Apply these principles when conducting market research

What is marketing? Is it a form of advertising? Is traditional marketing dead?

Marketing according to Wikipedia is the communication between a company and the consumer audience. The purpose is to induce behavioral change in the audience.

Markets are the people who buy what you are selling. Marketing is the research and studies conducted on the audience preferences and advertising is the process of making your product or service known to your market.

Businesses have up words to 100 different market approach’s such as; cloud marketing, email marketing, alliance marketing, call to action marketing, push marketing, pull marketing and so on. I want to cover 3 elements I find relevant in most cases; Organic, paid, social.

Organic is something that is spread through word of mouth, shareable, likeable, and reachable. Paid is something that a third party/broker receives monetary compensation for reaching an audience. Social is something that you barter besides money to reach an audience.

Just as I thought traditional marketing is dead I was put in check when I met Riley from Chicago.

“What do your potential clients pay attention to? That’s where you should be advertising.”

Paying attention to detail is something that is over looked in the business world. When you think it is important to fret about product place and price you become narrow sighted and you forget the most important factor, that is; people.

People buy from you. People are your market. People share if they like what you are offering them. People barter to have your product/service.

The attention needs to be refocused on people, not on ‘sell product, make money.”

I made several mistakes when I entered the market space with my company.

First and foremost, I experienced every avenue of advertising; mail, door to door, radio, news paper, and even carrier pigeons. That last part was to see if your paying attention, and also to emphasize that I exhausted what I thought was all the resources available.

What was over looked here is not so much where I was advertising but how I was doing it, and most importantly why I was doing it. I understood my target audience, I wasn’t clear about my objective. This created chaos and loss of money.

The focus was on profit rather than turnover. I need you to pay attention to what I am going to say. Profit is a bi-product of the relationships you build with customers.

While exhausting the many options that I briefly explained above, my initial intentions were to ‘get the foot in the door’. While acquiring clients was my main concern, my actions were depicting a different message all together.

Make profit.

Despite the conventional view that the business has to make as much money as possible in as short amount of time as possible, this is contradictory to how business becomes dominant in the market.

Take Tesla Motors for example; Elon Musk wanted to revolutionize the way we live our lives by deploying environmentally safe vehicles. Production costs were higher than the actual value of the vehicles that were being sold.

Why did he choose to go into deficit? Because when you bring people value they become loyal to your brand. This is why finding used Tesla vehicles is not that simple.

How do you bring people value?

You do so by connecting and building relationships with them, becoming interested in what they are interested in.

Christopher Locke explains it best in his intuitive book Gonzo Marketing; “What drives common interest is interest not product.”  

Sounds tedious and extensive reaching every client and getting involved in their lives. That’s how most disruptive businesses become well, disruptive.

Riley works for an advertising agency. We met in Arizona this weekend and he has unlocked my perspective on traditional marketing. I became parochial about the traditional advertising approach that I deployed in my early days in the company because it didn’t seem to work.

I came to the realization when I was talking to Riley that

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