Marketing serves the business
Everything trickles down from business strategy. Business strategy is how you create value. Brand strategy is how you express that value. Marketing strategy uses finite resources to reach your buyers, convince them of the value and turn them into customers. Channels and tactics come last.
We call this the Strategy Staircase. When the steps don’t line up, teams default to tactics: a new channel, a new tool, another campaign, none of it connected to where the business is going.
Every business wants to grow
If you don’t run the company, “where is the business going?” can feel above your pay grade. Start with the first of the three truths of every business: every business wants to grow. The goal step isn’t about whether to grow. It’s about where the growth will come from.
A simple way to remember the difference: the word go is in goal, so it’s the direction the company is going. The word object is in objective, so it’s something tangible you can measure.
A goal is not an objective
The goal belongs to the business: the revenue, profit or growth the owner is aiming for. The objective is what marketing must move to get there. The goal comes first, then the objective, then the strategy and the tactics, and finally the tracking that tells you whether it worked.
Use the Ansoff Matrix
The Ansoff Matrix crosses what you sell with who you sell it to, and gives four ways to grow.
Market penetration: sell more of your current offering to your current market. Product development: a new offering for the same audience, like Apple selling headphones to people who already bought its phones, or Taco Bell adding breakfast. Market development: your current offering in a new market. Diversification: a new offering in a new market, the riskiest box.
What each growth path looks like
Market penetration wins more of a market you’re already in. The usual plays: lower your price, promote more, buy a rival, improve the offering, or become more relevant to your buyers. Every new iPhone is a penetration play, the same product for the same audience with an improvement.
Product development sells something new to people who already know you. Dyson went from vacuums to hair dryers, and the buyers came with it.
Market development takes what you already sell to new people. Pedialyte was made for sick kids, then noticed adults buying it for hangovers and started marketing it to them. Same formula, new segment. It can also mean new geography: In-N-Out spreading beyond Los Angeles, or a famous Brooklyn bakery selling cheesecake online and suddenly reaching anyone with an internet connection.
Diversification sells new things to new people. A few companies pull it off, like Yamaha, which makes both pianos and motorcycles. Many don’t: Harley-Davidson once tried selling perfume.
Start with market penetration
For most companies, growth starts with selling more of what you already sell to the people who already buy it. It carries the least risk because you already know the product works and the buyer exists. Each move away from it adds risk, so make that move on purpose.
Penetration still takes judgment. Coca-Cola tried to win more of the soft drink market by changing its formula, and it backfired.
The crowded box needs the clearest brand
Market penetration is the safest box, and that’s exactly why it’s crowded. Everyone is selling a similar offering to the same buyers. In a red ocean, the play that matters most is being more relevant to your buyer, which is a brand decision: one clear reason to choose you over the competition.
Each path needs a different plan
A plan to sell more to existing buyers looks nothing like a plan to win a new market. A new market doesn’t know you, so it needs reach and proof. An existing market already knows you, so it needs reasons to come back and spend more. Name the box first, and the objective almost picks itself.
One goal the owner owns
A goal only works if the person running the business recognizes it as theirs. A marketing team chasing a number the owner doesn’t care about is busy, not useful.