By Marita Greenidge

Published on BusinessBarbados.com Click here.

Branded!

You’re in a competition; are you the underdog? Are you the crowd favourite? Are you the one everyone thinks would seize the prize if the crowd favourite weren’t present?

Why have people formed these opinions about you? Is it based on past performance, stories they’ve heard, articles they’ve read?

You’ve just been branded. Someone has totalled all they’ve seen, heard, read, thought and felt about you over time and now you are defined in their minds. Practically anything can be branded – a person (Lil Rick), a place (Barbados), a product (Proper Pork!), an idea (Barbados becoming the No. 1 entrepreneurial hub in the world by 2020).

According to marketing guru Seth Godin, “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.”

Your brand signifies a certain level of quality; it’s the promise you make to the consumer, the total benefits they are confident they will attain from choosing you over your competitors. As people are making their decisions, they are pooling the evidence that will help them determine if you are the underdog, the crowd favourite or simply second best.

With that said, how do you go about building a brand? First, it’s not simply done through advertising. You have to consider all the various ways a potential customer comes in contact with your brand – word-of-mouth, customer service hotlines, payment transactions, using the product/observation. All of these contact points help to create those memories, stories, expectations and relationships that Seth mentioned. The challenge therefore is ensuring that potential customers have the right experiences with your product/service.

To create the right experience, however requires identifying the right experience. This means you have to define your brand. This is not done in a vacuum focusing on elements you think would be cool for each contact point; it’s done by understanding the needs and wants of your market and crafting an image that caters to those needs and wants.

It goes back to differentiating yourself in the market, having some really strong competitive advantages. These can lie within your product/service attributes, your distribution channels, your human resources, your pricing, financing etc. Identify what makes you stand out and then begin teaching the market about the brand – what does your brand represent, what can the market expect from you (rational and emotional benefits offered), what is your vision, your mission, why should consumers even care your product/service exists? You have to help consumers understand there is a difference in what you offer, otherwise you are just a commodity. And you most certainly don’t want that. Any time you’re reduced to a commodity, your main advantage becomes price, which is all well and good if you have an entire production model and supply chain to justify low prices. If you’re just like the next guy, then a pricing war might not be too far away. And that tends to end badly.

It’s important to note that your brand resides in the hearts and minds of the consumer. As marketing academics Phillip Kotler and Kevin Keller state “It is a perceptual entity rooted in reality but reflecting the perceptions and idiosyncrasies of consumers.” This means that you can put the most amazing marketing programmes in place but there is still an element you cannot control. Despite that fact, you have to take control of your brand, with as much input as you can provide, or the market will do it for you. It’s better to have some say than no say at all.

By Marita Greenidge

The World is yours!

To answer this question, one must first identify the characteristics of an entrepreneur and what makes an entrepreneur world class. In my eyes an entrepreneur recognizes an unmet need in the market and puts resources in place to effectively satisfy this unmet need.

The world class entrepreneur is persistent and not easily discouraged by skeptics who can’t easily recognize the opportunity. However he/she is not so stubborn or blindly optimistic that he/she fails to make adjustments to the execution plan as the market demands.

Hard work is the order of the day and risk-taking becomes the norm. The vision is big but the world class entrepreneur knows he/she cannot achieve it alone so he/she works on identifying, cultivating and motivating the appropriate talent.

He/She doesn’t wait on Government for handouts nor spend a large amount of time complaining about market occurrences such as new competitors; he/she is too busy trying to find solutions to roadblocks and ways to continue development.

Sound like someone you know? It is a tall order. That’s why not everyone is cut out to travel this path. The man who recognizes the need to sell fruit smoothies from his van at various locations throughout the day has covered phase 1 of being an entrepreneur. He/she is catering to an unmet need. However, to transform into a world class entrepreneur requires a vision, a big vision. Whereas regular entrepreneur is content to run his smoothie bar from his one van consistently, world class entrepreneur has a vision of having several vans service various parts of the island; he/she is ready to arrange placing several other vans throughout the region and he/she is contemplating how to break into the international market.

What separates the regular entrepreneur from the world class entrepreneur is the vision to create something great and the “moxy” to make it happen. You’ll notice that nowhere in my definition does it state that an entrepreneur needs to live in a particular country, have a particular educational background or be from a particular social class. Granted that some of these attributes can help make the entrepreneur’s journey a little smoother (for example belonging to a particular social class may allow easier access to funds from well-to-do friends and family members or help the entrepreneur gain easier access to key persons to assist in business development), none of these attributes are by no means a prerequisite for entrepreneurial success. We’ve heard several stories of working class individuals who built large enterprises from the ground up – British entrepreneur Alan Sugar, US entrepreneur Sam Walton (deceased) and our very own Dereck Foster of Automotive Arts.

Currently we are producing entrepreneurs. There’s no doubt about that. However what we’re lacking right now are persons who dream that big vision and are ready to do what it takes to make that vision a reality. We have to cultivate the right mindset in our kids; we have to encourage them to dream big, to be solution oriented, be less laid back and more go-getter.

We can definitely produce world class entrepreneurs but it starts with persons having the right vision and the right attitude. If we’re truly going to make Barbados the number one entrepreneurial hub in the world by 2020, it starts there.

BEF Communications Team

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (March 31, 2011) – Managing Director of Crimson-Jade Consulting Inc, Marita Greenidge, has officially joined the Communications team of the Barbados Entrepreneurship Foundation (BEF).

Greenidge will be providing promotional strategy development and execution services for the organisation which intends to make Barbados the #1 entrepreneurial hub in the world by 2020.

“It is an honour to be part of an organisation which has such a bold vision for Barbados. I believe in dreaming big dreams and putting structures in place to make big dreams a reality. I believe we can definitely make it happen so I am willing to lend whatever assistance I can to the BEF.” said Greenidge.

The BEF is led by Chairman Peter Boos, CEO Damian McKinney, and a group of local and international entrepreneurs. The goal of the Foundation is to create an enabling environment for sustainable business development through advancing best practices in the areas of Finance, Government Policy, Education and Skills, Mentorship and Business Facilitation.

Rounding out the communication team is a group of equally dedicated entrepreneurs – Deidre Brathwaite from new media firm PixlD Inc., Corey Graham from social media marketing firm Drenalin Productions, Nicolas King from media production firm Marniko Media and graphic designer Paula Persaud.

“It’s an exciting group to work with because each individual is dedicated to excellence and constantly brings fresh ideas to the table. It’s great to work with a team that stays abreast of new developments and works hard to implement innovative communication approaches,” said Greenidge.

About Crimson-Jade Consulting Inc.

Crimson-Jade Consulting Inc. helps companies optimize their marketing dollars to deliver results that strongly impact their bottom line. Founded by Simon Business School graduate, Marita Greenidge, the company approaches marketing from a performance-based perspective, always focusing on helping companies grow revenue and expand profit margins. For more information please visit http://www.crimson-jade.com/

By Marita Greenidge

See on BusinessBarbados.com. Click here.

Data is your friend!

You’ve completed the marketing budget; you’ve justified the cost of each promotional tactic; it’s execution time! In a perfect world all would go according to plan and you would generate numerous high quality leads that turn into large sales. Unfortunately, the world is not so perfect and the “best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”.

This is why it is absolutely essential to track the effectiveness of your promotional tactics. The promotional plan isn’t written in stone. It’s an ever evolving document that is amended based on what your market tells you. Imagine budgeting to spend BDS$10,000 a month in marketing but then you gain revenue of only BDS$12,000 that month. That’s certainly a poor return on your marketing investment.

But where does the issue lie? Are all your promotional tactics delivering inadequate results? In lieu of actually taking the time to determine an effective way of measuring each tactic, as you seek to amend the strategy, you are again poking around in the dark guessing what you think might work in the future.

Building the promotional plan therefore requires an element for tracking promotional effectiveness. If it’s not delivering results, it needs to be cut from marketing the budget (or at least revised). Now hearing this, one may wonder how can you actually track promotional effectiveness? It requires a little thinking, that’s why it’s done at the stage of developing the plan.

As you identify each promotional approach you need to identify the associated metrics. For example, you’ve decided to embark on a direct marketing campaign by using the post office to deliver a catalogue/flier to the mailboxes of various homes. There are a couple of ways you can think about tracking if this method is working. Place a special link on the catalogue/flier that directs persons to a special page on your website. You can then track the hits via Google Analytics. If you want to get really cool, you can place a Quick Response (QR) code on the catalogue/flier to direct persons to the special page. (These methods of tracking also work great for print ads.) You can also offer a special for presenting the flier or a section of the catalogue and track how many are returned relative to the amount sent out. And you can also use a special mobile/telephone number or email address and then track the number of persons calling and emailing as a result.

For email campaigns you can use programs such as iContact, Constant Contact or MailChimp. These programs allow you to track how many persons have opened your email, clicked on a link or how many persons didn’t receive the email at all.

After you’ve determined what you want to measure and how you will measure it, you really need to consider how you will record the data. Since you can’t hold all the data in your head, you need to write it down or record via an electronic device. I’d strongly recommend an electronic device (unless you have no choice) so the data can be easily recorded, stored and retrieved. A small entrepreneur can use something as simple as an Excel spreadsheet that lists all promotional approaches and the response rate to each, based on the metric identified. The great thing about using an email marketing program is that all data gets documented, stored and can be easily retrieved for analysis.

With data recorded it’s time for you to turn it into some useful information. Look at the response rate relative to the money outlaid. If you’re expending lots of money on a particular promotional approach and gaining a poor response then that’s a serious red flag. You now need to identify why you’re getting such a poor response and revise or cut out the approach altogether. However at least you now know where the problem lies and can work on a solution. You are therefore one step closer to optimizing your promotional strategy, which translates in to greater cost savings and greater return on your marketing investment.

By Marita Greenidge

Also published on BusinessBarbados.com. Click here.

Stand Out!

While working as a Marketing Communications Analyst at my former business school, (Simon Graduate School of Business, University of Rochester), I remember the Executive Director of Marketing Communications making a comment that stuck with me. She said,

“Most of this stuff is the same. When you look at the promotional material put out there by many business schools, you could easily switch the name and logo for that of a competitor and it wouldn’t make a difference.”

She was talking about business schools but that point was relevant to the promotion of all products and services. If you just designed a beautiful brochure or leaflet and you can easily switch your logo for that of a competitor and everything on the document remains true, you have a communication problem. Straight away you are offering no real reason for a potential customer to choose you over the competition because you are just like everyone else out there. Furthermore, you are offering no real reason for the customer to remain loyal. You are easily interchangeable.

If you’re going to grab my attention and make me stay then you must have a really strong competitive advantage i.e. you must provide a benefit that the competition just cannot match. So what makes you stand out against the competition?

When asked that question most persons respond by listing product or service attributes. That’s no surprise; these attributes are usually the easiest to identify and probably the most persuasive in encouraging customers to choose you. However, there are other ways in which a company can differentiate itself.

You can provide excellent service. Just when you thought NISE was just that organization that had really cool cartoon characters and really cool smiley stickers, you realize that what they’ve been preaching all along can help give you a strong competitive edge and by extension help you drive sales and profits.

Of course, using service excellence as a key competitive advantage requires a strong commitment to hiring, training and motivating employees to serve customers well. Marketing to your internal customers (employees) becomes just as important as marketing to your external ones. Zappos.com has done an amazing job of making customer service a way of life at the company. A visit to their about us page shows the following heading, “Customer Service Isn’t Just A Department” and the following subtext “We’ve been asked by a lot of people how we’ve grown so quickly, and the answer is actually really simple… We’ve aligned the entire organization around one mission: to provide the best customer service possible. Internally, we call this our WOW philosophy.”

You can also differentiate yourself through your distribution channels. You can ensure market coverage is extensive thereby increasing convenience for customers. Therefore, if I purchase your product on a visit to St. Lucy, yet I live in St. Michael, I can still find a convenient location in my neighbourhood through which to acquire the product. The same goes for a service. You can also have a distribution point that offers an experience like no other. I work with a company called Manipura Inc. which offers a commercial line of art decor and accessories for sale through its Manipura Gallery on Walker’s Dairy, St. George. The gallery is located on a 300-year old working dairy farm with lots of trees; it is beautifully decorated complete with swings and rocking chairs; the birds are chirping in the background and if you are lucky, you will see a few monkeys playing; you can get a cup of coffee/tea, relax in a rocking chair and enjoy the cool breeze. The gallery offers the most relaxing and inspiring experience. Manipura has therefore moved away from simply selling art to creating an experience around the entire art purchase.

Other areas you can think about to help you craft your competitive advantages are pricing (can you offer the same benefits as competitors for a lower cost? Can you offer a unique financing package?) or variety in products and services offered, just to name a few. Overall make sure that as you start and continue your promotion journey you are highlighting value-for-money benefits that are unique to you.

By Marita Greenidge

Also published on BusinessBarbados.com. Click here.

You've Got the Mousetrap!

You’ve just started a new business or maybe you’re about to leverage the strength of your brand by extending your brand name to a new product. You’ve identified your target market; determined the price points and built distribution relationships. Now it’s time to get the word out, what people commonly refer to as “marketing the product” In fact, what they actually mean is promote the product; marketing encompasses so much more than promotion.

When people think of “marketing” a product, their mind automatically goes to “I’m going to take an ad in the newspaper.” Recently, because of all the talk surrounding social media, some minds are going towards, “I’m going to use Facebook.” These tools have their merit of course, but we must always remember that they are just tools and not every tool is ideal for the job at hand.

Your first step in promoting your product/service (product) is determining your promotional objectives. What are you trying to achieve? Are you trying to create a need for your product in the market? Are you trying to build awareness for your brand? Are you trying to position the product as a problem solver or one that people aspire to attain? Are you trying to encourage persons to make a purchase? Maybe you want a mix of the above? For an established brand, brand awareness would not be a major goal. However, for the new, unknown, business brand awareness would be key.

After you’ve identified the objectives, it’s time to look at the message. You have to communicate that you are a legitimate entrant into the category so the market accepts you. You also need to highlight what makes you stand out against the competition. For example, The Crane Resident Resort recently launched D’Onofrio’s Italian restaurant. To be accepted as a true entrant into the fine Italian dining category it must provide all the trappings consumers have come to expect from fine Italian dining. However, to encourage consumers to make the restaurant their first choice for Italian dining on the island, the restaurant would have to communicate what makes them stand out relative to others in the market.

Now you’ve got the message clear in your head, it’s time to get creative. Will your communications focus on providing clear information on the benefits of your product or will your message be delivered more subtly such as highlighting the type of individual who typically uses the product? Your answer to this question will help you determine the most ideal source to deliver the message i.e. help you determine if you should buy stock photos, use someone from within the company, use a person who looks like they would use the product or use a celebrity.

Your final step is choosing your mode of communication. You choose based on what grabs the attention of your target market. To give some examples, you’ve got advertising which encompasses print, radio, television, buses, bus stops, signs, posters, essentially anywhere there is a space your target market may be looking at. You’ve also got public relations which entails crafting the most alluring public image to attract your target market. (It means carefully managing the information that goes into the public about your company/product.) You can also use forms of direct marketing such as email blasts, fliers, newsletters, catalogues, brochures. There are also your interactive marketing tools such as Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media. And let’s not forget word-of-mouth.

Overall, effectively promoting your product involves a lot more than waking up one morning and deciding to run a few ads or use Facebook. These are just tools and the choice as to which tools are best depends on your overarching strategy.

By Marita Greenidge

Also published on BusinessBarbados.com. Click here.

The accountant!

One of my former economics professors, who shall remain nameless, was kind enough to point out that marketing should drive profits and not sales. You can sell your entire inventory and still make a loss! Very true. This means your focus should begin with target markets and pricing which means going after those persons who have the highest willingness to pay and charging them accordingly. I am inclined to agree. After identifying key markets and determining price, promotion and distribution come into focus and the probability of gaining a highly qualified lead, that converts into a sale, is heightened. This series of events leads to greater return on marketing dollars invested.

Speaking of marketing dollars invested, a few days ago, I was charged with writing a promotional/communications strategy, which of course must include the associated costs of executing said strategy. I sat with my marketing communications specialist to finalize the document. This didn’t mean doing the last sweep for grammatical errors; it meant applying the accounting lens. Could we justify these costs to the accountant who was finalizing the company’s budget? For each recommended marketing cost, we always ask ourselves, “What will the accountant say?”

It’s easy for the marketer to get carried away sometimes when it comes to promotion. You might want to include that really cool flash component on a website (that makes the page take forever to load, mind you) driving up the development costs of the website. You want to include this component because it’s pretty cool and the website will look awesome! The real question you need to be asking yourself in these circumstances is, can you justify the cost of this additional component? What’s the additional value you’re getting by including this thing? Will it get the company closer to reaching its marketing objectives and by extension, its overall business objectives? If you can justify the cost, then go right ahead, if you can’t, it’s time to chop that cost out.

Keeping the marketer in check

The accounting lens helps to keep the marketer in check. In my meeting with my marketing communications specialist, our approach was really quite simple. We looked closely at each suggested strategy and associated monthly cost and asked ourselves, why would the company want to pay us this amount to execute this strategy? Was it worth it? Would it really get them closer to reaching their objectives? We acted as if the accountant were sitting right there grilling us with gruelling questions. We ended up cutting a few strategies we initially thought were useful but really could not justify. The end result was a more goal oriented, lean promotional/communications strategy that we could back up 100% because we took the time to figure out the value we thought it was bringing to the company.

When designing your marketing strategy, a good filter to use, after you’ve jotted down all your suggestions and associated costs, is to simply ask yourself “what will the accountant say?”

By Marita Greenidge

Also published on BusinessBarbados.com. Click here.

Business Strategy

A few months in the business world, it didn’t take me long to realize that many business people think of marketing consultants and practitioners as offering up smoke and mirrors, lots of costly strategies that have no real value or pathway to sales.

I can’t blame them. Sitting through one or two presentations, these strategies look really awesome projected on a wall but often neglect to show how proposed tactics will lead to sales. It got me thinking, if ever I was going to present a marketing strategy to anyone it had better have a clear indication of the value I was bringing to the table. Quite simply I better be able to demonstrate the Marketing Return on Investment. Given that I work with many small businesses, this was highly imperative. Typically small businesses don’t have huge budgets to spend on marketing campaigns so every dollar needs to count. It puts you in a different frame of mind. It makes sure you are not wasteful.

For many of these companies I act as their outsourced marketing department. They hire me because they want to generate sales. Yet I am not a saleswoman in the typical sense. I do not go around and knock on anyone’s door or make cold calls. So if I am not a sales woman but I’m expected to help with sales generation, what is my role as a marketer? The way I view it, marketing’s role is to help generate sales leads i.e. potential customers. These leads are passed onto sales whose job it is to close the deal. I view marketing as the first step in the sales generation process. There is so much confusion around this. Many people can’t differentiate advertising, from marketing, from sales.

The marketer’s job

The marketer’s job is to generate highly qualified leads for the least possible cost. The question we’re always asking is how can I efficiently attract the persons who are most likely to buy my products and have the disposable income to follow through on the sale? Enter market research. You want to find out about the ideal target market so you can tailor the product to suit their needs; you want to know how much the market might be willing to pay for such a product; where they are most likely to shop for this product and which promotional channels they are paying attention to. Once you got this covered you can get quite creative. This is where you pull out all the brochures and press releases, websites, newsletters and ad development, Facebook, etc. These are all promotional tools meant to assist in generating highly qualified leads that will convert into sales. If you are spending money on a channel or a tool that is generating leads but very few convert relative to the price outlaid, it’s time to change the channel or at least analyze what you’re doing. For example, you place an ad in a magazine but get few calls as a result. That could mean, the magazine was the wrong choice, the imagery you chose was not appealing or the words you chose weren’t ideal.

All in all, as the marketer you want to help your client/company cost-effectively generate leads that have a high probability of conversion. In my mind, it really is that simple. Everything you do – building a brand name so your product is top of mind, window displays so persons will enter a store, producing that ad that goes on the radio, it’s all meant to attract those persons you think have the highest probability of purchasing.

So marketing isn’t sales and it isn’t simply advertising. Marketing is lead generation. Advertising assists in that lead generation and sales closes the deal.