… in educating South Africa’s future marketers.
Marketing today is all around us and as the world progresses at a lightning speed marketing techniques and tactics become a discipline of survival. Much like a martial art, marketers and brand specialists need to design competitive marketing strategies to achieve market dominance in their chosen categories.
As marketing educators we have a huge responsibility to our students and the marketers of future generations. We need to re-emphasise the value of being a consumer as part of the education process. Further to this is the notion of empathy, marketing and strategy are ‘feel’ disciplines that are practiced in a solution based environment and as marketing speeds on and the art of satisfying customer needs becomes ever more critical, so too does the need for trained specialists in the field of marketing and branding.
The best way to understand the marketing and branding process therefore is to feel what its like to be a consumer, for in understanding the process that drives as consumers we are better able to understand and identify with the needs of our target audiences. As crime around the world escalates and becomes a concern for public citizens the need for self defence skills increases and the best fighters often have expertise in a blend of styles and similarly marketing specialists who understand the style of their consumers and can adapt any shape or form to consumer needs and wants will perform best in the market place.
The concept of brands too assumes greater importance than ever before. If one can say that the ultimate objective of marketing and branding strategy is to create sources of uniqueness which are visible to the customer, difficult to copy and sustainable in the long term, then the process of brand loyalty assumes ever greater importance in satisfying customers and their unique needs. Although the concept and focus of marketing moves forward at lightning speed the principles and techniques of satisfying consumer needs and wants reside in simplicity. Simply put brands must continually deliver powerful and positive experiences, which are repeated and consistently perceived as being favourable on the part of consumers. Marketing education needs to emphasise this realism much like the martial artist would need to train against a real fighter with unpredictable techniques to prepare for battle and in so doing achieve a successful outcome.
In the classroom therefore we need to train our students to be and think innovatively regarding brands, products and services. We need to teach them to have confidence in their abilities and to take risks. We need to further endow them with the capabilities of becoming proactive thinkers. To achieve this is certainly an arduous task requiring much commitment and focus, but it is certainly achievable. Beyond what one can intellectually grasp lies the challenge of researching the way one feels, the notion of why one is brand loyal and the desire to inwardly review the way one behaves as a consumer.
The essential elements of the marketing mix all drive a product and/or service and the brand becomes an element of brand and the brand becomes the crowning achievement of the marketing process. All companies should strive to develop in their customers a focus on becoming brand ambassadors for their respective businesses, which is the highest level of marketing achievement in a fastly evolving world of competitive strategy. So this simple principle that confirms the saying that less is more and more is less is ever prevalent in our modern society.
Create a positive perception for your brands and encourage your students to develop the combined skill of intellectual innovativeness and creative flair through feeling and reflecting and experiencing their actions and reactions as consumers. Differentiation from a branding perspective is the key to successful marketing strategy and as the gaps narrow down to achieve this differential advantage it becomes more and more difficult to create and then sustain these gaps, but it is possible. In class situations it is always beneficial to ask students to search for those gaps and discover them themselves.
These gaps can be thus discovered as consumers and found in all common consumer behaviour around the world. What is extraordinary today becomes ordinary tomorrow and obsolete the day after and as the whole concept of creativity in marketing develop and evolve. Today’s businesses need to develop core competencies more than ever and then in order to achieve market dominance they need to develop key strengths for their various target markets.
Marketing and branding has always been key to business survival and always will be. Just the perceived manner of this growth assumes more importance as time moves on yet the principles and concepts remain fundamentally clear. Business strategy therefore often involves the development of business mission and visions in order to timeously and successfully achieves business objectives. As marketing educators we are ideally positioned to take advantage of the new trends that focus on satisfying customer needs in an ever-increasing competitive market place.
The future of marketing and branding belongs to the innovators of tomorrow, those people that can think and develop creative avenues of thinking and strategic differentiation in all that they do. As the 21st century evolves the dilemma of choice becomes an ever increasing challenge. In other words how do we persuade consumers to purchase our product or service over and above that of competitors? Strategic differentiation is the answer and a solution-based approach to marketing thinking is a critical step forward in the evolving process of marketing strategy. Due to the great proliferation of information both locally and globally marketers need to strive to find better ways of communicating and interacting with their target audiences.
What better way to address all these platforms than to develop outcomes based brand education, which challenges our youth to think and develop creatively.
Lets make a start and recognise the value of ideas and concepts which lie in the minds of the next generation of great marketers, our students who are the future of marketing and branding and who will carry the torch forward deeper into the century before us.
The right time for branding is now so lets focus on providing our customers with the timeless principle of the best possible value in every interaction with them.
Neil Levy is a lecturer at Vega The Brand Communications School
