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Break Away Marketing

Written by: Keith Thirgood

Article Overview: Are you still marketing your service/product the way you have been for years? The same way your competitors are marketing theirs? Are you marketing the “industry way�? If you are, how can you expect to get break away from the pack?

Break Away Marketing

By Keith Thirgood and Helen Walter

Are you still marketing your service/product the way you have been for years? The same way your competitors are marketing theirs? Are you marketing the “industry way”? If you are, how can you expect to get break away from the pack?

The marketing definition of insanity is “doing the same thing you always have and expecting different results.”

How do you break away from this marketing insanity? You could go out and hire an ad agency. However, if they’re an industry specialist agency, they might just cost you a fortune and still give you the same answers. What do you do?

One method used by a few really sharp companies is to look outside their own industry. If you’re a management consultant, you might consider how pizza shops market themselves. Could you take something from their approach and convert it to work for you? Can you find an answer outside your box?

The trick to marketing outside your box is to look at what successful companies, outside the confines of your industry, are doing with their marketing. To do this, you observe what they’re doing. Ask yourself, how are businesses in the such-and-such industry finding new business? Analyse why it seems to works for them. Then reframe what they’re doing in terms of your industry.

Make a list of lots and lots of ideas. The world is full of ideas that your industry is not using. Turn this into a daily exercise. When you’ve picked up a few dozen ideas, it’s time to do something about them.

Reframe the ideas you picked up, but don’t criticize them yet. Just put them into the context of your industry. At this point, these ideas are very fragile. The slightest criticism and they will self-destruct. Just place the ideas into the terms of your industry. Figure out how you can make these ideas work in your industry, don’t look for reasons why they won’t work.

For consultants, if it’s delivering a proposal or report in a pizza box, or breaking your services down into small, medium, large, jumbo and two-for-one, don’t let the fact that no one in your industry does this stop you. Go for it! You might just get those break away results you were looking for.

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Article Tags: ad agency, competitors, industry, marketing, outside the box



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