Marketing for Success

Marketing and the Tax Season
By: Ed Keller, Professor, City College of New York

Tax season is a particularly good time to go over your marketing plans. Are you meeting sales expectations? Is your advertising and/or promotion plan appropriate? Are you getting the most bang for your buck?

These are critical questions, but the most important one to ask is whether your effort is succeeding. Ask yourself: Am I building my brand? After all, immediate results aren’t good enough; the more important issue is what we’re building for the long term.

No one understands better than Mr. Trump that a business needs to be a brand at least as much as a product. After all, when you hear the Trump name, you don’t just think about real estate; the Trump name means quality that investors can trust for the long term.

What do I mean by this? Simple. The consumer must believe that whatever you have to offer is backed by a promise that you intend to keep. That’s what keeps clients coming back.

As you account for your expenses and seek appropriate deductions, keep in mind that few things are more important than developing your own marketing plan. Then, ask the key questions that advertising agencies have been asking for generations:

1. Am I offering a superior product? Superiority isn’t just the product itself; after all, most products are comparable with each other. Superiority has to do with the ability to create a perception of better in the public mind. And that has to do with the service that goes along with it. It has to do with the promise you make; after all, you will be believed if your product lives up to your promise. If it doesn’t, your market will feel manipulated, and over time, sales will nosedive. This, I might add, is the difference between good and bad advertising, successful versus unsuccessful marketing.
    
2. Have I differentiated my product from the competition? This is the key rationale behind all marketing, and the standard by which you can measure whether or not you’ve created a window of opportunity for your product. At the end of the day, customers want to feel that they have taken the best path to get what they want. Being different from the mass of other offerings is what it’s all about, isn’t it? Convince your audience that the path less taken, as Frost so aptly put it, is their best step to find what they’re looking for; it’s your first step to creating the brand most desired.
    
3. Do I believe in my product? Without real confidence that what you are offering is the best product available, selling it is a problem. You can’t execute a program based on convincing your customer base to try your product unless you believe in it yourself, because without that belief, you can’t expect them to believe you.

How do you succeed? You do so by measuring, on an on-going basis, whether your marketing effort is well focused and developed for the long term. To do so, always remember; in marketing, everyday is tax season.