With several decades of marketing experience, Ian’s early business life included product management and corporate affairs roles for International Computers Limited (ICL). Such positions being initially with the company’s Asia Pacific subsidiary and thence its London headquartered International Division operations. The latter encompassing company activities in Canada, the USA, the Caribbean, South and East Africa, the Middle East, the Subcontinent, as well as Asia and Australasia.

Subsequently returning to Australia, to establish his own marketing consultancy in Sydney, Ian’s client base quickly came to number a range of domestic IT companies together with transnational corporations such as Hewlett Packard, Raytheon, Philips, IBM, Rank Xerox, Sperry Univac, National Panasonic, Oce, Honeywell, Cincom and Memorex. A focus on the finance sector also emerged with clients such as The Commonwealth Bank, Schroder Darling and Klienwort Benson.

During this time, he also took a short leave of absence from the private sector to accept the role of Chief of Staff for the New South Wales Minister for Industrial Development and the Minister for Small Business and Technology.

Moving back to his Adelaide home town in the early 90s, Ian’s consultancy practice has continued to diversify.

Certainly information technology clients maintain a strong presence. And over time, Ian has worked on international marketing for PULSE Logistics Systems, as consultant general manager for The Software Export Centre of SA and as a marketing consultant for The Playford Centre, PROMADIS, 2ic Software, Stable Online, Practical Programs, MAXimas, MDS and Epitome Software.

However, other current and recent clients include Adelaide Biplanes, equity capital company the Pinara Group, The Brompton Hotel, Michell Wool, global basketball uniform supplier Proball, Krivic Built, Kars for Kats, TRG Transport, Shakin Jakes, Pureform Furniture, racecourse equipment manufacturer Steriline Racing, accounting and business advisers RDC Partners and Travel On The Parade.

In all such instances, Ian’s view is:
“If you’re spending money on marketing that’s not growing sales than why the heck are you wasting your money.”

But equally:
“If you’re not supporting sales with effective marketing it’s like winking at a pretty girl in a dark room with all the lights off. You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.”

But that’s far more than enough about us.

Let’s, instead, look at things from your viewpoint.

But What Can Marketing Do For Me?

At day’s end, it is our belief that effective marketing is all about helping you profitably generate additional business.
It’s that simple.

But let’s be less glib and rather more pragmatic. And so let’s address the key questions of what is good marketing really all about? What can it achieve? What are the benefits that can accrue from its effective use?

Well, in essence, we’d suggest that the five major objectives that you might set for your own marketing might be to:

• Create a greater awareness and interest in your organization, your products and your key people.
• Solicit enquiries for information from unknown prospects, investors, suppliers, etc.
• Create an image for your company, its products and expertise.
• Help create product differentiation in favour of your company’s products/services that clearly surpasses your competitors.
• Help increase and maintain staff morale and assist in new staff recruitment.
  
  

So let us briefly consider each of these points in turn.

Good Marketing Creates An Awareness Of An Organisation

Many years ago, McGraw Hill Publishing ran a now famous advertisement to encourage organizations top use its publications as an advertising medium. It pictures a senior executive talking to a visiting salesman to whom he was saying:

“I don’t know who you are!
I don’t know your company!
I don’t know your company’s product!
I don’t know what your company stands for!
I don't know your company’s sales record!
I don’t know your company’s reputation!
…. Now what was it you wanted to sell me?”

This advertisement perfectly sums up the importance, in the selling environment, of the marketplace’s awareness of your company and its products or services. If present, it guarantees that any prospect is informed about your organization, and what it has to offer, before a salesperson visits or phones. In other words, it establishes the salesperson’s credentials so that they can get on with the actual job of selling.

Adelaide Biplanes Our creative work for this exciting company focused on increasing market awareness.

Pinara Group

Our charter was to help grow the market’s awareness of this equity investment company.

Marketing Helps Solicit Enquiries

In creating an awareness of your company, marketing provides an invaluable framework on which a particular set of negotiations or discussions can be carried out.

Of course, before these can begin, you must obviously have already found a suitable sales prospect on whom to weave your sales magic. In some instances finding sales suspects is a simple process. In others it is not.

Prospect identification can take many forms.

But certainly marketing can play its role – as a highly successful and economic means of canvassing potential customers. For by interesting the market in your company and your products or services, marketing encourages your target prospects to make the first contact. It makes them think: “We are about to buy a widget. Can we afford not to consider Brand X?”

As such, the benefits of marketing include the substantial reduction in the time a salesperson has to spend cold calling – again increasing productivity.

Next, we find that marketing further increases the amount of time that can be spent actually selling as, in most cases, people who make serious enquiries will be genuinely interested.

And finally, economy of selling can be enjoyed as a well planned marketing campaign can regularly reach hundreds of potential customers for only a few dollars each. An impossible objective if we had salesmen endeavoring to do the same thing.

And in this context, it’s impossible to overlook the sales and sales leads that are today being generated by the web. It’s a blindingly obvious example of just how good marketing can be in generating new business.

Proball Our brief was to substantially increase basketball uniform sales internationally.

Kars for Kats

The marketing objective was to increase limousine hire enquiries.

Good Marketing Creates Image

An effective marketing campaign can make people aware of your company and aware of your products.

But that is only part of the story, for it by no means guarantees that they will necessarily regard your organization and products in the correct or ideal light.

Thus, while size, quality, service, integrity, new product development and financial stability may be but a few of the qualities your organization may possess, these will do nothing to help unless your market knows and accepts such attributes.

Indeed, many cases exist where a company’s customer and prospect base can have a totally wrong impression of that organization. This situation is particularly likely when an aggressive marketing posture by a competitor allows them to gain respect, simply by default.

So it really does boil down to a question of your company and its products having the correct image – and here again, marketing (including the all important matter of ‘branding’) has a key role to play.

For by actively promoting the correct aspects of the company and its offerings, a highly positive image can be assured.

The Brompton Creating a distinct image for this newly renovated hotel (SA’s 2007 Hotel Of The year) was part of our brief.

Krivic Built

As well as focussing on branding, our brief was to help further enhance the image of this construction and landmark development company.

Marketing Creates Product Differentiation

Differentiation is a much used expression in marketing for sure. In essence, what is meant by it, of course, is very simple. At the start of a particular set of sales negotiations, many competitive products can appear pretty similar to the prospective customer.

The final decision, in favour of your brand, will then be made after your product has been able to demonstrate a “product differentiation” more desirable than its competitors.

Further, this differentiation will not only place strong emphasis on physical, tangible and quantifiable factors, but also on intangible and subjective considerations as well. A decision highlighted by McGraw Hill Research into the influences behind buying decisions.

In this survey, 1,000 “top performing” business-to-business salespeople were asked to list the things they considered to be of most vital concern to their customers and prospects.

The following are the top seven factors nominated and the percentage of the research sample who listed them:

Of key significance here is that (while certain quantifiable factors such as price are quite obviously included) the two most important items are those for which no physical proof need (or in may cases can) exist. And because they are subjective, they can be strongly influenced by good marketing.

It can also be concluded that while it is still of utmost importance to have a competitive price, a sales situation where discounting below this is deemed necessary is where a company has been unable to adequately establish the factors higher on the list … such as an image of quality, reputation and integrity.

The advantages of creating favorable product differentiation via marketing are numerous. For instance, it can make a product appear superior even though that product may not yet exist.

It can generate favorable product differentiation for a product that may start with an unfavorable bias like a higher price.

And it can create favorable differentiation for a product before negotiations start. That is, to some extent, the prospect will be pre-sold about the product’s superiority.

TRG Our web site work was targeted to enhance the transport organisation’s product differentiation.

Enpresiv Group

“For this leading web and internet applications developer, our task was to help present their company’s substantial product differentiation through new web site copy and presentation”.

Good Marketing Increases Staff Morale

Marketing has the potential to favorably affect staff morale in three ways.

First, it can influence what can be termed the general job morale of an employee. They like your organization, like the job and like the working environment.

Second, it can nurture corporate morale. The staff member believes your company is not only a pleasant place top work but that it is also successful, dynamic and an on the move organization.

Finally it creates product morale. The employee has maximum enthusiasm and passion for the products and services
you offer.

It is important to also note that these observations are not just about present staff. For effective marketing activity can help play a significant role in making your company appear very attractive to future employees. Of great importance, in this day and age, when many businesses are facing extreme pressures in finding the staff they need.

One final comment. Marketing that boosts staff morale may often require very little special effort. It is often available as a natural by-product of promotion undertaken for other purposes. Thus an advertising campaign mounted to influence buyers can also have a very positive impact internally.