There is however, promotion. Promotion is different from marketing and advertising in that it represents a short lived event or special attraction. Marketing and advertising represent long term relationships with marketplace. A promotion, as opposed to a gimmick, can be very effective in attracting attention from both potential new business and media.

An example of a good promotion might be for your company to form an affiliation with a local charity. Then on designated days or weeks, you could donate a percentage of all sales to this charity. Let’s say you own a restaurant. Then on last Wednesday of each month you would donate $2.00 from each meal purchased to local food bank.

Will new customers come running from all corners of earth just to eat at your restaurant on this day? No. But a promotion like this, done on a regular basis, will generate good word of mouth for your company and eventually lead to an increase in clientele who have heard “great things” about your restaurant.

So always remember to separate out cheesy gimmick from quality business building promotion.

Michele Borowsky http:motherofallmarketing.com

Focusing on Customer

Peter Drucker, a sage of financial marketing discipline, discussed customer defined value almost 50 years ago. During last decade his concept of a customer-centric focus has become part of popular marketing literature and is now guiding principle of financial marketing. Drucker’s fundamental mandate that ‘the customer’s interests must come first’ can be summarized by following statements paraphrased from his extensive writings: * The only valid definition of business purpose is to create a customer. * What business thinks it is producing is not as important as what customers think they are buying; what customers consider to be value is decisive. * Every business has only two basic functions: marketing and innovation. * Marketing is your whole business as seen from customer’s point of view.

While easy to articulate, customer-centric practices are difficult to implement in most financial services organizations. Obstacles include a prevailing product-push mentality, a focus on short-term profitability, under-investment in financial marketing activities, and lack of solid market intelligence about needs and wants of target markets. We believe, however, that in future most successful financial services marketing organizations will be those that make Drucker’s principles their own through extrapolation, adaptation and creative application. As effective financial marketing evolves to a cross-functional, multi-disciplinary activity, successful firms will create a culture of customer orientation throughout organization and incorporate advocacy for customer welfare in all corporate decision-making.

With financial services industry currently going through a transformation, management’s challenge is to provide leadership to displace status quo and create a culture of opportunity. Early adaptors who apply concept of “integrated marketing” on an organization-wide basis will not only develop a customer-orientated culture, but also create opportunities for innovation, improved performance and incremental profitability.