Global Entrepreneurial Marketing

This weekend I attended a workshop at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship about Global Entrepreneurial Marketing. Workshop has been held by Rasmus Rahm, who is a Research Assistant at Stockholm School of Economics and Founder & Owner at Pop n Roll. It was a two days workshop and we have learnt lots of practical things. We watched lots of commercials from different sectors and gained vast amount of tools and methods. As a summary;

1- Customer is the boss

2- Marketing is a complex thing and should not be seen as an isolated event.

3- Big mistake that entrepreneurs do is that; positioning their product or service based on features vs. competitors. But, customers do not buy features. Instead they buy perceived benefits/values.

4- When you make your marketing, until it turns back to profit, there are different steps involved. We can show the steps in this graph and one of the most important part is Communication Effects. When it comes to that step, there are four different categories. Namely;

a- Category Need

b- Brand Awareness

c- Brand Image

d- Brand Purchase Intention

Brand awareness and brand image are somehow always in your marketing. Think about these groups, do you want to create a new category, or increase brand awareness or “encourage”, “force” your potential customers to purchase your product or service. But keep in mind that the final result or ROI will be around %12 (if you can reach this number, normally it is much less)

5.1- If your marketing is for Brand Awareness

a- Recognition Brand Awareness Strategy : Avoid radio, because target audience cant see product

b- Recall brand awareness strategy: All media are appropriate

5.2- If your marketing is for Brand Image

a- Low Involvement & Informational: All media are appropriate

b- Low Involvement & Transformational: Avoid radio because of need of visual content

c- High Involvement & Informational: Avoid broadcast media because of time needed to process message

d- High Involvement & Transformational: Avoid radio because of need of visual content

6- While preparing a marketing strategy, first define your goal, what benefits will you provide to your customers and what are the attributes of your product 7- There must be a balance in between all there points when you are marketing your product. For example, a person’s self image and behavior will create a consequence and you, as an entrepreneur, must carefully think about balance. 8- Selecting media type for your marketing is one of the most important thing. Have a look at this graph and always keep in mind the pros and cons of different methods. 9- Think about your customers motivational and involvement levels. Involvement can be economic or psychological. For some cases product can be cheap but psychologically important for the customer. So, the product will be count in high involvement group. Also think about the motivational factors such as informational or transformational. Informational means, a product to solve or avoid a problem. These problems are already exist and well known. But,  transformational means; products which are emotional for customers. Like happiness, worriers, social people. This is also means, to make your customers emotionally happy or secure and so on. 10- Lastly but not least, think about the customer loyalty. Because this is where you make money or create other customers.  It is hard to find the optimum point, for some cases your extra-active or extra-loyal customers can disturb other potential customers. But it is always nice to have reference customers, who will make your marketing for free.