The Four Essentials of Marketing Leadership

As you prepare to launch a new product or service into the marketplace there are four essential ingredients you might want to add to your marketing mix that can greatly benefit your final output and outcome. These four components are the foundations from which a successful marketing launch can be made:

1. Visual—how does it look?
2. Emotional—how does it make me feel?
3. Functional—how does it work?
4. Financial—how is it priced?

Visual—how does it look?
Today’s business market sectors are filled with giant sized corporations, so you need to be careful to produce materials and presentations that match their design level of quality. Over- or under-doing your quality of marketing aesthetics depends more on whom it is you’re trying to reach and they are inherent quality aesthetics and related marketing levels.

Today, the media covering the various market sectors and beats are saturated with things to research and keep up to date, so your communications should be written in a clear and easy-to-understand language. The need for powerful visuals is apparent when talking about new ideas or concepts. If you use illustrations or infographics to help explain what you are presenting to the media and your target audience, they will be more inclined to view them if they are simple and powerful in their coverage of the topic.

An interactive website demo that shows a new product working in its context is the ideal way to present a new product. This demo could provide specific types of data, not necessarily any particular information about a company however, and provide an example of the type of application the product is designed to serve. This demo can be short or long as long as it remains interesting to its audience.

Emotional—how does it feel?
The average executive holding a position of authority is typically an analytical bottom-line thinker. This executive uses numbers and formulas continuously to assist others with work assignments, projects, investments and a related myriad of tasks. As a result, your marketing campaign to this individual needs to be fact-based to create a solid feeling of your firm’s strength including its product integrity and innovation. Weird graphs or illustrations or abstract visuals have no place here. Of course, if your product is aimed toward an industry, such as the entertainment industry, you would want to be a bit more creative! The end goal is for you to make your audience feel confident that you know what you’re talking about and that your firm is one that should be listened to sincerely.

Functional—how does it work?
Typically, a product or service requires a financial and a product-oriented executive to make a purchase. Even at higher levels of management both the CEO and CFO must agree to a purchase of significance. A common mistake that is made in marketing is to point everything to just one of these two types of executives. It’s nearly always preferable to have a multiple marketing campaign that addresses the many types and roles of people that might be influencers in the purchase of your products and services. Yes, this makes for a more complicated marketing campaign, but it also makes for a more successful one.

Financial—how is it priced?
Pricing is critical mass. The least scientific of all phases of product and service marketing is pricing. No one has been able to scientifically determine the objective price of a product or service outside a direct comparison to other competitors in its market sector. This means that your price is going to be based upon your competitions’ products. Ignoring this is perilous. Ultimately, a product value in a market is based solely upon what the market will pay for it and this most often is derived by comparing your costs to your competition.

What type of executives are you dealing with in your industry, and how do they solve problems and select products? Using the simple mapping below can give you a very good idea of how to compose your marketing leadership campaign based upon your understanding of your key customers.

Target Market Profile
Transactional  < ----------------------- > Emotional
Rational  < --------------------- > Functional

• Transactional: Logic and professional relations integrity.
• Emotional: High-energy and makes decisions on how things look and sound.
• Relational: Driven by personality and relationships.
• Functional: Concerned about qualitative thinking and processes.

Think of your marketing leadership as a tour guide. The single largest contributor to the program is the one who best understands the customers in its market and how the organization’s products and services can best serve them. By knowing your market well and your competitions’ leadership approaches will allow you to strengthen your marketing and take a leadership position in the market sectors you are most interested in developing.

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Tom Marin, president of MarketCues, a national consulting firm, wants to hear from you! Follow MarketCues on Twitter for strategy and related tips. Tom also welcomes emails, new Linkedin connections, calls to (919) 908-6145 or learn more at: www.marketcues.com.

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