As someone who studied business and marketing at university (many years ago now) and has over 20 years of experience working with brands big, medium, and small, I focused on helping them use marketing to achieve their business ambitions.

As a lifelong learner of business and marketing theory, practice, strategy, implementation, measurement, human psychology, and behavioural economics, I like to share what I have learnt with others.

These are some of the fundamental principles that all businesses should adopt to maximise the impact and return on their efforts. They are ideas backed by extensive work, research, knowledge, and wisdom from some of the most respected figures in the business and marketing world. These are strategies that have proven to be effective across industries, geographies, and time.

Time is a precious resource; not everyone can delve into in-depth learning. Therefore, consider this a practical guide: insights you can incorporate into your daily work to enhance your performance, or it will inspire you to explore further. I will provide references for each concept and resource, making it convenient for you to delve deeper should you want to.

Everything a business does should start with market orientation.

Market orientation emerged from several business and marketing scholars in the late 1980s.

A couple of twosomes were critical to this:

• Ajay Kohli and Bernard J. Jaworski (1990) - Defined market orientation as how an organisation gathers market intelligence, shares it across departments and responds to it.
• John C. Narver and Stanley F. Slater (1990) - They viewed market orientation as an organisational culture that prioritises understanding customer needs and creating superior value for them.

These scholars built on earlier ideas about the marketing concept, but their work on market orientation provided a more specific framework for businesses to implement customer-centric practices.

Mr Narver said, "A business culture committed to creating superior value for buyers/customers through three combined behaviours—customer orientation, competitor orientation, and inter-functional coordination. Businesses that are more market-oriented enjoy higher profitability as well as superior sales growth, customer retention, and new product success."

Clarify what your customers need and the problems they have. Then, explain the functional and emotional benefits you provide them. 

Then, clarify how every function or department in the company must behave, individually and collectively, to deliver superior value, fulfil customers' needs, and solve their problems.

From there, understand what your competition does, where you are stronger and weaker, and implement plans to ensure you deliver superior value while gaining competitive advantages. For me, this is where innovation lives.

When you understand all of this, the leadership team should bake it into the fabric and culture of the business, and everyone should be clear on their role in delivering it.

When you are clear on all of this, it makes it easier to understand the market segment(s) you are best suited to serve.

The world of segmentation needs to be more understood, with competing views on who to target. Segmentation often needs clarification, with too many people focused on demographics, which must include much more. Segmentation should look at your customers through psychographics, behaviour, needs, pain points, benefits sought, customer journey, values, usage, occasions, timing, and geography. Understanding this will help ensure your orientation remains on point as customers' needs evolve.

Other helpful work from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute is around Category Entry Points (CEPs). CEPs are the triggers or reasons that nudge customers to consider a product or service within a particular category. Marketers use this concept to understand what prompts consumers to think about a product and how to position their brand at the forefront of the customer's mind. CEPs cover needs, motives, emotions, situations, time, location, and who and what brings a buyer into the market. Knowing and understanding all of these is essential so you can orientate the business in the best ways, target the correct segment(s), and communicate about your offering in ways that will resonate more with your audience. 

When thinking about market segmentation, it's essential to also think about the following;

• Market value
  • What is the total market value, and how is it spread across the key brands?
  • What is your market share?
  • What is your annual revenue from the market?
• Segments & segment value
  • How significant is the segment?
  • How many people are in it?
  • What is their value and buying power?
  • What is their estimated lifetime value? (1st purchase, annual, three years)
• Supply potential
  • How much additional demand can you supply with current resources?
  • Can you still meet and exceed customer expectations if you service this new demand with existing resources?
• Demand requirements
  • How much additional supply do you want to go after, and what demand do you need to create?
  • What additional resources will you need?
• Reach requirements
  • How much audience reach do you need?
  • How much can you afford?
  • How much are you prepared to reinvest in additional reach as you grow?
• Growth plan
  • What is your plan to reach new audiences, create new demand, supply the new demand, and reinvest new revenues into creating further demand? How will you then supply that new demand?

When it comes to whom to target, The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and Professor Byron Sharp's work recommends targeting the whole category, which is a proven path to success. It is an excellent approach if you are in a position to reach them all and serve the demand it would create, but that is usually only for businesses that have reached a certain size or have invested in massive growth plans with the resources to serve the demand they would create.

Professor Sharp's 'How Brands Grow' (worth reading) demonstrates that most category buyers are light buyers. If you want to grow your brand, you must encourage light, medium, and heavy buyers to buy you more, which comes from speaking to the whole category. The bulk of your growth would come from light buyers, infrequent or lapsed buyers, or those who have never bought from you but do buy from other brands in your category.

This juxtaposition to mass marketing would be the world of data, technology, targeting, precision, and real-time optimisation. Depending on your size, scale, growth ambitions, and budget, how much you focus on mass marketing versus tightly targeted marketing will significantly depend on you and your business ambitions.

In short, for orientation and segmentation, get clear on your customer's needs/wants/problems, what are the CEPs, what are your products/services to answer them, what are the functional and emotional benefits you deliver, how does each department within the organisation play its part (silos and departments not collaborating hurt businesses here), what does your competition do, how you are better, how you are weaker, and how you can improve.

Next up is strategy.

This always starts with a business strategy. The brand, marketing, comms, and media strategy will come after. Everything they do should always serve the business strategy.

What is your vision and mission for the business? This is your starting point. It often needs clarification. I like to think about them like this. 

• What is the big thing you believe as a business (your vision)?
• What are you going to do about it (your mission)?

Your business's heart is your vision, mission, and how you will deliver and surpass your customers’ needs and expectations.

From there, the values you will live by as a business and team will follow. I like to turn these values into core behaviours so those who live them best can be celebrated, creating rituals that help instil new behaviours.

Now, you can set your goals, of which there should be a few. I often see businesses trying to do too many things, which increases the chances of missing a few marks. The best practice is to set SMART goals.

• Ensure your goals are specific: It is crucial to define clearly what you aim to achieve with your goals. This provides a clear direction and ensures that everyone understands the objective. 
• Ensure your goals are measurable: Establish metrics to track progress and success. This will help your company and stakeholders monitor whether you are achieving the desired results.
• Make your goals achievable: Avoid setting overly ambitious goals that may be demotivating and unattainable. Instead, ensure that your goals are realistic and attainable.
• Ensure your goals are relevant: Make sure that your goals are directly connected to (or at least not conflicting with) your company's overall vision and mission.
• Set a timely deadline: Add a month and year for these goals (typically at least by the following strategy cycle). This creates a sense of urgency and accountability.

Playing to Win: How Strategy Really Works, by R Martin and A.G. Lafley (ex-CEO and Chairman of P&G), is a great read. They discuss how a good business strategy requires tough choices. You can only do some things; focus is needed, and you must be clear about what you will and won't do.

Martin and Lafley ask five powerful questions here;

• What is our winning aspiration?
• Where will we play?
• How will we win?
• What capabilities must be in place?  
• What management systems are required?

I sometimes worry about how many businesses still need to do this work first and jump straight to tactics.

Morris Change, founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, wisely said, "Without a strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless." The strategy needs to come first.

Once the business strategy is complete, we can look at brand and marketing.

Your brand strategy is a roadmap for how a business builds customer relationships. It goes beyond just a brand's visual components, like the logo or colours, and instead focuses on the big picture. 

Your brand is how you present yourself to the world; your brand strategy is the plan behind the scenes that shape that presentation.

The brand strategy builds from the business strategy and includes the following;

• Your vision, mission, values and behaviours
• Your positioning   
• Your personality, voice, image.

It’s important to remember that brand is so much more than ads or something the marketing team manages.

"A brand is the intangible sum of a product's attributes: its name, packaging, and price, its history, its reputation, and the way it's advertised". David Ogilvy.

"A brand is a distinguishing name and/or symbol intended to identify the goods or services of one seller and differentiate those goods or services from those of competitors". Philip Kotler.

"A brand is the set of expectations, memories, stories and relationships that, taken together, account for a consumer's decision to choose one product or service over another". Seth Godin.

"In the 21st century, brand will ultimately be the only unique differentiator between companies. Brand equity is now a key asset." Fortune Magazine.

Brand positioning is your intended image in the market and the minds of your buyers/customers. It is what we want our target audience to think, feel, and know when they think of us a few times a year.

It should build from your vision (the big thing you believe) and mission (what you will do about it) and position you relevant to your audience. Your tagline (should you want one) would follow.

You may want an example, so here you go.

Nike (this is my interpretation).

You would assume that, from a business point of view, they want to be the biggest sporting goods and apparel company in the world and that they will find a way to achieve this with...

• Vision - if you have a body, you are an athlete
• Mission - bring inspiration, innovation and confidence to every athlete in the world 
• Positioning - unleash your inner-athlete
• Tagline - Just do it.

Your brand story would follow.

A brand story is a short narrative that introduces your brand to the world.

Key features are:

• Origin: how did the brand come to be? What inspired its creation
• Vision: what do you believe? What’s your purpose and reason for being? 
• Mission: What will you do about it? How will you get there? What pressing problem are you trying to solve, or what need are they trying to fulfil?
• Values: what are the brand's core principles? What do you stand for?
• Impact: how does the brand make a difference? How do your products or services improve lives?

The best brand stories are not just informative but also emotional. They connect with the audience personally, creating a sense of trust and a brand they want to buy from and be seen using. 

Some people see a brand story as something that only lives on your website's 'About Us' page, but for me, it helps you distil your story, what makes you worthwhile (outside of good products and good service), and what makes you a better choice for consumers' money. It's good to be able to articulate this for both internal purposes (it should bring a bit of pride and excitement) and to help shape how you communicate externally to customers and prospective customers alike.

When considering all of the above, you must also consider how, at each step, you can create some differentiation to set yourself apart from your competition.

Byron Sharp from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute tests the efficacy of differentiation, and for good reason. The Institute's research has shown that the vast majority of people across a wide range of categories don't view the products or services they use as unique or differentiated from the others in their respective categories in any way.

Mark Ritson would say that's because the issue concerns its uniqueness. Most products and services are very similar, answering customers' needs similarly, so being unique is almost impossible. But being different, even in minor ways, can help set you apart and stand out more. Difference can be a potent weapon and shortcut for customers to choose you.

One powerful thing they agree on, albeit with different names, is the importance of creating brand assets that you own that can get stuck in consumer's minds.

Jenni Romanuik of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute discusses Distinctive Brand Assets, and Mark Ritson discusses Brand Codes.

These are the last foundational building blocks brands should create and use fully. Brand Codes/Distinctive Brand Assets are valuable because;

• Getting noticed is critical to driving brand and business success.
• Before someone can buy you, they need to know you exist. Then they need to remember you when they are ready to buy what you sell.
• One of the best ways to achieve this is by using distinctive brand assets.
• They help people recognise you.
• They help you stand out in crowded retail environments.
• They can be used to reinforce positive messages about your brand.

Distinctive Brand Assets can be your logo, a colour, a shape, a font, a slogan or tagline, a creative visual style, a package shape, characters, a celebrity spokesperson, music, or sonic brand cues. They could even be an action like the hiss of a bottle top popping off like Coca-Cola. The key is that they have to be ownable and that you have to make them known by category buyers.

Jenni Romaniuk's research has shown that only 15% of distinctive assets are distinctive, so you must work hard here to achieve distinctiveness.

Ideally, you aim for 3-5 assets that are distinctly you.

Then;

• You use them everywhere, and I do mean everywhere.
• You, the brand owner, should get a bit sick of them, but remember, category buyers won't because they don't care about your brand like you do and don't see them all the time.
• If you ask if you are overdoing it, you’re probably getting close to them getting stuck in buyers' minds, which is what you want.
• You must also consider how your assets work together and how to use them best.       
  • The red truck and the “holidays are coming” are only used at Christmas for Coca-Cola.

Once you have all the above, you must map out how each would be embodied across your brand ecosystem. There are many brand ecosystem examples. I created one that works for me. It includes all the touchpoints a brand can have, pre-purchase, purchase, and post-purchase. Like orientation, each department within the business must present the brand in the best ways and exceed customers' expectations with each touchpoint. 

This togetherness is vital, as we are in the memory business. Every interaction a customer has with a brand is an opportunity to create a positive or negative memory, and negative memories are detrimental to creating greater lifetime customer value, so they are best avoided. It is on everyone.

To close. A hit list, if you will.

Orientation

• Your customers, target segments, and what they need/want/desire
• How you exceed customer's expectations throughout the company
• How do you do it better/worse than the competition
• How you can improve (your innovation pipeline)

Business

• Your vision, mission, behaviours, and SMART goals
• Key initiatives and focus areas
• Timeline, roadmap and resource allocation

Brand

• Audience/target customers/customers  
• Positioning
• Brand story
• Difference and distinctiveness
• Distinctive brand assets/brand codes

Brand Ecosystem

How your brand comes to life and how you exceed customers' expectations across every touch point (everything is marketing)

creating more positive memories.

• Pre-purchase
• Purchase
• Post-purchase.

My next article will illuminate more marketing and communications fundamentals every business should know, understand, and incorporate.

If you want to know more, get in touch. I also recommend reading the work of the people I have referenced and following them on LinkedIn, as they often post helpful information for any business or marketing team.