Start With the Market, Not the Message

Marketers naturally like messages. We enjoy naming things, creating campaigns, finding a headline, designing the visual identity and deciding how something should appear on social media. I have certainly spent plenty of my career doing exactly that.

But there is a question that needs to come first.

Does anybody actually want this?

It sounds painfully obvious, yet organisations regularly develop products, services, events and initiatives internally before turning to marketing and asking us to find an audience for them. At that point marketing becomes a rescue operation. Instead of understanding demand and shaping the proposition around it, we are trying to manufacture enthusiasm for a decision that has already been made.

Market orientation turns that process around. Start outside the organisation rather than inside it. Understand customers, competitors, behaviours, needs and barriers before becoming too attached to the solution.

I think this is particularly important because organisations inevitably develop an internal view of themselves. We know how hard a team worked on something. We understand why a project matters internally. We know the organisational strategy, the terminology and the political reasons behind certain decisions.

Customers generally know none of that.

Nor should they have to.

When I developed the supporters' information around Aberystwyth Town's website, the useful questions were incredibly basic. If I have never visited Park Avenue before, where do I park? How do I buy a ticket? What time should I arrive? Is there food? Where is the ground? What happens when I get there?

None of those questions are particularly exciting marketing questions. But answering them removes uncertainty from the experience, and removing uncertainty makes somebody more likely to attend.

The same principle applies when thinking about prospective students at a university, somebody considering joining a gym or a family deciding where to eat. We need to see the organisation from their side of the table.

That is one reason I am increasingly interested in proper customer research rather than relying entirely on internal opinion. Asking customers why they chose you, why they did not choose you, what nearly stopped them, what alternatives they considered and what matters most can expose enormous differences between what an organisation believes and what the market actually thinks.

It is also why I like the idea of continually collecting small pieces of customer knowledge rather than conducting research once every five years and filing it away. Conversations, surveys, website behaviour, search data, sales information and customer service feedback can all contribute to a much stronger picture.

There will always be a role for instinct. Marketing would become incredibly dull if every creative idea needed to survive a committee of spreadsheets before it could exist. But instinct becomes more powerful when it is informed by genuine understanding.

I want to create marketing that people notice. But before worrying about whether people notice it, I want to know that we are offering something they actually care about.