No matter what business your business card says you’re engaged in, you’re really in three in three businesses: your primary business, the marketing business and the people business.
Every business on earth eventually must sell what it is offering. When that happens, you’re in the marketing business. If you haven’t seen that up till now, see it clearly beginning today. You’ve got to market what you sell to your employees, to your salespeople, to your distributors and suppliers, and also to your customers. All these people can help move your business forward.
Focus as much as possible on your primary business, creating quality, value, and desirability. Instead of thinking expansion and diversification, think excellence and concentration upon your strengths. Don’t let success in your forte mislead you into thinking that you are now automatically assured of success in fields beyond your specialty.
When Gerber’s Baby Food put their name on other items created for babies, non-food items, they thought the Gerber name was associated with babies and that they could succeed in any baby-related field. It cost them several million dollars in losses to realize that Gerber’s was related to baby food only and not to babies. Their failure to focus was an extremely expensive mistake for them. Coca-Cola thought they knew beverages, so they purchased a winery. Big mistake. Coke has since sold the winery because they soon learned that they’re in the soft drink business, and that doesn’t make them experts in every other beverage business.
The idea is to realize that every business deserves 100% focus and that instead of diluting that focus, a business should hone it by sharpening their marketing skills as well as their people skills.
As you are always eventually in the marketing business, you are also always eventually in the people business. You may toil away in a lab, a factory or an office. But the rubber will meet the road when you emerge from your workplace and factor in the component of human beings.
Your employees must sense your passion and enthusiasm. Your salespeople must share your vision. Your distributors must get onto your wave length. And then, human beings must be aware of why they should purchase what you are selling. If you lack crucial people skills, all the toiling you have done will have been in vain, for it is real people who will end up buying — or not buying — what you offer. And if you don’t know what makes them tick, you’re in for a dismal journey.
When you focus upon your own business, you must always also be focusing upon the marketing of what you offer to the world. You must become as much an expert in marketing as you are in your own field. Here, I implore you to go online and get yourself a website, but I also know that you will fall flat on your cyberface if you don’t understand marketing. Being online means you’re availing yourself of a new high-tech medium, but it does not mean you’ll succeed with it. Unless you know marketing and the need for fast response time, individual attention, and a continually fresh online presence, being online might only be an invitation to frustration.
And even when you know marketing inside and out, as well as your own business, you must also recognize that if you don’t know people, you’re in for a lot of trouble. People make your product. People render your service. People buy your product. People purchase your service. People recommend your offering to other people. No matter what you do or produce, eventually, it comes down to people. And if you don’t know that you’re in the people business, dire consequences will occur.
The guerrilla knows his or her own business like nobody else on earth. But the guerrilla is also a whiz when it comes to marketing and knows that he or she better market more effectively than the competition or else. And finally, the guerrilla understands human beings and what their hot buttons are, why they buy, what turns them on, what turns them off, what makes them happy. If you don’t know you are truly in the people business, you’ll probably soon learn what it means to be out of business.
There is now a more direct relationship between marketers and individuals than ever before as we head into what many have termed “the one-to-one future.” Motorola makes how many pagers? Take a guess? One? Three? Five? Try 20 million — each one tailored to the needs of each customer.
Jay Conrad Levinson