Three Major Marketing Fundamentals

The marketing fundamentals remain the same whether you're marketing on the web, in print, to the local area, on national television, or anywhere else. It all comes down to the same core principles. These are the same concepts that have been pushed in every good book on marketing and salesmanship, every blog and website on advertising and in every classroom where they teach you how to write up a marketing campaign:

1. Sell a Great Product

Great advertising can carry a bad product, but not for long. As soon as word of mouth gets out that that new movie is a stinker, a two million dollar marketing campaign goes down the drain. As soon as word gets out that the new model of car you just released explodes when it gets rear ended, you go down in history as having produced the world's most unsafe vehicle.

If you're a young marketer looking to make a name for yourself, no matter what anyone tells you, the last thing you want to do is try to sell for a company that releases a product that you wouldn't want to put your name on. Spokeslegend Billy Mays chose clients on a simple philosophy: If he wouldn't use it, he wouldn't sell it.

Not only did this help him to maintain his integrity, it helped him to maintain his reputation, as he never pushed a product that didn't have legs.

2. Tell a Story

Marketers aren't exactly liars, rather, they're storytellers. When you cherry pick the market's worst leading brand to put up against your client's brand, you're telling the truth, but it's a very carefully selected truth. You're playing to the product's strengths.

Sometimes, even confessing the product's weaknesses can be part of the story. "It's not the most luxurious car in the world, but it's more than you expect for the price" for instance. Everything about the product helps to tell the story. The price tells people whether this is a status symbol, or a smart buy for the shopper on a budget. Even the color tells a story. Think of Apple products. That slick, white plastic shell they all have is saying something about the person carrying the iPhone.

3. Make Promises and Keep Them

The best thing any business can do to maintain a strong reputation today is to make promises, specific promises, and then keep them. "Great customer service" is not specific enough. Specific is "We promise never to put you on hold for more than a full minute." That's a high bar to set, but you can bet that the companies that set those high bars are outselling every company that doesn't.

Customers like knowing what to expect. Be realistic, but be ambitious about what you're offering the customer.

You may notice that these fundamentals apply as much to the company that hires an advertiser as to the advertisers themselves. This is because it simply makes no sense not to be marketing from a conceptual level. If you're putting together a product and you have no idea how you're going to sell it, you've already lost.

Anything worth selling isn't going to be all that hard to sell. It's maintaining consistency and protecting your reputation that's a challenge.

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Jon McCulloch is Europe's top small business marketing consultant. Visit http://www.jonmcculloch.com now and grab his free tips on the fundamentals of marketing. There is absolutely nothing to buy on this website - just free small business marketing tips to help you expand your business.

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