Your Road Forward: Market Orientation
Hey!
In the world of marketing, there are four distinct orientations that your business can take:
Sales Orientation: meaning you make something and look for folks to sell to.
Product Orientation: meaning R&D drives your business.
Advertising Orientation: meaning you don’t care about anything but getting your communications out into the world.
Market Orientation: meaning you look at the business from the eyes of the customer, outside in, and you find out as a business the way to provide value for the folks you serve.
As we are working through the pandemic, I see a lot more folks staring down the barrel of sales and advertising orientations.
You might recognize the sales orientations by the folks calling or emailing or pitching their services and products with no care about what you might need from them or what your situation needs.
You’ll recognize the advertising orientation by those awful advertisements that had every business you might have crossed paths with telling you, “We care in this time.”
Product Orientation isn’t as on display, but we saw it this week when Elon Musk rolled out Battery Day.
All of them are inferior because they end up with you doing a lot of talking at people and not making a lot of progress for folks.
As we continue to figure out how to get through the pandemic, to keep your business going or moving, you have to orient yourself towards the customer.
In the title, I called it market orientation. In reality, you can call it customer-focused, outside-in business, or something else. The key is that you have to take the image you have of what you are offering and turn it around and see it from the vantage point of your customers.
Last year in Melbourne, I did a workshop where the key takeaway was that you are not your market.
I beat it to death.
In today’s world, we all have to keep that in mind because the only way we are going to get through this pandemic and survive is by focusing on what we can do to add value to the people that we aim to serve and to sell and market effectively.
So, turn the lens around and look at what you are doing through the eyes of your customers.
Tell me what happens when you do.
Dave