Posts Tagged ‘Thought Leadership’
Marketing 101 – A look into the not so obvious
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Marketing is much more than just advertising; it is the sum total of all your communications with the marketplace. This includes your vendors, lender, investors as well as your customers and the community at large. It is what I call a “reluctant reality” that your marketing will be a bigger factor in your success than the quality of your offering.
By “reluctant reality”, I mean that most business owners would rather it not be so… but it is. We’ve all been brainwashed to believe in the old saw, “build a better mouse-trap and the world will beat a path to your door.” Trust me; it just isn’t so.
Savvy entrepreneurs know (even if they don’t like it) that a B product with A marketing will always beat the pants off an A product with B marketing. Obviously, the best combination is to couple an A product with A marketing – and that’s exactly what you should strive towards.
The first step in creating an A marketing plan is to differentiate yourself. This is the most important thing you can do. And, of course, you already know all the ways you are… but you’ve got to be different in the eyes of your customer. This is much more difficult thing to achieve. It is basic human nature to group things together as “alike” or “not alike”, with emphasis leaning strongly towards “alike”.
Links for 8-18-2009
What is Thought Leadership?
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Wikipedia defines it as:
Thought leader is a buzzword or article of jargon used to describe a futurist or person who is recognized among peers and mentors for innovative ideas and demonstrates the confidence to promote or share those ideas as actionable distilled insights (thinklets).
Thought leadership is an increasingly vital driver of business success. The term was first coined in 1994, by Joel Kurtzman, editor-in-chief of the magazine, Strategy & Business. The term was used to designate interview subjects for that magazine who had contributed new thoughts to business. Among the first “thought leaders,” were British management thinker, Charles Handy, who advanced the idea of a “portfolio worker” and the “Shamrock Organization”, Stanford economist Paul Romer, Mitsubishi president, Minoru Makihara, and University of Michigan strategist, C.K. Prahalad, author of a number of well known works in corporate strategy including “The Core Competence of the Corporation” (Harvard Business Review, May-June, 1990); and his co-author, Gary Hamel, a professor at the London Business School. Since that time, the term has spread from business to other disciplines and has come to mean someone who enlivens old processes with new ideas.