In medieval ages marketing was as simple as presenting yourself at your town’s market and shout out you’ve got the best and most fresh produce in town. But those times are long gone and here is my more modern approach to help conscious businesses survive and make profit.
1.A good marketing strategy
First of all in order to to reach the greatest amount of customers I follow a basic marketing ethos. Mainstream marketing is mostly akin of a flock of cocks competing on who’s got the loudest cackle, but the ethos of ethical marketing is based on a series of main principles that aligned to a high moral.
- Always be truthful and service oriented
- Listen to critiques from users and customers
- Offer products that respect the environment, social equity and promote fairness and so on.
- Conquer customers hearts with truth.
- Be open to customers opinions and reasonable critiques.
- Never claim you are the best at anything unless you can provide verifiable proof.
2.Market with consciousness
With these principles in mind, what can you do as a socially conscious and responsible entrepreneur to make a positive impact on the world while also remaining profitable? Well, you have me here to help you do just that.
3.Add some sauce
Lets be original, but let’s change that term , let’s change the term “original” to “sauce” . This will be the term i will use from now as an equivalence. Then , what sauce are we talking about here? One made of two ingredients: conservative and novelty ? Wait, let’s not forget to add creativity as a catalyst! Now, we got a good mix.
Lets look at real world sauce like the now common named pink sauce. This sauce is a mix of mayonnaise and ketchup. Now, mayo is quite old , and unless you are 200 years old, you probably think is not a new thing.
Ketchup on the other hand is from the 50s so, its more novel, yet it is still old for newcomers like me who are only in their 40s at the time of writing. But hey , add a pinch of red pepper powder and we have a spicy pink sauce. Simple right?
These two sauces are very similar but just adding one extra ingredient we instantly change the product into different marketing sub-niche: enter the realm of spicy food fans! For years people who only knew ketchup and mayonnaise separately would mix them in the same dish. At some point in time there came a marketing genius and marketed it as a new sauce called pink sauce. So simple but yet effective. Then came another “genius” and marketed a spicy pink sauce. How simpler can it get!
Today there are millions of customers looking for spicy pink sauce at supermarkets here in Spain at least, they call it salsa “brava”, which kind of translates to brave sauce.
4.Being vanguard and conservative at once
In the sauce example we have two conservative sauces, already well established in the market. mayo an ketchup. Then we have a sauce which can be deemed as original , but is made mixing the previous two.
The spicy touch adds a disruption in the niche and pivots to a new one , where only spicy tolerant consumers will be happy delving in.
Novelty means we need to scout in order to find new trends which may be starting but can become BIG in the future . This is specially important when your product or service is generational and follows the needs, cultural shifts, tech breakthroughs regarding a particular age group.
Eg: If your product is fashion related for example age will be a factor indeed.By monitoring what is coming and selecting a trend with the highest odds of succeeding we are getting ready for market disruption in advance.
Therefore to innovate one needs to generate novelty from already existing views, ideas, products and so on, inheriting some attributes of the previous ones. One needs to think and act outside the box, to be a vanguard thinker and marketer.
Easy to say so how do we make the better choices?
By being too conservative a strategy ends losing the rat race, but being overly optimistic of our creative genius can end up in a pedalcopter1 crash 1 A pedalcopter: an imaginary helicopter propelled by simple pedaling.
5. But be somewhat conservative…you never know!
Nature’s way of combining genes to generate new possibilities in the existing environment is called Natural Selection. The markets follow similar laws indeed and its a wild digital world out there!
Conservative vanguard marketing is akin of keeping a safe foot on the ground raising our heads towards the sky aiming at greatness with our creative bows and hit new targets.
6. Be data obsessive
Until the creation of the internet, marketing was done by trial and error. with data gathering on real time on the online and offline we can quickly “see” how a marketing campaign is performing.
In order to work well, both original and conservative approaches of today’s online marketing require gathering of big amounts of data and doing serious metrics to compare different hypothesis.
By mastering hypothesis testing and A/B testing we can evaluate our innovative approaches carefully and sense the receptivity of new products and ideas even before they are manufactured at high scale.
The data driven approach is a key aspect for tailoring budget and avoiding a “pedalcopter” crash.
By the way, pedalcopter crashes have actually really happened! See more on this link
6. Concluding
Yet there is so much more i would love to tell you about this approach and its many nooks and crannies. In the next post on conscious marketing, i will talk about the importence of timing your marketing funnel and how this sauce applies to that aspect.