Do the Old Rules of Marketing Still Work?

As we hit the homestretch on 2020, I’ve been thinking about what is important to consider as we move to thinking about 2021 and recovering from the pandemic at some point in the new year.

One of the topics that consistently comes up to me is: “How will marketing change or be different now?”

My answer is almost always, “It depends.”

Why?

Because marketing is contextual and everyone’s marketing plan and approach should reflect their business and the goals that they have.

What I think the question does highlight is a need for folks to understand what parts of marketing are foundational and shouldn’t or don’t change no matter what environment you are in.

Today, I want to share a few of those foundational aspects of marketing that won’t change no matter what the environment looks like.

The customer still needs to have a voice in the organization:

I’m quite passionate about the need to listen to customers and take their needs into consideration when you are designing your marketing plans.

I’ll go a step further here because too many people reactively mumble, “Of course, we are focused on the customer.”

But I want you to go past that reflexive action and consider things from the point of view of the customer. An idea in marketing known as Market Orientation.

This matters and is foundational because too often we assume that we know what a customer wants or needs and we act as if we are afraid to talk with them.

You can’t do that and expect that you’ll be successful for long.

You have to get your customer’s voice and ideas inside the business. That’s the job of marketing. To figure out what the customer wants and give it to them.

Strategy before tactics should be a mantra:

In business we’ve seen such an acceleration of tools that we can use to get our messages out and our products in front of folks that we have forgotten about the need to know where we are going, what we are attempting to do, and what our goals are before we make any of those decisions.

The key is to put strategy first and tactics second.

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