Marketing Goals: The Minimum Goal for Any Marketing Activity

The activity or group of activities that are counted as marketing⁽¹⁾ has various objectives, to some it is about certain p’s⁽²⁾, to others it’s about relationships⁽³⁾, about sales⁽⁴⁾, advertisement⁽⁵⁾ or it is about everything⁽⁶⁾.

Protagonists of these aforementioned purposes/objectives of marketing have
lots of reasons to justify it but still, just think about it. How many activities, how many times you miss to make a profitable sale, beneficial relationship, perfect advertisement strategy, or cover almost everything. Well quite a lot of times right?!, you end up not achieving your main marketing objectives or purposes they way you desire. 

Now I believe there is no concept of miss or waste in terms of marketing activities in present day; you have to achieve at least something that should benefit you in the long run, through your marketing activities even if you fail to achieve the main goals (sales, relationships, advertisement etc).

So what is that minimum goal that we need to focus on for every marketing activity, well let’s discuss it further.

Minimum Goal for Any Marketing Activity

When you are engaging with your customers (consumers, distributors, suppliers etc) at various touch points (personal selling, advertisement, direct marketing etc) make sure you achieve the minimum goal from each and every marketing activity. The goal is simple “make them feel good” whenever and with whatever you engage your target market (includes suppliers, distributors etc), make them feel good.

Hmm Interesting but "How ?"

So how do you know what well make them feel good, well I can’t provide a concrete list of things that will make your target market feel good. But by satisfying any one aspect of the three aspects of your customer (including suppliers, distributors, middleman) that are emotional, cognitional/rational, material will definitely make your customer feel good.

Three Aspects of your Customer

1. Emotional
2. Cognitional/Rational
3. Material

It could be a smile with a good cup of coffee, a funny/thought provoking ad (emotional satisfaction) for some, a flexible return policy (rational satisfaction), special discount, freebies or a little extra with product or service (material satisfaction) for others.

This is the minimum you have to do in each and every marketing activity. It is not necessary that you should satisfy all three aspects but it is far better if you can.

Benefits

• Well the “feel good” differentiate your brand, product/service from others. You are being remembered for certain special things (by satisfying any aspect of the three aspects of your customer) by your target market. And that’s where you become special in minds of your target market.

• Your customers, target market advocate about you, refers you for specific reasons (any of the three aspects, where you made them feel good emotionally, rationally (cognitional) or materially) to others like hey this brand, business gave me such and such thing for free (material satisfaction) or you won't believe their offer in terms of post purchase services that they gave me (rational satisfaction) so on and so forth.

• Likelihood of more engagement or return business, well why not when you make them feel good.

• More feel good means more people appreciate, trust, respect etc you for one reason or another. That means increase in social capital consequently more brand awareness and more opportunities and business engagements.

• Helps you gain more rich insights about your customers, more valuable feedback as they are more likely to share with you more things (compared to your competitors). Because you are the one who make them easy, feel good, more open and naturally you gain more insight.

That’s it, so make it the minimum goal of your marketing activities and you will soon see the benefits. It is important that marketing managers remind of this minimum goal, reiterate it to their staff, teams so that each and every marketing activity is crafted around customer satisfaction in terms of these three aspects mentioned above.

References

1.       McKitterick, J.B. (1957), “What is the marketing management concept”, in Bass, F. (Ed.), Frontiers of Marketing Thought and Action, American Marketing Association, Chicago, IL, pp. 71-82.

2.       McCarthy, E.J. (1960), Basic Marketing: A Managerial Approach, Irwin, Homewood, IL.

3.       Berry, L.L. (1983), “Relationship marketing”, in Berry, L.L., Shostack, G.L. and Upah, G.D. (Eds), Emerging Perspectives on Services Marketing, American Marketing Association, Chicago, IL, pp. 25-8.

4.       Woodall, T. (2007), “New marketing, improved marketing, apocryphal marketing”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol. 41 Nos 11/12, pp. 1284-96.

5.       Morgan, R.E. (1996), “Conceptual foundations of marketing and marketing theory”, Management Decision, Vol. 34 No. 10, pp. 19-26.

6.       Michael Saren, (2007),"Marketing is everything: the view from the street", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 25 Iss: 1 pp. 11 - 16