Get Rid of Your Marketing Vision Statement and Address the NEED!

Most organizations try to develop a meaningful marketing vision statement designed to guide their action for today, tomorrow and in the future. The vision statement serves as a platform for all their marketing goals. Armed with a vision, you establish your marketing goals, which are time-sensitive and detailed orientated. We send the goals through the SMART procedure to make sure that they are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-specific.

Duct Tape Marketing addresses the marketing vision in the book and further defines it in the Marketing Plan Pro software by using these three components:

· Goals: list the significant personal, business, strategic, and tactical goals of your marketing plan

· Marketing purpose: describe the greater purpose that the execution of your marketing plan and the growth of your business will fulfill.

· Marketing visual: write a paragraph describing a picture of this business as you would like a customer to experience it in a perfect world.

Back in April, I even wrote a blog discussing the Marketing Vision, and as I implemented the Lean Marketing House, my thoughts about a vision statement started to evolve differently. I studied the Duct Tape Marketing Hourglass and used it as the Pillars in the Lean Marketing House. I segmented each Pillar based on the different customer channels that were required. However, I kept pondering because it still seemed to be missing a very important ingredient and even try formulating the vision that each channel needed. It still did not quite seem right. The funny thing was that the answer was there all the time. It was obvious, very obvious.

The problem was that our vision statements are internally focused. Marketing is about the customer, it's not about us. Your vision statement needs to be a definition of the NEED that you serve for the client. John Jantsch author of Duct Tape Marketing has always defined marketing as "Getting someone with a Need to know, like and trust you. That was further developed and expanded in the Marketing Hourglass to include the other steps of Try, Buy, Repeat and Refer. However, somewhere along the line the NEED disappeared.

The NEED is your vision and for each customer segment or Pillar if you are using the Lean Marketing House. Defining that need clearly takes quite a bit of effort. What NEED do you solve for the client? Put that at the head of the Fishbone and address the different causes. I would start by using the Fishbone Diagram or the 5 Y's to determine the actual need. Get to the root cause. It may get a little more difficult and the use of Goldratt's Logical Thinking Process could be used for further definition. However, the NEED must be defined and your ability to solve that NEED must become crystal clear in your Marketing NEED statement.

If your customer understands this message, and he should if you do it right(it is his NEED), your marketing may become extremely simplified. Even for the future, you will be thinking about how your customer's NEED will be changing, and what they will NEED.

So would you rather go to market with a clear VISION or a clear NEED statement?