Question marketing, or else

Want to grow your business faster? Here are 10 tough questions to ask about your marketing. (Ignore them at your peril.)

1. Is it more important that we improve our products, or our advertising? Great products may not sell themselves, but they come close. There's no more profitable way to acquire new customers than through customer recommendations, but it's hard to get more recommendations by spending more on advertising. The path to more recommendations is to provide better products and services.

2. What knowledge do we have about specific customers that our competitors lack? There are many ways to remember information for customers, in effect making life easier for them. Doing so can give your firm a substantial advantage over its competitors. The more you reward customers for sharing information, the more likely they are to do so. Look at your competitors... who knows more about specific customers, your firm or their firms?

3. Do we make it convenient for our customers to be loyal? This is an outgrowth of #2. You can use customer information to make it easier for customers to be loyal, by filling out forms for them, pre-approving them for credit, and even giving them specific tips about how they use and benefit from services your firm offers.

4. Are we deliberately biased when we measure the strength of our customer relationships? Many firms define and measure "customer satisfaction" or "customer loyalty" in a manner designed to make middle and senior managers look good. The results can be laughable to an objective observer - and to customers - portraying firms that customers openly despise (cable, telecommunications...) as having high customer satisfaction ratings.

5. Do our marketing efforts spin the truth to a degree that is unacceptable in a social media age? "A day without (insert product name) is like a day without sunshine" or similar blather often romanticizes products that really aren't very good for customers. But there are ways to invest marketing dollars that support the truth rather than obscure it. For example, your firm could make it easier for customers to compose and share recommendations.

6. What percentage of our customer touchpoints are smart (interactive) vs. stupid (static)? As I've previously written, the race is on to make everything smart. If your firm lags too far behind, its very survival will be threatened. Michael Hinshaw and I make this case in Smart Customers, Stupid Companies.

7. Do we have a mobile strategy that places a greater emphasis on serving than selling? As customers shift from desktops to laptops to smartphones and perhaps soon to smart glasses... the last thing they want are intrusive ads in increasingly personal mediums. If you tell me where to find my favorite food when I'm really hungry, that's a valuable service. If you harrass me with promotions for a food I don't even like, that's annoying beyond belief.

8. Are we consistently looking at the edges of our industry to spot disruptive technologies and business models? Disruptive change comes from the edges, not from the leaders of an industry. You can't look at your major competitors and say, "None of them are being that innovative, so we don't need to be so either." You'll all be blindsided, just like Amazon blindsided publishers and - further back - Microsoft Encarta blindsided World Book encyclopedias.

9. Are we getting increasingly granular in our marketing metrics, to better spot opportunities? Stop looking at customers as a monolithic group. The more you subdivide customers into both needs-based and value-based segments, the better you can understand how to profitably provide services that customers will embrace. 

10. Do we reward employees for serving customers, regardless of divisions or jobs? Here's the central disconnect in most companies: firms don't pay employees for the behaviors that customers want most. People are only human, and they do what is in their best interest. If you inadvertently pay employees to ignore or minimize customer needs, they will.

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