Poor firms ignore their competitors; average firms copy their competitors; winning firms lead their competitors.
Philip KotlerRead
The art of marketing is the art of brand building. If you arenot a brand, you are a commodity. Then price is everything and the low-cost producer is the only winner.
Interpretation
Successful marketing focuses on building a strong brand rather than simply reducing prices.
This quote by Philip Kotler emphasizes that effective marketing involves creating and nurturing a brand identity. When a company fails to build a brand, it risks being perceived merely as a commodity, where competition revolves solely around price, allowing the lowest-cost provider to dominate the market.
In practice
In a marketing conference, when discussing strategies, one might quote Kotler to highlight the importance of branding.
Poor firms ignore their competitors; average firms copy their competitors; winning firms lead their competitors.
Marketing is becoming a battle based on information than on sales power.
Marketing is a race without a finishing line
The key to branding, especially for smaller firms, is to focus on a limited number of issue areas and develop superb expertise in those areas.
Companies pay too much attention to the cost of doing something. They should worry more about the cost of not doing it.
Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value.
The mistake so many marketers make is that they conjoin the urgency of making another sale with the timing to earn the right to make that sale. In other words, you must build trust before you need it. Building trust right when you want to make a sale is just too late.
You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support, and you market every time you send a memo.
Your story needs to move people’s spirits and build their goodwill, so that when you finally do ask them to buy from you, they feel like you’ve given them so much it would be almost rude to refuse.
Brand is not what you say it is. It’s what they say it is.
A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is - it is what consumers tell each other it is.
It has been found that the less an advertisement looks like an advertisement and the more it looks like an editorial, the more readers stop, look, and read.
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