One of the most significant periods of my life was the three years I studied under the world’s greatest business consultant, Peter Drucker. Dr. Drucker is known as the father of modern management, but he also contributed to the creation of marketing as a professional discipline, wrote extensively about entrepreneurship and innovation, and is generally regarded as the greatest business philosopher of all-time.

There is not a single day that I don’t hear his voice in my head as I work through customer problems. His advice has become the foundational pillars of my work and in many respects, my life.

But there is one piece of advice he gave me that is remarkably useful to me in this overwhelming world of change, and I think it will help you, too. Let’s reveal that today.

Immersed in the problem

I studied under Dr. Drucker while pursuing an MBA at the Claremont Graduate University. He had retired from most of his professional life and devoted his time to mentoring students in the business school that now bore his name.

He would sit on the edge of a desk with a carafe of coffee and talk about his books. It was impossible to outline his talks as he took us on a jagged journey through his life and the fascinating people he met along the way.

Dr. Drucker taught us through the Harvard case study method. We were assigned a long text detailing a complex business problem. Over weeks of classes, we would dissect the issues from every angle. As business leaders, our tendency was to try to solve the case and resolve the problem.

And that’s when Dr. Drucker would go nuts.

It’s not about the right answers

This class was filled with experienced leaders eager to display their intelligence and insight by “solving” the case study.

Nothing irked Dr. Drucker more.

“The people in this case study have been working in their business for 30 years or more,” he would say. “What makes you so arrogant to think that you can solve the problem when they can’t? Your job is not to have the right answers. Your jobs is to have the right questions.”

This might be the most important advice of my professional life and informed how I approach all my business consulting assignments. I approach business problems very humbly because I am never the expert in the room. Why would I have the right answers?  However, I can guide people to the right questions — the real key to a resolution.

I’ve found that most leaders have the knowledge and insight to solve their problems if they know where to find an answer.

Relevance of the right questions

The marketing world is far too complex to be an expert in everything. I’m not sure you can be an expert in anything! However, you must be immersed enough in the day’s issues to ask the right questions. You have to have a sense of what is possible.

I think curiosity is the most important soft skill for marketers today. For me, asking the right questions is not just a prerequisite to effective consulting. It helps me become a better author, speaker, and teacher.

Asking the right questions is also the true heart of all great content creation. If you put the work into finding the right questions, great content will surely follow.

Jay Acunzo and I just dropped a fun podcast episode demonstrating the opportunity to ask the right questions. We challenged each other to pose questions that the other person had never been asked before. And it worked! I invite you to have some fun with us and enter a world of challenging questions.

All you have to do is click here >

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion Episode 305

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What business are you in? That is one of the most deceptively difficult questions you’ll face.

Here’s an example from my personal experience.

One of my first consulting customers was a regional telecom company. This was a company run by engineers who were proud of their ability to offer the very latest technology. But when I asked customers why they valued this company, they cared nothing for the technology. They valued reliability and the fact that this company would respond to issues even in the middle of the night.

My customer thought they were selling technology. However, the customer was buying a security blanket for their critical communication systems.

In the latest episode of The Marketing Companion, Keith Jennings and I explore the multidimensional question, “What business are you in?”

Theodore Levitt

We begin by discussing Theodore Levitt’s seminal article “Marketing Myopia,” published in the Harvard Business Review in 1960. One of the key questions Levitt posed in this article is, “What business are you in?” Levitt suggests that this question has profound implications for how companies understand their purpose, define their markets, and, ultimately, achieve long-term success.

Levitt argued that businesses often fail because they are too focused on their products rather than on their customers’ needs and desires. He used the term “marketing myopia” to describe this shortsightedness. Companies should not define themselves by the products they make but by the value they deliver to their customers. This shift in perspective can lead to a broader and more sustainable understanding of their market and competitive landscape.

Levitt’s question, “What business are you in?” forces companies to look beyond the immediate scope of their operations and products. It encourages them to think about the underlying needs they fulfill for their customers. This customer-centric approach is essential for innovation and growth. When businesses understand their core purpose, they are better equipped to adapt to changes in technology, consumer behavior, and market conditions.

A modern example of Levitt’s principle can be seen in companies like Apple. While Apple started as a computer manufacturer, it recognized early on that it was in the business of creating innovative technology solutions that enhance people’s lives. This broader vision has allowed Apple to expand into various markets, including music, smartphones, tablets, and wearables, continually redefining its business in response to technological advances and consumer demands.

The Marketing Companion episodes are short—30 minutes—but the conversation is expansive. Listen and learn how you might answer the question, “What business are you in?”

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion episode 292

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This episode is brought to you by Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Brevo gives you the tools to attract, engage, and nurture customer relationships.

Now any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customer to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence in order to strengthen their customer relationships.

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I recently had a dream come true when I got to meet my marketing hero Philp Kotler. He was the author of my first marketing textbook that influenced me to get into marketing, and at 91, he remains an inspiration to me and countless others.

Although it was largely a personal conversation — he told me he loved my Marketing Rebellion book! — we also had an interesting discussion about Peter Drucker, who was my teacher and mentor in the early 1990s. Dr. Kotler said one of the great honors of his life was meeting Peter Drucker, and it was one of the few times in his life he was ever nervous!

He had some interesting observations about this great man, and I thought I would pass them on to you. A legend discussing a legend …

Dr. Philip Kotler on Peter Drucker:

“Peter Drucker was really the first real marketer. He saw early in the 1950s that the question every company should ask is, what is your purpose? And his answer was, “not to make money.”

“In fact, he said that making money gets in the way of doing the right things. The purpose of a business is to create a customer, and then went on to say that we better understand what is “value” to a customer, and you can’t define that unless you understand what the customer defines as value.

“But altogether, he saw business embracing a service philosophy. The business exists to serve. Peter Drucker always saw a company as more than just an economic machine. It was a social organization. And it has social responsibilities.

I mean, he wrote early on about what became corporate social responsibility.

“Like me, Drucker did not see marketing as an isolated function, which is a problem in universities today — creating majors and courses in silos. I teach marketing, and someone else teaches finance, and that’s not the real world. Real world problems come at the intersection of two functions, or three functions, and so on.

“Also, we need to increase students’ international perspective because they’re being trained to work for a company in just one country to sell its product within a country. We need to expand marketing skills geographically. We want our students to get acculturated into different cultures, especially where growth is occurring in the world.

“Most education is about advertising, public relations, sales, promotions, and all manner of campaigns. Maybe there’s something missing that is more basic than that. This idea — the purpose of a company is to create a customer — maybe we should teach more about how you build customer intimacy. How do you understand how people really buy, the unconscious processes? I don’t mean manipulating people, but understanding consumer psychology and respecting the psychology of the consumer.

“I’m afraid marketing could devolve into putting electrodes on your head to see what part of your brain lights up when I offer to sell you something. I think that is the challenge and the question facing new media and new technology — remembering that a business is here to serve, to respect, to make the world better.”

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

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I don’t believe anyone can truly be an expert any more. Any hope of expertise has been overrun by the malignant complexity of our world.

There is no single human who understands the internet or the economy or teenagers. I recently read an article about a new scientific discipline devoted to understanding how Artificial Intelligence is making its decisions. Wait … didn’t we build the thing? We don’t even understand our own machines.

So there really are very few experts in the world. But you probably already know this.

The important question is, how can you remain an effective leader without being an expert? I will provide a suggested strategy today.

Because … I’m an expert! Just kidding.

An effective leader asks the right questions

When I was in graduate school, I had the honor of studying for three years under the legendary Peter Drucker. He used to tell us that an effective leader didn’t need to have all the right answers. They needed to have the right questions.

This is profound and true, especially today.

My friend Joe Waters passed this quote along: “That’s all any of us are: amateurs. We don’t live long enough to be anything else.” – Charlie Chaplin

So true.

The pace of change in the business world is breathtaking. It’s impossible to keep up, but it’s reasonable to have a goal of knowing enough to pose the right questions.

To ask the right questions and lead your business, you need enough familiarity with the changes in your industry to know:

• What is possible?
• What is probable about its future?
• How is it applicable to my business and industry?

And the only way to know these things is to dabble. With courage, you must become an intrepid explorer, immersing yourself in unfamiliar worlds to understand these questions. Part of my recent journey:

• I’m not an expert in NFTs, but I have a digital wallet, bought a few NFTs, and created one. I even tried to publish an NFT book, but the tech world isn’t there yet.
• I learned to create AI-generated images like the one used in this post and I’m experimenting a little each day with ChatGPT.
• I’m no metaverse expert, but I own a digital penthouse on Spatial and meet my friends there. We are learning what is possible to do in an immersive digital world.
• In the past 24 months, I launched a creator coin (and watched it crash), started a community on Discord, and went to a conference about the creator economy.

I’ll never be an expert in any of these things, but I know enough about them to talk to a customer, ask the right questions, and determine how these opportunities might fit (or not fit) in their marketing strategy. And then we can experiment.

What this means for you

I recently did a 1:1 coaching call with a person five years younger than me. She said, “I give up.” She was simply overwhelmed by the rate of change in the world. I understand. It IS overwhelming.

“Overwhelm” is not a function of age. Whether you’re 18 or 68, the world is changing at the same rate. This moment we are spending together right now is the moment of slowest technological change you will ever experience. The overwhelm problem speeds ahead — for everybody.

This means you and I need a new mindset to survive and thrive.

My hope is that you don’t give up. Keep dabbling. Keep trying new things, even if they seem unfamiliar and scary. Learn so we can unlearn.

I explained in my book Cumulative Advantage that every shift in the status quo represents opportunity. Understanding the shift — not necessarily mastering it — can lead to breakthrough innovations, new business models, and momentum for your business.

Forget about having all the answers. But, you can certainly have the right questions.

And that’s enough.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling digital marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration generated by MidJourney

The post You can’t be an expert. And you don’t have to be. appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I received the most significant business advice of my life more than 30 years ago and it continues to inform my approach to strategy, business, and content creation to this day.

When I moved to Los Angeles many years ago, I desperately wanted to attend the MBA program at Claremont Graduate University for one reason — Peter Drucker taught there (in fact, the school was named for him). If you’ve never heard of Peter Drucker, discovering his books and articles might be the most important thing you can do for your career!

I applied for entry to the college but was told I was too young to be accepted to this prestigious program. I would not quit that easily, however, and went through an appeal process, arguing that they needed my youth (27 at the time) to add to the diversity of the program! Incredibly, I was admitted! Perhaps my tenacity amused them.

Peter Drucker was one of a handful of people I have known who could distill vast complexity into simple wisdom. The scope of his knowledge and business advice was breathtaking. He would sit on the edge of his desk and lecture for three hours straight without a break, and without notes. He generally lectured about one of his books. My favorite was Innovation and Entrepreneurship, a remarkable book that still holds up today.

My best business advice

Professor Drucker taught via the Harvard case study method. We would be assigned to read a long, detailed, real-life business case and then dissect it in class to discover the true nature of how the business worked.

The students in this class were high-flyers — the brightest senior business executives in the Los Angeles region — and they were always trying to “solve” the business case. Nothing made Professor Drucker angrier than that! “What makes you think you’re smarter than the people in the case?” he would ask, “Smarter than people who have worked in their industry for decades? How can you be that arrogant?

“Your job as a business leader is not to provide the right answers. It is to provide the right questions.”

Over and over, he would pound this truth into our heads until it became part of our DNA. And he was so right … so profoundly right. There is not a week that goes by that I don’t think of some lesson from Professor Drucker, but this was the most important of all.

Teasing out the answers

Peter Drucker

Even today, I approach my consulting assignments like solving a case study puzzle. Of course I’m not going to have all the solutions to these complicated problems. I consult in pharma, high tech, banking, and CPG to name a few industries. And I’m good at what I do, not because I’m an expert in those fields but because I am humble and tap the wisdom of my customers. The solutions are always there for me to discover.

Think of the power of leading people to the most effective solution, not by pontificating and telling them what to do, but by distilling the issue down to the essential question and letting them discover the answer themselves.

Adopting a strategy of professional humility is anathema to our modern Western culture. We may associate humility with weakness, when in fact it can be our greatest strength.

Like most young people starting out in business, I felt a need to know all the answers, especially when I was promoted to a leadership position. That creates an ego-driven approach to business. But from Professor Drucker I learned that being vulnerable, involving others in the process, coming up with a better solution together, sharing the weight of decisions – those are all benefits of humility. Being deeply human, instead of trying to wear the Superman cape of traditional leadership, is powerful and liberating.

Asking questions instead of providing answers has been important to my career in three ways:

• As a business leader, it helps me tap into the power of a team of true experts to find the best answers. The world is changing so fast, I can’t possibly keep up with everything. And I don’t have to if I know the right questions to ask.
• As a consultant, this approach allows me to apply my skills to a broad scope of industries – from high tech to meat processors. I don’t need to be an expert in every business. I just need to ask the right questions that leads to the answers!
• As a content creator, I follow my curiosity and pose questions to a global audience. Getting smart responses from my readers has helped me create better classes, speeches, and books. Essentially, I am crowd-sourcing wisdom.

Asking the right questions instead of having the right answers is so simple, but like most of Peter Drucker’s wisdom, it distills a complex world to its elegant essence.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of several best-selling digital marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy pexels.com

The post The most significant business advice I’ve received appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I recently attended (virtually) the Drucker Global Forum and was inspired by a talk from Margaret Heffernan, a professor at the University of Bath. She said that marketing innovators should act like artists.

I loved this idea and wanted to share it with you. Here is what she said:

“What does an artist do? They notice, they investigate, they seek to understand what’s really going on in the world. Then they ask themselves this question constantly – ‘what can we make of it?’

“How can we make something that’s really positive, that’s relevant that speaks to people, that is meaningful and has value? They have a fearless imagination and endless capacity to experiment. They change before they have to. They keep moving. And they recognize that they often fail.”

That resonated with me!

She also said that leaders today also need to see themselves as doctors. Businesses can’t survive when the country isn’t healthy (referring to a Peter Drucker quote). This is why corporate social responsibility is integrated into business and marketing so tightly. If we don’t contribute to the health of society, our businesses won’t be successful in the long-term.

If you love these ideas, you’ll love our new Marketing Companion podcast episode. Brooke Sellas and I discuss this concept of the marketer as artist, why Mark is suffering from lawn porn (no joke!), why L’Oreal’s online make-up filters are about to change meetings forever (what an idea!), why marketing needs some marketing, and the reason Ryan Reynolds might be marketing’s keenest mind right now.

So much goodness in one 30-minute podcast episode. You can’t miss this. Just click here to listen!

Click on this link to listen to Episode 207

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Last week I was honored to participate in The Global Peter Drucker Forum, a prestigious annual gathering of business thought leaders in Vienna. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, it was obviously not in Vienna and was a typical Zoom-style gathering! While I missed the elegance of Austria, I did enjoy soaking up some new insights!

The content was superb, and something struck me in a presentation called “The Path to Humanocracy.” This session featured awe-inspiring case studies of companies on the forefront of “being more human” through strong corporate values — and of course I was glowing over that!

But this discussion also led to an insight about a pressing leadership issue: — connecting to customers through values-based marketing in periods of social upheaval.

The power of shared meaning

As a consultant, I’m constantly asked about corporate strategies to respond to the upheaval of civil justice movements, environmental concerns, the pandemic, and other crises dominating the headlines. Cause-based, or values-based, marketing is perhaps the most pressing priority in all of marketing today.

On one level, we can recognize that expressing shared meaning with customers through corporate values is a powerful path to loyalty. Research conducted by Edelman showed that 67 percent of consumers will try a brand for the first time solely because they agree with its position on a controversial topic, and 65 percent said they will not buy a brand when it stays silent on an issue they consider important.

The study, which polled 8,000 people in eight countries, found that a company’s position on a social issue can drive purchase intent just as much as the features of a product. Nearly a quarter of all consumers will pay at least a 25 percent premium when their values align with a brand, and 51 percent will buy the brand exclusively based on shared values.

Increasingly, we support businesses that are generous and mindful of the impact they make. We’re moving toward the formulation of a new value equation – one that rewards work that is carried out with heart and rewards businesses that are driven by purpose before profits.

Perhaps this movement was codified in 2018 when investment firm BlackRock shook Wall Street with an edict to business leaders that companies need to do more than make profits – they also need to contribute to society if they want to receive support from the investment company — “Sustainability is our Standard for Investing.”

Leading with corporate values

But responding to evolving customer views as a marketing ploy instead of an expression of a deep-rooted company value can be seen as pandering and tone-deaf. Marketers often flock to whatever is popular until they ruin it, and this is happening with the trend of “woke-washing” filling the airwaves.

The common theme in the “Humanocracy” presentation was that corporate values are the essential North Star in an operating system that helps us respond authentically and consistently to any changing environment.

Tracey Davidson, Deputy CEO at Handelsbanken, said that the value statement known by every bank employee was established 50 years ago. Chief among these is compassion for customers that have driven 48 straight years of segment-leading financial performance.

Florent Menegaux, Président du groupe Michelin, echoed Tracey’s message, pointing out that the fundamental values driving his company and its success have been embedded in the Michelin culture for decades.

Kevin Nolan, CEO of GE Appliances had an interesting perspective on company values. He noted that for many years GE was a chaotic place to work as leaders and philosophies changed year-by-year in an attempt to improve profitability. Then the business unit was acquired by the Chinese company Haier, and to his amazement, there was almost no change in the leadership team or manufacturing processes. Instead, Haier implemented a decades-old value system focused on employee trust and accountability. The business is having the most profitable period in its 95-year history.

The North Star

While there’s an important message about the essence of corporate values and consistent leadership here, there is also an implication for marketing in this period of unprecedented upheaval.

“Trust is the beginning and end of everything we stand for,” Davidson said.

And trust is the key to success in values-based marketing as well.

If you consider a company like Patagonia, of course we trust any message they deliver relating to the environment because we know this is embedded as the core DNA of the company. It is consistent with everything they do, resulting in admiration and trust.

Likewise, the message delivered by the Drucker Forum leaders emphasized the importance of corporate values leading to trust as a fundamental core competency.

The trust established by values-based companies such as Handelsbanken, Michelin, and GE Appliances will seamlessly and effortlessly create a compassionate and appropriate company marketing presence amid turmoil and uncertainty.

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of several best-selling digital marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

The post How corporate values guide marketing through a crisis appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

By Keith Reynold Jennings, {grow} Contributing Columnist

Years ago, I started noticing something people were doing with bananas.

Once I saw it, I couldn’t un-see it. It was something I realized I was doing too.

Bananas became a personal metaphor for everything that was wrong with marketing. And each time I see a banana, it serves as a reminder of the invisible marketing mistake we continually make.

In this article, I want to invite you into my banana observation and the hidden secret it reveals.

To get us started, I’d like you to participate in a quick visualization exercise with me.

My Banana Revelation

Picture yourself entering your kitchen. On the countertop are apples and bananas nestled in a serving bowl handcrafted from black walnut.

Walk over and pick a banana out of the bowl. Hold it in your hand for a second or two.

Now, peel the banana and imagine taking a bite.

Question #1:

“Which end of the banana did you peel open — the stem or the tip?”

I’m going to bet you opened your banana at the stem. Nearly everyone does. I do! Well, I used to.

Did you know that bananas are easiest to peel from the tip, not the stem? It’s true. If you pinch the tip, the peel essentially falls open revealing a perfectly intact banana. No twisting and tugging the stem. No gooey, disgusting banana.

Once I started noticing that most people peeled bananas at the same end — the wrong end — I had to ask, “Why?”

Question #2:

“If bananas are made to be opened from the tip, why do the overwhelming majority of people still open bananas from the stem?”

I think the simple answer is that, as kids, we’re either taught to do things a certain way or we copy what we see others do. And most of what others do originate in times long passed. Which leads us to…

Question #3:

“How much of what we’re doing today, as marketers, is the equivalent of peeling bananas at the wrong end?”

Can you see why I live with a banana complex?!

What’s most interesting to me is that we live in a world in which this banana hack is accessible to anyone. Yet every time I do the banana exercise with a group, it’s the first time the majority in the room learn about it.

And this is where we have to implement an important cognitive and behavioral change, as marketers and leaders.

If we were to first focus on the banana, rather than ourselves, we have a good chance of understanding how it is designed. Then, with a few peeling experiments, it wouldn’t take us long to figure out that bananas consistently peel easiest at the tip.

The problem, of course, is that operating in this way is mentally exhausting, which is why we don’t do it. Here’s why.

The marketing mistake

In his brilliant book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman goes into great depth about the difference between what he calls, “System 1” and “System 2” thinking.

System 1 thinking is intuitive and instinctual. It’s fast, unconscious, and associative. System 2 thinking is rational. It’s slow, logical, and takes effort.

We operate on System 1 thinking 95% of the time. System 2 only kicks in when needed.

Let me give you two examples so you can experience these systems at work.

Solve this math problem: 1 + 1 = ?

That’s your System 1 brain at work. You didn’t have to pull out a calculator to work out the math. You instantly knew the answer, because it is stored in memory for fast retrieval.

Okay, next problem: 6 x 4,893 = ?

As you read that problem, your System 1 brain quickly said, “This one’s not me! This one’s for you, System 2. And your System 2 brain woke up and started looking for a calculator or paper and pencil.

System 1 thinking works with what Kahneman calls “cognitive ease.” System 2 thinking creates “cognitive strain.” It’s why in a stressful period or after an all-day planning session, we are mentally exhausted. And it’s why we unconsciously avoid as much cognitive strain as possible to preserve ourselves.

So let’s think back to your banana. Are you using System 1 or System 2 thinking when peeling a banana? You and I peel bananas with our fast, unconscious System 1 brain.

The root cause of this invisible marketing mistake is that most of our bad habits, most of our faulty or outdated learnings, are encoded in our System 1 brain.

We do much of what we do without being aware of it. Which means as you and your team are executing marketing each day, you are using System 1 thinking 95 percent of the time. In other words, we are phoning it in, despite what we tell ourselves!

It’s only when we encounter a real challenge that our System 2 thinking is activated and engaged. And it only remains active for the duration of its job. Then we immediately default back to System 1.

System 1 thinking is the reason marketers treat their customers and prospects as objects. It’s why we unconsciously put our business first, rather than our customers. And it’s why marketing has the negative reputation it has in the general public.

Are your customers subjects or objects?

Our System 1 brain treats everything as an object. Our System 2 brain can make anything a subject. Objects are boring. Subjects are infinitely interesting.

Think about it, an object is a tool we use to serve ourselves. On the other hand, a subject is something we serve. Subjects are infinitely knowable. It’s why after 50 years together, a couple continues to surprise and delight each other. It’s why someone can dedicate their life to studying a group of people, a place, an idea or thing and never tire of it.

This comes with a cost though. Treating your customers as subjects, rather than objects, is exhausting.

When I think of System 1 marketing, I think of Sergio Zyman’s definition:

“The goal of marketing is to sell more stuff, to more people, more often, for more money, more efficiently.”

When I think of System 2 marketing, I think of Peter Drucker’s definition:

“The purpose of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well, the product fits her/him, and sells itself.”

To achieve Zyman’s definition, you must start with Drucker’s definition. Knowing and understanding our customers, like taking time to know and understand a banana’s design, creates cognitive strain.

Learning to peel your marketing bananas 

What can you and your team do today to begin serving your customers as subjects, rather than objects?

How can you overcome the busy-ness of the every day and push through the strain and fatigue System 2 thinking demands from you?

Here’s an idea to get your System 2 brain working. This is not intended to be a formula you follow, because your market, business size/stage, and culture is likely very different than mine.

Simply treat this as an approach to how you can organize and implement deep change without burning yourself and your team out.

Month 1: Market Audit

• How well do you really know your customers? What’s keeping them up at night right now? What functional, emotional, and social jobs are they trying to get done in their lives?
• What questions are you asking customers? Why? What questions aren’t you asking? Why not?
• What data are you collecting? Why?
• How are you structuring and using this data?
• Is your team engaging data because they’re supposed to or because they’re genuinely interested in it?
• How often are you having real conversations with your customers? Your competitors’ customers? Non-customers?
• How often are you in the field shadowing customers? How often should you be?
• How are you using social listening?

Month 2: Brand Audit

• What values does your business stand for?
• When is the last time you earned or lost a customer because of these values?
• What can you promise and guarantee that would scare your competitors and win new customers?
• Why aren’t you the #1 or #2 brand in your market? What will it take to get there?
• If someone asked 10 customers about your brand, what would they hear?

Month 3: Leads Audit

• Are your paid, owned, and earned media doing the jobs you’re hiring them to do?
• Is the next email campaign scheduled to go out designed to serve your business or your customer’s business? Prove it.
• What 20 percent of your spending is generating 80 percent of your leads?
• Who are the 10 influencers in your industry everyone listens to? Do they know, trust, and like you and your business? Why or why not?

Month 4: Conversion Audit

• How many clusters of prospects are moving in and out of your funnel?
• What makes each customer cluster distinct?
• Which specific clusters are converting? Why?
• Where, exactly, does marketing end and sales begin?
• Where are the most common breakdowns in your marketing and sales funnel? Why is each breakdown happening?
• How much does it cost to create a new customer?

Month 5: Retention Audit

• What, specifically, is causing existing customers to stick around? Is it price? Quality? Service? Brand? Laziness?
• How much does it cost you to keep a customer?
• Are your customers consumers or co-creators? Why?

There are hundreds of questions, like these, we could ask. And there are dozens of approaches we could take. Such as dedicating a week at a time to a specific area such as SEO, social channels, email optimization, etc.

The big idea is to:

1. Stop surrendering your marketing to System 1 thinking
2. Break down the deep thinking (i.e. System 2) you and your team need to do into bite-size phases

From Bananas to Ham (A Cautionary Tale)

The president of the company I work for tells a terrific story about holiday ham.

According to his mother, you prepare a ham by cutting off its ends, seasoning it, then roasting it in the oven. Curious about why you cut off the ends, he asked his mom.

“I’m not sure, that’s just the way my mom did it,” she replied.

So he called his grandmother and asked, “Why do you cut the ends off a ham before cooking it?”

“Oh, I have to do that because it’s the only way it fits in my little oven.”

The moral of the story: Question everything! We must seek to understand where the things we do as marketers came from. Then we must determine if it’s still relevant (or was ever relevant).

It’s time we overcome the invisible marketing mistake of blindly peeling our bananas at the stem. Instead, let’s find the most effective ways to peel those bananas.

I believe this starts with seeing our customers as infinitely discoverable subjects that we have the privilege to serve, rather than objects we use to serve ourselves.

Keith Reynold Jennings is an executive and writer who serves as vice president of community impact for Jackson Healthcare. He’s also an advisor to goBeyondProfit. Go deeper with Keith on Linkedin or Medium.

The post How to Avoid the Invisible Marketing Mistake All Businesses Make appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

By Keith Reynold Jennings, {grow} Contributing Columnist

For ages, people believed the world was flat.

Then, thanks to mathematics and, ultimately, engineering, humanity discovered that the earth’s shape wasn’t what it appeared to be from where we’re standing.

In this post, I’ll argue that differentiation, a nearly 90-year-old pillar of marketing theory, appears to be relevant when looking at markets from the position of a seller. But as soon as you shift your position and see the world through the buyers’ eyes, differentiation no longer seems to matter. And it doesn’t explain why people buy what they buy, especially today.

The paradox of choice

I was recently in the market for a telescope.

My kids have shown a growing interest in what’s happening in the sky. We love running out to watch the International Space Station fly over. We love pointing out the planets and major constellations. And we love using apps to discover what’s happening up there.

The time finally came for us to take one small step from binoculars, one giant leap for our family!

When it comes to choosing a telescope, it’s overwhelming. There are reflector, refractor, and compound scopes. There are manual, motorized and computer-driven scopes. Then there’s aperture, focal length, and eyepiece considerations. And let’s not forget the mount! Is equatorial or alt-az better? Oh yeah, and what price should I expect to pay? They run from $100 to $30,000!

As I did my research, my brain started to melt. Every element of a telescope has dozens of differentiated choices. The paradox of choice started to set in and I could feel myself second-guessing any choice I made.

Thankfully, one of my co-workers is a long-time astronomer. He listened to me describe why I wanted a telescope and how I wanted something my kids could use. Within a few days, he recommended a $200 telescope that gave me all the primary functions I wanted for my kids (with free shipping!).

As a buyer, I wasn’t looking for the most unique telescope out there. They all were differentiated! I was looking for the telescope that had the most things in common with my family’s stargazing needs.

Take a second … think about the most recent significant purchase you made.

By “significant” I mean that you had to do some research and analysis before deciding to make the purchase and choose between the options you had.

Did you choose to buy the product or service based on how DIFFERENT it was from the other choices? Or did you choose the product or service that had the most in COMMON with who you are, what you wanted and what you were willing to pay?

The backstory on differentiation

Differentiation appears to have originated in a 1933 book on monopolistic competition by economist Edward Chamberlin. Other notable thought leaders touting the merits of differentiation have included Theodore Levitt, Michael Porter, and Costas Markides.

These guys are regarded as gods and gurus among the business and academic elite.

The core thread woven through their thinking on differentiation is that, in order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in a world of increasing commoditization and complexity, products, services, and brands MUST clearly communicate how they are unique and different from the other choices out there.

Different customers prefer different things. The job of strategy is to monopolize a niche in a way that eliminates the competition. Differentiation is the silver bullet to achieve this.

At this point, I hope you’re seeing that differentiation was/is a tool for competition. It offers little in the way of actually creating customers. (ht Peter Drucker)

The problem, according to Harvard Business Review author Freek Vermeulen, is that all these thought leaders touting differentiation were economists looking at the world through the lens of economic theory. In their view, for some to win, others must lose.

However, when I look at products and services as a buyer, I can’t see this to be true at all. For example, I am always in the market for discovering new music and genres. I’m never choosing one artist among the others. If I like their stuff, I’m streaming it. All of it!

If something brings value to me, if we share things in common, then I will choose to include it in my life. If not, I won’t. I’m not assessing choices based on their differences, I’m assessing them based on what they have in common with me and my needs.

But does this apply to B2B services such as SaaS or consulting?

Why differentiation could not save  Michael Porter

In 2012, Monitor Group, the elite firm founded by strategy guru, Michael Porter, filed for bankruptcy.

How on earth did this happen to one of capitalism’s most renowned thought leaders on differentiation? Did his firm fail to differentiate? Of course, not.

According to Steve Denning, in a brilliantly written Forbes post, Porter’s firm simply failed to add value to clients. Naturally, clients stopped calling. “(Monitor Group) were numbers men looking for financial solutions to problems that required real-world answers,” he wrote.

In other words, business leaders continually need help innovating in order to bring increasing value to customers. They need consultants who best understand and align with this need. Monitor Group couldn’t even do that for themselves. Which led to the firm’s demise and acquisition by Deloitte in 2013.

Everything I’ve read about differentiation, throughout my career, is written from the perspective of the organization, business, brand, product or service. When you’re trying to sell something, any option besides your offering is a threat. And that threat commands attention.

However, when looking at marketing from the vantage point of the buyer, the only things that matter are:

• How well your offering helps the buyer get a functional, emotional and/or social job done in their lives,
• How well your company aligns with their personal values, and
• How well your pricing aligns with their expectations

Your competitive advantage isn’t dependent on your ability to differentiate — remember, we’re looking at this through the perspective of the buyer, not the seller — your competitive advantage is dependent on your ability to align with the values and needs of the buyer.

Buyers seek “Same As,” not “Different Than”

The earth looks flat when you’re moving around on it, but that doesn’t make it true. (ht Pythagoras)

If you want to get “invited to the island,” you have to respect and contribute to the community. And that’s the key word: community. Community is the holy grail of marketing and branding.

It’s not surprising that the root word in “community” is the word, “common.” Common means “same as,” “shared,” “alike.” I like to think of community as “common” + “unity.” That sure seems like a much bigger idea to me than “different than.”

As buyers, we’re looking for solutions, tools, and experiences that best align with who we are, what we value and what we’re trying to get done.

As marketers, the best advice seems to be simple: Stop obsessing over what competitors are doing. Start obsessing over what customers value and need.

If the world looks flat from your business’ position, it’s time to see things from the perspective of your customers. Welcome to the rebellion!

Keith Reynold Jennings is an executive and writer who serves as vice president of community impact for Jackson Healthcare. He’s also an advisor to goBeyondProfit. Connect with Keith on Twitter and Linkedin.

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