Value mindset begets value purchasing begets value marketing
November 16th, 2008 by Hugh Kennedy
An acquaintance who works in the medical field recently pulled a string or slipped into a disguise and got a seat at the Target national sales and marketing meeting. What impressed him was less the scale and scope of the event but the level of messaging consistency.
The word for 2009 at Target was Value, and every presentation, every point of view, every strategic plan of action was focused on value. Every speaker threaded value into their comments and every sales lieutenant spoke about delivering value in the new economic reality.
My acquaintance came away not so much impressed that Target is focusing on value – which is about as obvious as saying that Bergdorf‘s is focused on luxury – but that in a company with 366,000 employees, a number greater than the entire population of Iceland, every employee was aligned in exactly the same direction. Why couldn’t he do it in his own company, which has a fraction of that number of employees?
The B2B world is more complex and nuanced than big box store retail, of course, but my friend does have a great point about the power of a message to unite. Reading (well, skimming) Barrons this weekend, I couldn’t help but notice this opinion from Mark Ververka about 2009 tech spending forecasts:
“CIOs plan to spend less on personal computers, printers and mainframes next year while virtualization – software that increases computer efficiency without additional servers – remains hot. That’s good news for industry leader VMware and storage giant EMC…At least somebody has a reason to look forward to 2009.”
There’s value again: wresting more processing out of your servers which, like the human brain, tend to run at just north of 10% capacity. Clearly overdue. Yet how do you make value a virtue when so many of the best companies of the past five years are all about innovation?
In my opinion, value is always the cardinal virtue in IT and medical technology. And yet companies (and their agencies) tend to overlook it, the same way that service and support predictably overlooks the needy customer and blows another potentially loyal advocate. It comes up on survey after survey I see, as recently as last week in fact, often cloaked in terms like “make it simple to use” and “make it compatible with what I have, no matter who the vendor is.”
The call for value lurks everywhere you might want to look. From a marketer’s perspective, it will be interesting to see how marketing makes a virtue out of a quality that customers have been looking for all along. In its content and in how it’s measured, too, marketing will have to deliver more value than ever.
Sounds like it could be an innovative year.
