Examining the Rosewood Marketing TreeTM
Oreos. Milk. And a friend. You’re set!
Oreo has been the best-selling cookie in the US since its introduction in 1912. While no one knows how Oreo got its name, practically everyone knows its iconic taste. Oreo ranks as one of the top recognized brands in the country, holding a place among Cheerios, Kleenex, and red Solo cups. In 2000, a survey revealed that 9 out of 10 households enjoy Oreos.1 Twenty-five years later, Oreos is still considered the best-selling cookie in the world.2
Ultimately, taste is what sells Oreo cookies in more than 100 countries. Taste is Oreo’s ticket on 4,000 Southwest flights a day. Its perfection is a result of precise science; for example, in the most common version, the cookie-to-creme ratio is always 71 percent to 29 percent.
Taking a deeper bite into the Oreo, professional taste-testers identify 17 individual flavors converging into the single toothsomeness of the original cookie. Identifying and thoughtfully using these flavors in proper balance has made Oreo wildly popular.
What if you understood marketing the way Oreo understands the nuances of taste that push it into popularity? What if you could market what your business does and how it does it delightfully, serving consumers who keep reaching for seconds, thirds, and beyond, even sharing the experience with their friends? That’s Oreo.
This article explains the components of marketing. When present, all these necessary elements can converge and function effectively together. This overview gives the basics: you can understand marketing and evaluate your business for missing pieces or low-functioning elements that are costing you valuable time, money, and lost opportunities.
What do we mean when we say marketing? For the purposes of this article, marketing is how a business organization creates, accesses, and capitalizes on demand in the marketplace.
Take a look at the tree diagram above. This tree helps us visualize the main components of marketing. In this article, we will examine the foundational and structural parts of the tree: the roots and the trunk.
Company Soul – The Roots
The first component is your company soul. On the tree diagram, company soul is represented by the roots underground: vision, mission, and core values.
Vision
Regarding vision, what motivated you to be in business in the first place? Why does your company exist? What keeps you on track when the going gets tough? What is your guiding star in decision-making? Or, in tap root terms, what is your water source? That’s vision! Without robust vision, our difficulties will cause us to give up or settle for less than the best.
Mission
The root on the left is labeled mission. Mission is the “what” of business: baking pies, pulling wires, building sheds, polishing shoes, fixing cars, stuffing chocolate wafers. It is the vehicle for our vision, the thing we do that moves us toward our guiding star on the horizon. Manufacturing cabinets is not your company’s vision–manufacturing cabinets is your company’s mission, the function you do to accomplish your vision.
Core Values
Now note the root on the right–core values. Our values are guiding principles that enable us to deliver on our vision and mission. Core values clarify what we need to protect (value) in the business. Core values are similar to a GPS giving turn-by-turn and day-by-day directions to keep your business aligned with your vision and mission. Roy Disney once said, “Decision making is easy when your values are crystal clear.”
If the roots of your company soul–vision, mission, and core values–are not strong and inspired, the trunk and branches will not be healthy. You really won’t comprehend fully what you are trying to market in the first place, or why it matters to you or anyone else.
Research and Data – Lower Tree Trunk
Let’s move to the second main component of marketing–research and data. This is represented by the bottom of the tree trunk.
For example, you can remember companies that didn’t keep current with research, and therefore, wouldn’t or couldn’t change their vision or mission to adapt to the times. Kodak. Radio Shack. Toys”R”Us. Payless Shoes. PanAm. These once-stalwart companies became extinct mostly because they no longer made choices based on accessible, relevant market data.
The brutal marketplace crushes those who neglect their research. Business mission must pivot with changing market conditions, discovered by relevant research. You can see this happening with Oreo: Double-Stuffed, To-Go cups, Oreo Thins, Chocolate Creme, Mocha, Golden Oreos, Cool Mint, Peanut Butter, and Halloween. Oreo pivots with alacrity to consumers’ whims, all the while keeping us anchored with the tried and proven original and its 17 components of flavor.
Research has two distinct parts: internal testing/measuring and external research/discernment.
Internal Research
Internal research tracks the leads coming from billboards, direct mail, newspaper ads, promo codes, and all other trackable forms of advertising.
- How many leads are being generated?
- How many of those leads are converting into sales?
- Where are advertising funds best allocated?
Internal research also addresses those types of questions:
- What do our customers really want?
- Why do customers buy from us?
- What features of our company motivate our potential customers?
Domestic airline service finally realized that most of us don’t buy plane tickets because we are hungry. They now understand travelers really didn’t care for their lukewarm chèvre broccoli pastry in the first place. And they now save themselves jet loads of money, time, and effort. This pivot didn’t affect ticket sales, and travelers wanting a hot meal now buy from businesses better grounded for food service than a cramped metal tube hurtling through turbulence. PanAm tanked because of their ignorant determination to blissfully overstretch the glory days of air travel.
Enter Oreos! Today, snack information and all the stuff that matters are tastefully displayed on airlines’ free mobile apps. App-driven options are the type of delights today’s travelers are hungry for. That’s research doing its thing–making relevant contributions to answer the question, “What do customers really want?”
External Research
External research, on the other hand, relates to understanding market conditions and potential:
- What is the size of the potential market?
- Is there an unfulfilled need?
- What is the competition doing: what are they offering, and could we perhaps do better?
Government resources and other studies can support external research. Properly done, external research helps us focus on what we can provide in the market we can reach.
Strategy – The Main Trunk
When our research is well done, we move to strategy, the part of the tree represented by the main trunk. Strategy is a set of decisions about how to correctly respond to market conditions.
Business strategy guru Roger L. Martin describes strategy like this: “Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.” Regardless of your business type or industry, you need to develop the product, the options, the service, and the experience that attracts your target customer to your offering just like a strong magnet snaps to metal.
Sound strategy results directly from sound research. But strategy based on mere assumptions may cost you dearly. For example, it’s sometimes tempting to offer a product or service simply because you want to, rather than because your customers want it. Since a certain amount of assumption will need to be made even with good research, it’s wise to test a product or service by offering it in smaller quantities. A lack of good strategy fills warehouses with exotic products, shutters storefronts, parks airplanes, supports the auction industry, and catalyzes liquidation sales.
Strategy includes three components: planning, brand position, and messaging.
Planning
Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening my ax.” That’s planning. Without it, we run the risk of wasted energy and effort.
Planning creates a bridge from where we are now to where we want to be. A plan keeps us on track with our requirements and goals, such as a certain number of items sold or some other key performance indicator (KPI). In addition, a plan helps us consider what projects and activities will carry us to the point of repeatedly closing the sale with our target market customers. For example, you could offer a “try-before-you-buy” program. Or if you deliver complex or custom projects such as building homes, custom cabinets, or custom machinery; consider this. Create a simple numbered list of the steps the customer will experience. Clearly indicate at what point they need to pay money. This delivers confidence that enables them to take the first step.
A plan without accountability often fails to deliver. Within larger organizations, the chain of leadership usually provides internal answerability, while a smaller business owner/operator may need to reach out to a friend or another organization to provide the needed accountability and encouragement to act. As T. Boone Pickens said, “A plan without action isn’t a plan, it’s a speech.”
Brand Position
The second part of strategy is brand position. Your business’s reputation is closely tied to brand position. For example, McDonalds has clearly defined itself as the place to go for consistent food in a very short time. Some of us will go to McDonalds simply because of their ability to repeatedly deliver on these qualities–not because we like the food so much. If a company positioning itself as “fast food” can’t deliver efficiently, it will need to change some of its processes to support its brand position or rebrand.
To harness the power of brand positioning, we must aim for the target of customer impressions. What will the customer respect and appreciate? Do you want your business to present as an attentive, thoughtful, and personable St. Bernard toting a small barrel of refreshment under its neck, or as a Rottweiler with a spiked collar? The Rottweiler might actually be the best branding choice if you are marketing rugged jaw crushers for the demolition industry. That’s brand position, and you get to choose. But it takes work and intentional steering towards those qualities by which you want to be known.
Messaging
The third closely related aspect of strategy is messaging. What are the primary reasons your target market buys from you? Choose one to three key points to consistently communicate in your marketing. Most times, these points are the advantages you bring to your target market that your competitors do not. They make the difference your target market cares about. By reading your messaging points, someone can immediately see what makes your business different from your competitors.
Of course, your message must align with reality, or the customer will put out their own, more accurate message about your business.
Summary
In summary, this article has pointed out the foundational components of marketing. Marketing is rooted in your company’s soul: your vision, mission, and core values. Research, including both internal and external measuring and discernment, produces a valid base for decision-making. This creates a strategy for superior value and sustainable advantage in the marketplace. The components of strategy–a plan, brand position, and messaging–all support the customer journey.
Next time we will explore the branches of the marketing tree. We will discover how the root and trunk components help us make effective marketing tools and processes.