Is your marketing strategy guilty of too much change?
As we begin the New Year, it’s natural to think that change is good – and in many cases it is. As technologies, the global economy and the needs of your demographic evolve and adapt, so too should your marketing focus.
That said, there’s a fallacy in assuming change for change’s sake is a positive step.
To retain customer loyalty, it’s important for businesses to stay identifiable and memorable. Therefore, it’s common for marketing departments to feel strong pressure to constantly generate new ideas and race to the forefront of the next new trend, to try and stay relevant.
However, if you alter your key messages, methodologies or branding techniques too much, you run the risk of losing your core identity and having no distinguishing features. Customers might remember parts of your proposition but they’re unlikely to have a clear and consistent sense of you as a brand.
Here, we’ll examine unnecessary innovation, its impact on business performance and how to ensure meaningful and creative changes run seamlessly alongside your core proposition.
Unnecessary innovation: project into the future
Nowadays, marketers are well aware of the meaninglessness of certain corporate buzzwords or jargon – utter the words ‘blue sky thinking’ and watch your credibility abandon ship. Yet still, there can be a tendency to lean on concepts such as “groundbreaking” or “industry leading” new technologies in the hope that the promise of these mere words attract attention.
However, customers these days are increasingly perceptive, requiring evidence of past success or carefully curated forecasting for the future. And in an oversaturated market, if you’re unable to provide this, one of your competitors surely will. Morey Stettner in Investor’s Business Daily emphasises that “Vague goals breed needless innovation. If you’re unsure what you want to achieve, the results can fizzle.”
When innovating or changing core parts of your proposition, it’s vital to be able to demonstrate how this will grow and strengthen the business – for both prospective and current clients and investors alike. If this is a tricky question to answer, you may need to re-evaluate why you’re making the change.
Impact on business performance
Unsurprisingly, implementing reactive changes can often do more harm than good. In addition to being inefficient from both a resource and monetary perspective, it also runs the risk of making your business and its messaging look inconsistent and unfocused.
We recently wrote an article on the danger of forcing AI into your proposition in order to stay relevant. Rather than allowing you to keep up with your competitors, companies who focus too much on AI can neglect development of the original elements of their technology that will more efficiently let them stand out from the crowd.
It’s understandable to worry that repeating the same message will make you seem boring and uninspired. However, we’re fond of emphasising a key piece of research from the Ehreberg-Bass Institute – “95% of B2B buyers are not in the market for your product”.
Your target audience are not viewing every piece of advertising you’ve created and hence while you may appear to be repeating different forms of the same message, only a small amount of that is filtering through to prospective clients. For the marketing they have come across, consistency is extremely helpful as it allows them to build up a clear picture of your brand’s story. Constantly coming up with different messages only confuses your audience and dilutes your brand’s individual identity.
A healthy approach to change
Firstly, have a clear idea of your brand’s core offering and critically analyse your key messages – these should be clear and consistent even when launching a new technology or product. If there are changes that would help augment or strengthen the approach – from a technology or messaging perspective – then these should be seriously considered. However, reacting to every popular change will only make your approach seem disjointed.
Again, we’re certainly not advocating against genuine innovation. Indeed, Stettner encourages the idea of letting your innovation teams unleash their creativity – but with parameters. Make it clear the degree of flexibility and adaptation they have and then allow them to come up with creative solutions within this realm.
About Us
At FS Partnership, we have extensive global experience helping firms identify what makes them distinctive in the marketplace and creating impactful yet consistent messaging. This is integral to allowing companies to stay relevant in an ever-evolving marketplace. We help our business partners to create a strong brand, intelligently position their offering in the marketplace and expand their client base. If you’d like to chat to our Managing Director, Chris Hopwood, about our previous work or your own specific requirements, please do get in touch for a chat on 07766 824209.
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