Creating a 'value monopoly' without a large marketing budget

Do you want to battle industry giants at their own game; or do you want to stage and win a game of your own design?

Most business people are constrained by patterns of thinking which cause them to conform to industry norms and practices.  In contrast, highly successful entrepreneurs deliberately challenge such convention, discovering and pioneering new concepts.

In business you create profits by creating value for others which is greater than the price they are prepared to pay in exchange for that value.  Much conventional marketing is focused on selling what the organisation has already chosen to produce.  Indeed, many so-called 'marketing departments' do little more than advertising and promotional activity.

However, 'true marketing' is really about the purpose of business, which is the creation of outstanding value for shareholders by way of creating outstanding value for customers, the sort of value for which customers are prepared to pay a premium beyond commodity pricing.

Conventional marketing has been reduced to a cost of production.  What we call 'true marketing' makes a genuine contribution to improving revenues and profits.  What's more ... Edensilk's kind of 'true marketing' is the least expensive and yet the most effective way to take your business forward.  It's a method that can be applied by anyone on an ongoing basis to launch and grow their business to unlimited size.

Anyone already in business today must move beyond the notion of competition as the path to success.  To be merely 'competitive' in our world economy today is like treading water in a strong tide.  You may not be drowning, but you won't be around for very long.  Any business that plans just to survive will inevitably be out of business, sooner or later.

Competitiveness is necessary for success; but not sufficient.  Like water is the basis of soup; but soup requires more than just water.  Too many people enter into the business of selling soup that tastes like water.  While everyone else sells watery soup many market participants may 'survive' ... that is, until someone comes along offering something the world has never tasted before.

What will you be offering?  Do you have a process for working out what you could offer so that you're not just another 'me too' kind of product or company?  Going to market is no longer about the so called competitive advantages of price, service, location; or the other clichés like the four P's.  You need a lot more than that to make an impact with customers today.

Take for example, the highly competitive market for fleet cars ... predominantly the Ford Falcon and Holden Commodore.  While both these companies/models 'slug it out' on price and minor feature differences, has anyone thought how they might integrate their offering with the values of their target customers in such a way that they knock their competitor entirely out of the race?  For example, what if Ford bought out Wilson Parking (which owns over half the publicly available capital city parking in Australia) and stipulated that henceforth these parking lots would be available to Ford vehicles only!  Recognising that fleet cars are purchased mainly by city corporates, and such cars spend a large amount of their time parked, every fleet car buyer would have to think seriously about buying a Holden car that could be very difficult/expensive to park from now on.

A fanciful notion you might say ... but this is an example of thinking which creates a 'value monopoly' ... single ownership of a benefit to the customer that integrates with other values that a customer seeks ie. a car is more than just a gadget on wheels, it must also be 'parkable' to be of value.  It's an application of the process of 'lateral thinking' ala Edward de Bono.

Not every circumstance requires the purchase of another business.  That was just one example, one idea.  The possibilities are immeasurable.

Australian advertising guru John Singleton once remarked that the best way to make money is to know where people are going, anticipate what they will want when they get there, and be there to sell it to them when they arrive.  One of the serious limitations of traditional market research is that customers cannot tell you what they want until they know what is possible.  Therefore it follows that the more anticipatory the value your business creates, the more outstanding will be your revenues.

Many success stories arise from companies that have anticipated demand.  Most of us have TVs, DVD players, mobile phones, etc which provide us with value we could never have imagined for ourselves.  But we did know beforehand that we would value products and services which make our lives easier, happier, more interesting, etc.  And these are the 'values' that these new offerings integrated with.  When considering services ... who would have imagined we would be paying a premium for bottled water to be delivered to our homes and offices?

So, how can you and your team create your own value monopolies?  Simply ...  such 'monopolies' are driven by concepts, and the generation of concepts requires serious creative effort.

However, most managers are uncomfortable working with abstracts such as concepts.  There is an impatience with concepts, and an urgent desire to be given 'hands-on' tools.  Most want to be doing rather than thinking.  Yet a concept change is unquestionably the best and cheapest way of getting added value out of existing resources.  And with guidance, training and practice, anyone can be creative.  Creativity is a learned skill.

Business schools have always taught students how to analyse information and make decisions.  Today this is totally inadequate.  It is still necessary, like water is to soup; but the emphasis must now shift to conceptual and creative thinking.

Traditional competitive business practices are no more than 'housekeeping'.  They are needed, but not sufficient to ongoing success.

What every business needs ... what your business needs ... is ongoing research and development of concepts which will create 'value monopolies' for your business, coupled with purposeful and skilful implementation.

If you would like guidance in this respect, call us on 08 9271 7661.  We provide many approaches to stimulate your creative marketing efforts, and the resources to help you develop and implement them.

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