Powerful Marketing Strategies That Produce Sales
by John Graham
The retail harvest of Thanksgiving week 2004 was less than bountiful for Wal-Mart. While other retailers were upbeat, Wal-Mart's sales were "disappointing" the last week of November and traffic was "low" on infamous Black Friday.
Uncharacteristically candid, the company quickly acknowledged it had dropped its deep discount strategy the day after Thanksgiving. Reacting predictably, value-minded customers headed straight to the arms of the competition where low pricing prevailed.
In Clued In, Lou Carbone writes, "With modern management fixated almost solely on the bottom line, the value proposition of far too many businesses has become increasingly one-sided; lots of emphasis on the company but little on enhancing customer value." And then he adds an ominous warning. "As a consequence, I believe today's organizations have become extraordinarily vulnerable."
The day after Thanksgiving 2004, consumers saw Wal-Mart in a new light: the king of retail is vulnerable. What followed was dropping prices on a couple of dozen bellwether items, along with an unprecedented print and TV ad blitz. It's almost as if the giant stumbled. They didn't anticipate the competition taking a page from the Wal-Mart game book. They abandoned, just for a moment, their winning strategy of delivering the lowest prices on customer-pulling products.
While Wal-Mart will not make that mistake again, what lingers is the unavoidable fact that even the biggest company in the nation can stumble when it abandons, even for a day, its customer-focused strategy.
If it can happen to Wal-Mart, it can happen to any company. To avoid the problem, here's a sales results marketing strategy:
1. Get the right ...