LOK JACK GSB

SHERRY ANN SINGH

Good marketing starts and ends with the numbers. It is certainly possible to market without paying much attention to the numbers but that amounts to playing a hit and missing game; you’re never really sure what you’re going after, how much you need to do to get it, nor even when you’ve reached your target, as none may have been set in the first place.

Since the ultimate aim of marketing is to grow your bottom line, not doing the math does not make much business sense. Number crunching, therefore, is an essential function of the professional marketer.

In determining the ideal marketing mix, marketers must ask themselves some fundamental questions to inform their product, pricing, promotion and placement decisions.

The old adage “you must be able to measure it to manage it” holds just as true for marketing as for any other discipline.

The marketer’s job hinges on measurement at every stage of the marketing cycle. To begin with, marketers must seek out answers.

What is the size of the market that I’m in?

What is my current market share?

What is my competitor’s?

How much more must I sell to grow my market share by ten per cent to become the market leader?

Is my promotional budget sufficient? Do I have the resources to do it or will it cost me too much?

Can I achieve the same objective by growing my margins?

If I increase the price of my product by 15 per cent, how many customers do I stand to lose?

Are there products I should discontinue?

New ones I should produce?

Marketers grapple with these questions every day and it is only by breaking down the problem scientifically and running the numbers that they can justify to their CEOs why certain decisions should me made.

The starting point of all marketing is research. Before a company decides to produce a product it must survey the market to establish that demand exists (or is likely to exist) and estimate at what level demand is likely to be. Then it must decide what percentage of the potential market to go after. These are not easy decisions.

Many entrepreneurs and small business owners will rely strongly on tradition, guesses, hunches, instinct, etc, when making such decisions. They may not hire expensive market researchers, but the vast majority of them are also engaged in “informal” market research.

They talk to other business people, they talk to customers, they walk around the neighbourhood, they observe consumer and supplier behaviour. They go about investigating their environment, trying to identify problems (for them, opportunities) and potential solutions (goods or services) in much the same way as a scientist would. Their instruments may not be as sharp and readings may not be exact, but they instinctively know when they’ve struck gold.

The good business person, however, does not stop there. Because no matter how small, how unschooled, or how unsophisticated he/she may be in his approach, it always comes down to the bottom line impact.

A business person may act on an initial hunch, but if the numbers don’t add up soon enough, that hunch will have a very short lifespan. And so science and art do a delicate dance, feeding back and forth into the process to ensure at the end of the day that the right goods and services get delivered to the right people at the right time, in the right place.

But good marketing is much more than a numbers game. Marketing guru, Phillip Kotler, defines marketing as an organisational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organisation and its stakeholders.

Kotler was firmly of the view that marketing is both art and science. The science will provide you with the recipe for success, but it’s in the execution that the art of marketing takes over.

A Porsche is not just a well-built car. Beyond speed and performance, it’s a beauty to look at and drive. It has a powerful appeal to the senses. To illustrate further, consider the example of low cost airline EasyJet. When this carrier was first launched, it was because the numbers indicated there was high enough demand for a low cost, no frills airline service. But it was a brilliant, breakthrough idea from someone who thought out of the box—art as it were—that resulted in direct internet booking of flights, eliminated the need for travel agents and therefore saved the carrier substantial sums from the non-payment of third party agent fees. So it was inspiration as much as intelligence, that led to the success of this business model.

The entire communications aspect of marketing is driven by something greater than numbers. Numbers may, of course, drive the overall objective of a promotional campaign (a 30 per cent increase in sales, for example) and sales will be measured before and after the campaign, but the numbers are peripheral to the campaign itself. It is the imagination, the foresight, the creativity and the artistic flair of the copywriters that breathes life into the campaign and ensures it is pitched correctly, is executed flawlessly and packs enough of an emotional punch to persuade consumers to go out and buy more of your product.

To conclude, successful marketing requires a delicate blend of both art and science. Skillful marketers know how to draw on the strengths of each discipline to ensure customer needs and wants can be satisfied profitably.

There is much science involved at the research stage of marketing which is usually, though not always, the starting point of all marketing activity. At other times, it may simply be a burst of inspiration that creates the next hottest product innovation.

Sherry Ann Singh is

communications manager at the Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business. s.singh@gsb.tt

Marketing is both art and science. The science will provide you with the recipe for success,

but it’s in the execution that the art of marketing

takes over.