Benefits before explanations

Two totally different items, apparently unrelated but not if you happen to be an engineer working in marketing. An interview on the BBC breakfast programme today discussed a news item that National Health hospitals were about to begin advertising for patients. The interviewer started with the premise that money was to be spent on advertising and wanted to know how much, so that this figure could then be equated, if invested differently, into more doctors or patient services. The interviewee then explained that advertising was just one aspect of marketing and in fact at her particular National Health Trust, none of the marketing communications budget was actually being spent on advertising. As a marketer and engineer this need to explain what actually you do is something we meet regularly. In fact for as long as I have been reading the IEE journal the letters page has run frequent complaints that the status of electrical engineers is not understood and that engineers are viewed by the general public as repair men. I have experienced this personally in the past when relatives would invite me to fix items of failed electrical apparatus when I visited their homes. So one of the first tasks with any new marketing prospect or client is to explain what we actually do. Of course the TV interviewer’s perspective that marketing is advertising is a widely held view and so we have tended to focus on promoting the benefits first to reduce the whole client educational process to an easy to understand concept. The bottom line is that by investing in marketing you can grow your business and increase profits. Of course that works best when talking to the owner or the person responsible for the P&L account. In larger organizations department managers tend to lose sight of this because they are measured on managing a budget to come in on target which is not the same thing at all. One approach we have used is to write very simple briefings on a range of marketing topics which are both syndicated via other web sites and available to download as a PDF book - Minute Marketing .