Organisations have evolved around the years by using the traditional marketing mix and sticking with conventional marketing ideologies to thrive in the market. A lot of companies however find themselves in a closed loop when there is no consistency in growth and sales tend to become stagnant. This is the time when a firm needs to employ the concept of radical marketing to turn around its fortunes and firmly establish itself in the hearts and minds of customers. This is done, in such a way that the customers not only love the company, but also become missionaries for the company and its offerings.
So what exactly is radical marketing? To put it in simple terms it is just to do marketing beyond the conventional way. It goes deeper than just being crazy or revolutionary in approach, but to have a passion and love for the company’s brand, product and its consumers.
In radical marketing the CEO becomes much closer to the marketing action and in fact owns the marketing department. The CEO and top management drive marketing approach; hence everyone in the organization focuses on its interaction with the market and become more accountable to the company’s marketing practices.
The crux of radical marketing is to understand the pulse of the customer by getting out of the office and get face –to- face with the people that matter the most, the customers. Snap-on Tools, a leading designer and manufacturer of tools, used radical marketing and became a two billion dollar organisation by selling tools door-to-door to its core customer base of over one million auto mechanics. Among other organisations that adopted radical marketing are Harley Davidson, Virgin Atlantic Airways and Boston Beer, who focussed on stretching limited resources, staying in close contact with customers, and creating more satisfying solutions to meet customer needs.
Radical marketers can also be termed as missionaries, who strongly believe in the product and the customer base as strongly as the CEO. They go beyond age old conventions and follow innovations in terms of their product, advertising and brand building strategies. A radical marketer is obsessed with brand integrity and is fixated on quality.
Radical marketers tend to have smaller marketing budgets, which makes them learn to be creative with a small amount of resources. Most of these marketers tend to rethink the marketing mix, by using more targeted campaigns to reach their customers. Since radical marketers are focused on one-to-one customer interaction, they spend little on their advertising budgets. However they tend to use advertising in short, sharp bursts what is called as “surgical strike advertising”. Radical marketers tend to rely more on tools such as direct mail, local advertising, and sponsoring local events and so on.
Radical marketing is not just apt for large companies, but also smaller companies are equally benefited by being innovative and thinking out-of-the-box.
There are various instances where new entrepreneurs have adopted innovative marketing practices and boosted sales and brand equity with considerably low resources.
One such Radical Marketer is Joy Gendusa, the Founder and CEO of PostcardMania, the fastest growing direct mail postcard marketing firm, recognized by Inc Magazine. She began PostcardMania in 1998 with no capital injections of any kind, using her marketing acumen and direct mail postcards to expand her corporation year after year.
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