Starting A Business Abroad: 3 Things Marketing Isn’t

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Emmanuelle Archer in Blog, Expat Entrepreneurs
2 comments

Now that we’ve covered the basics of planning and structuring your business, let’s spend some time looking at a key piece of your strategy: marketing.

There are hundreds of fancy definitions of marketing, most of which read like something straight out of Dilbert.

For our purposes, a basic definition of marketing could be: everything that has to do with defining, analysing, targeting, and satisfying your clients and their needs.

Not so scary, is it? I know that you may have been exposed to many myths about marketing, most of which make it sound more complicated, costly and, ahem, sleazy than it is really is.
So before we go any further, I want to dispel a few widespread misconceptions about marketing.

3 things marketing isn’t

- Advertising

Advertising is part of marketing, but it’s far from being all there is to marketing. It’s simply one of the tools in your marketing arsenal, among many others like market research, customer service and distribution channels.

While advertising may be the most visible (and costliest) part of a company’s overall marketing strategy, it’s only the tip of the iceberg. To name just a few examples, defining your target market, developing the products that people want to buy, and offering a bulletproof money-back guarantee are all marketing activities, yet they have nothing to do with running ads or buying air time.

- Manipulation, brainwashing or selling out

Does the mere word marketing make you squirm? If so, what is it about it that makes you uncomfortable?

If it’s a belief that selling is a dirty word and that money is fundamentally evil, you need to recognise that it’s just that: a belief. Money, in and of itself, is neutral. It’s a currency. It’s a tool. It’s also damn useful when it comes to keeping a roof over your head and food on your table.

This is a belief that you’ll want to snap out of as fast as possible. After all, if you think deep down inside that you shouldn’t want to get sales and make money, that’s going to make it rather difficult to run a successful – read: profitable – business, isn’t it?

But maybe you find marketing repulsive because you’ve been exposed to one too many “internet guru” (you’ve got to love self-proclaimed gurus) and now their GIGANTIC ALL-UPPERCASE SLEAZY HEADLINE DRIPPING WITH YELLOW HIGHLIGHTER is seared into your retina forever. Or maybe you spend a lot of time around people who think that any commercially successful artist is a sell out.

The good news is, you don’t have to espouse anyone’s idea of what marketing is, or isn’t. You don’t need to hard sell to sell at all, nor do you need to feel ashamed for wanting to build a financially viable business, which is pretty much the only kind worth having anyway. So don’t worry, you’ll eventually find your own marketing style, one that lets you speak in your own voice, and allows you to find your own place on the market.

- Entirely an art, or entirely a science

Just like many people think that marketing equals advertising, many believe that in order to be a great marketer, you have to be some kind of creative genius who brainstorms 300 words a minute while sketching wild packaging designs with brightly coloured markers.

If only. I worked in marketing for years, and I never got to do such fun stuff. But crunching numbers, analysing statistics and comparing ratios? Oh yes, there was plenty of that.

Good marketing actually requires a fairly rigourous, if not downright scientific, mind. It’s well known that you can’t improve what you can’t track, so you need to design and implement systems that allow you to see whether your marketing efforts are bearing fruit.

Now, marketing obviously cannot be reduced to a hard science either. Because it’s all about human behaviour, marketing data is not something that you can plug into a computer and voila, a marketing plan! You constantly need to balance market data with a thorough understanding of sociology, psychology, and, in your case – since you’re dealing with a culture different from your own – ethnography.

How do you gain this understanding? By getting to know your target market really, really well. Marketing is both art and science – and ultimately it is the art and science of listening to your clients.

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Emmanuelle

Image by worldmegan (bottom) via Flickr Creative Commons