As a result of this column you and your organization will: Understand how to gain top of mind awareness with your customers. Develop a distinguishing and Unique Selling Proposition. Stand out in the crowd, head and shoulders above the competition. Consumers of all products or services make buying decisions based on how they perceive you and your business. As a result, proper positioning in the mind of your client or customer is the most important marketing task you can perform. Positioning means performing activities that are different from you rivals or performing similar activities in different ways. Crest held the top position in the toothpaste market for 35 years. Colgate finally introduced “Total” and created enough differentiation to dominate. Coke continues to outsell Pepsi and Kodak film is still #1. In contrast, Intel, Microsoft, Amazon and others have captured top market share quickly. Meanwhile, differentiation has evolved from what products and services do, to what people can do with them to solve business or lifestyle problems.

To businesses decision makers, technology is no longer an expense item. It’s a tool for profits, cash flow, and productivity. The leading reason parents buy computers is to get their children on the Internet because their future depends on it.

• Because the relevance of any product or service has evolved to solve problems, people judge superiority in the context of accomplishing some task or goal.
• They assign superiority to the product or service that can best solve their problem.

Tom Trapp. President of Bear Brook Design said, “The goal isn’t to get a customer to take action once, but to establish a continuing relationship. The most effective marketing approach is a combination of brand building - generating awareness and making emotional connections; plus, persuasive direct marketing - using tactics designed to elicit a specific response. Ultimately, the success of any organization lies in using these approaches wisely and in concert.”

Trust is a huge issue in the minds of customers. Customers will choose the brand that offers the best combination of a powerful value proposition, strong on-going support, a compelling vision of the future, and a high degree of trustworthiness.

Customers know that when they make a purchase, they are, in effect, buying an implicit futures contract, and they want to know you’ll continue to be around to service their problems.

• The interdependent nature of many products or services is extremely important and often requires “partnering” to solve a customer problem.
• From the customer’s perspective, every product or service enables a total solution or participates in it.

Thus, organizations must determine what role they play in solving a customer’s problem. Is your brand the entire solution or just part of it? Nothing is more important to long-term success than the quality and the quantity of ongoing support. If “partners” are involved, they reflect directly on you, and your on-going customer relationships depend on their proper performance.

Consumers have evolved to purchasing only when convinced that a particular product or service is the best solution for a problem of personal or business importance. Marketing to them the solutions to their problems is the key ingredient to continued success.

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