.)we will never reach out to the demographic that has money, isn't afraid to spend it, and wants a quick experience, we can't be successful.

You've got most of the nuts and bolts in there. But you're missing the most important one.

Stand-by.

 

[DiveNav]

Marketing = Outside, In
Sales = Inside, Out

 

[RJP]

The 20min "Scuba MBA"
MBA = "Marketing By AQUIS"

Here's a somewhat Joycean "stream of consciousness" overview of the marketing process.

1.) Figure out what business you are REALLY in

• If an LDS – or the industry as a whole – continues to think that they are in the scuba business they will continue to be limiting the potential
• In another thread I mentioned Kodak's demise being that they thought they were in the film business... when they were really in the "image capture and distribution" business. If they thought of themselves as the leader in THAT business... they would have come up with - and owned - digital photography before anyone else got there.

2.) Identify who your potential customers are... based on the business you are REALLY in

• Once you've identified what business you are REALLY in, you will probably see that your potential audience is far beyond just "potential divers"
• Of course I'm not using the industry's current, flawed idea that "anyone who is NOT a diver is a POTENTIAL diver" here.
• In marketing, a potential customer is anyone who has a problem or need that my product/service can answer
• My neighbor is an executive with Church & Dwight. Brilliant company with an extraordinary ability to see past their product... all the way to the customer. Imagine if they limited their thinking to "the baking soda" business?

3.) Understand what problem or need these customers have that your product or service can uniquely answer

• Closely related to #2... this should actually be "Step 2a"
• It's not just enough to be able to solve the problem... your solution needs to be unique (or solve a unique problem)
• Arm & Hammer, for instance knew very early on that baking soda could be used for a million things. But they purposely started their expansion out of the baking aisle with the refrigerator odor problem. You can't really spray Glade or Lysol in your fridge... so an all-natural "absorbent" product that could be placed into the fridge was unique. Of course, once they owned that... they were able to expand. There's no way they could have competed if they went right to solving "all odor problems" or laundry detergents, etc they would have been crushed.

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4.) Identify which segment of the universe of potential customers you want to go after

• While your product might WORK for everyone in the target audience, you can't effectively go after "everyone" because, as I've told clients for years "a product that is for 'everyone' is a product for no one"
• If you're not specific in some important ways... the whole rest of the process breaks down, because "no one knows who 'everyone' is" especially your AUDIENCE. If you don't know who they are, how will THEY know they are your customer? (Think about your response to an envelope addressed to "Resident" versus "Residents of Bradenton" vs "Residents of White Loop Lane" vs "Clint Seeley.")
• Segmentation is determined based economics, demographics, psychographics, and logistics
  • Economics - can they afford my product and/or how much can/will they pay
  • Demographics - are they the right age, gender, education, etc (This is becoming less and less important)
  • Psychographics - what's their psychological mindset? What about them presents us with an opportunity to target them emotionally? This also speaks to the critical issue of likelihood to adopt my product. (This is of paramount importance... and has replaced demographics as the key to segmentation in the contemporary marketer's toolbox)
  • Logistics - can I effectively reach them? Can they easily obtain information about my product when I need them to have it? Do they have access to my product/service? If you identify your best customers based on the three above, but they all live in the woods 100 miles from here, and have no mail, no tv, no internet access, and no way to get to your shop... they aren't your best customers.)
• Once you have the four things above figured out separately... you analyze them to figure out the largest overlap
• Tide is a great example of nailing this down. Their target audience is not "people who do laundry" but rather "moms who believe that the way their family looks in public is seen as a reflection of their ability to be an effective manager of the household"

5.) Define your objective(s)

• Objective: what are you trying to achieve?
• Needs to be relatively specific ("grow sales" isn't much of an objective)
  • Needs to be more specific than simply quantifying it ("grow sales by 10%" isn't much of an objective either.)
  • If it's NOT specific you'll never be able to develop a strategy in the next step.
  • The analogy I've always used is: Suppose I asked you to book a trip for me. You, of course, ask me where I want to go... what's my objective?
    • How effectively could you plan my trip if I told you my objective was "to head west"?? How about "go a long way west"? How about "Go 3,000 miles west?" Better... but you still don't know if I want to go to Vancouver, Washington, Oregon, California, or Baja Mexico.
    • "Go to San Francisco." Great... right? Nope.
    • When do I need to get there? What do I need to bring? Is anyone coming with me? Is cost an issue?
  • In this case an actionable objective could be "It's imperative that my partner and I get to San Francisco for a meeting on Tuesday morning to save the $20M Levi's account." On the other hand suppose I said "I need to be in San Francisco in two weeks, I've only got $149 to spend, and I've always wanted to see more of the country."
  • I think you'd agree that the plans you'd develop from those two options will be very different from each other... and probably BETTER plans than if my objective was just "Go to California."

​

6.) Determine your strategy

• How will you go about achieving your objective?
• What's your big picture "plan of action"
  • Can't be an objective. ("Get more divers" or "sell more gear" are NOT strategies.)
  • Needs to be specific: ("Conduct an effective marketing program" is NOT a strategy.)
  • Can't be a tactic: ("Leverage email and social media" is NOT a strategy.)
  • To underscore the critical nature of setting clear objectives, in the travel example above "Travel via plane" would be a good strategy... or "Take a bus" ... depending on which objective we we had. If our objective was "go west" we could not develop an effective strategy
• Strategy needs to be developed based on everything you've put together in Steps 1-5 above
  • If we were in the frozen treats industry, providing families with a fun way to spend a few moments together enjoying the essence of summertime... a strategy of "driving uptake by college students returning to campus after winter break" would be a really bad strategy
• Typically you'll have more than one objective... so you'll need more than one strategy
  • "Increase gear purchases by OW students" would have a different strategy than "Expand our group travel with families"
• My favorite example of a great example of a great strategy is the Lamisil campaign... and not just because I did it
  • One of our objective was "motivate the 'suffer in silence' segment to take action." To achieve that objective our strategy was "create a sense of urgency by highlight the 'living infection' nature of toenail fungus" (Also speaks to the "unique" ability of a pill to solve the problem in a way topicals couldn't.)

[video=youtube;3h1O7-r7Wrw]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3h1O7-r7Wrw[/video]

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7.) Properly position your product or service

• There's a million definitions, but essentially... Positioning is the mental space you want your product to occupy in the customer's mind
• One of the most important parts of marketing, it's also the most poorly understood and the part most screwed up by clients.
• Proper positioning enables you to codify exactly what it is that your customer is buying. (Externally and internally)
• There are several VERY specific ways of crafting a positioning statement. As long as you have one of the generally accepted "good ones" you'll be OK. But you need to have an exquisite understanding of the different components of a positioning statement in order to complete one properly. ("Our product is the best" is not a positioning statement.)
• The positioning template I've used has evolved and been refined sllightly over the years but it remains true to the rigorous science+art of positioning. It contains the following elements, many of which should be familiar from above:
  • Audience + Insight: who are we talking to... and what do we know about them
  • Our brand: what is our product
  • Frame of reference: essentially the competitive set from the CUSTOMER's perspective
  • Differentiated Functional Benefit: what our BRAND DOES that is unique
  • Reason To Believe: what key feature supports the functional benefit
  • Differentiated Rational Benefit: what our brand lets YOU DO that is unique
  • Differentiated Emotional Benefit: what unique FEELING do you experience when you receive the rational benefit of our brand
• Tide and Lamisil are my two favorite examples, so I'll have to go to #3 on the list for this one...

8.) Develop your messaging

• What is the full story that will most clearly convey your positioning to your audience?
  • At the risk of beating a dead horse... you can't really do this effectively if you haven't rigorously completed the previous steps above
  • This is not ad copy, but more of a narrative
  • It is not "the history of..." but rather a contemporary story that is compelling to your audience today
• I use the word "story" purposefully; it is not a list of bullets or talking points.
  • It needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end
  • It needs to be interesting to the audience
  • They need to care about the story... it needs to be about THEM not your product or service
  • It needs to be tight and hang together
  • If you have done the steps above properly you already know the characters, the plot line, etc
• While you do need to construct the full story for this exercise, understand that you don't have a single customer or potential customer or ever needs to HEAR the full story all at once
  • Different elements will be relevant and meaningful to different audience segments... at different points in time. (eg: someone coming in to find out what it takes to get certified doesn't need to hear about how you run your rescue class or that you have a shop trip to Palau in 2016)
• Anything that doesn't ADD to your story TAKES AWAY from your story. (If you wanted to positioning a shop as essentially "we make tech fun" there would be no reason to include the fact that the shop was a family-run business in the story. While it's a lovely sentiment - and would certainly be meaningful to YOU - it has nothing to do with "making tech fun" and is meaningless to the audience. In fact it becomes confusing.)
• Everyone needs to stick to the script at all times!
  • If your positioning is "we make tech fun" then you have to actually DO that!
  • If your story is "we do everything we can to make learning easy" then you can't do anything that makes it hard.
  • The people that answer the phone, and check in the rental gear, even your freelance instructors need to have the story down cold and stick to the script!

9.) Develop your tactical plan

• Hopefully the fact that the "do stuff" part is STEP 7 in the process is not lost on anyone. Unfortunately this is where most people/organizations think marketing BEGINS. The scuba industry really confuses "tactical promotion" with "marketing efforts." The doing is important, but a sh***y plan well-executed is still a sh***y plan.
• The key here is ensure that your tactics...
  • COME from your strategies: if your strategies are good, good tactics write themselves and bad tactics are obvious.
    • If your strategy is "Promote Caribbean Travel" a presentation on Dominica featuring samples of regional cuisine makes sense... while a "Discover Local Diving" program in April at a quarry in Ohio would probably not be a good idea.)
  • ALIGN with your story: the content of any tactics should of course say the same words as your story... but what the tactics are should also align. In fact the way you run your business should align with your story.
    • If part of your story is "preserving the underwater environment" then hosting an underwater cleanup day where the shop provides free fills for participants is a great idea. In fact, if it really is part of your story... you better do one a month. Because if you only do one a YEAR it tells everyone your story is b******t.
    • A story of "we make getting certified easy" can be enhanced and supported by delivery of the students OW gear to the dive site and having a DM handle getting tanks refilled while students have a relaxing lunch. They'll go home and tell their friends how easy it was to get certified. If they hump their own gear and tanks... they'll go home and tell everyone how heavy the gear is, how steep the hill is to the fill station, and how the instructors and DMs stood around BSing while the students did all the work. Sort of guts your "we make getting certified easy" story, no?
  • APPROPRIATE to your target audience: when you know both the psychographics and demographics of your audience channels and media become obvious.
    • This section could go on forever about e-marketing and newspaper ads and flyers and websites and a million other things. I'm not going to do that.
    • My main point here is that you start with the audience in mind as you are developing the tactics
    • You should be able to describe everything you do by starting with "Because our strategy is to ___________ and our target audience is _________ who we know___________, we should do________"
      • Because our strategy is ___to leverage DSDs to drive interest__ and our target audience is __parents with pre-teens__ who we know ___love to watch their kids engaging in sports and other activities___ we should do ___DSD Birthday Parties with cake and ice cream __.
      • Again, see how the "do" part comes after the thinking part?
  • FOCUSED on one thing at a time: For years I've preached the concept of a "single net impression" for any tactic.
    • don't create swiss-army-knife tactics and resist the temptation to say everything that is true about your product/service/shop every time you open your mouth.
    • A flyer at the local health club about the fitness and health benefits of scuba diving should be designed to ONLY get people to sign up for a DSD (or whatever your specific call to action is) and should NOT mention how many brands of gear you carry, how many trips you run, or how great your service department is, etc
  • MEASURABLE, TESTABLE, and SCALABLE: this doesn't require a market research department and production teams... just a little thought.
    • if you can't measure/track something... you won't know it it's working or not. So you won't know whether to keep doing it... or stop doing it.
    • before you commit to something... test it. Doesn't need to be a huge experiment. If you think promoting DSD's to local boy scout troops is a good idea... rough some materials together for ONE troop and run one. Maybe offer it for free to one small troop to work the kinks out. If it works - meaning you get people to SIGN UP for OW classes - then you can commit to rolling the program out for every troop in a 30mi radius
    • if you have multiple ideas and can't decide which to test/try first... try the one that is the most scalable. A successful program pushed through a town recreation department could be easily replicated with other towns. On the other hand, something that is fairly targeted/narrow might end up being a "one-and-done" even if it does work.
• Everyone is under pressure, and everyone wants to get stuff going, but you need a plan first. Don't be "that guy" when it comes to implementation.

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10.) Continually review, refine, revise, revisit, rejuvenate

• The market process is ongoing. Most of my Fortune 500 clients were pretty bad at this. The Fortune 50's of the world were the worst. They had "planning season" which was the 4-months they spent developing a plan... that then sat in a drawer until it was time to start next year's plan
• Do note, however, that you really shouldn't need to go back to step 1... unless you didn't do it the first time.
• I also purposely did not include react in this step. If the plan is solid... don't get distracted by ancillary challenges or small "opportunities" that are off-strategy or otherwise inconsistent with your plan.

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And yes... that is the process I used to come up with the $1,000 DSD.

 

[clint@uniquescuba.com]

Steven Sasson as an engineer at Eastman Kodak invented and built the first electronic camera using a charge-coupled device image sensor in 1975. - Wikipedia

Patent