DeWinter Comm News & Occurrences

As featured in the Boulder County Business Report’s 2006 Book of Experts:

Five Tips For Stretching Your Marketing Dollars

By K. Courtney DeWinter, President, DeWinter Communications, Inc.

For those who have studied the marvelously successful Toyota Production System (TPS), there is one fundamental TPS principal that can and should be applied to marketing. That founding TPS principle is the “ruthless elimination of waste.”

So how do principles from car manufacturing apply to marketing efforts? Simply put, strategic decision making, sound marketing program management, and savvy implementation literally can stretch marketing dollars. The following offers some tips designed to eliminate waste and make your marketing dollars go further.

Tip 1: Do Your Homework. It’s amazing how frequently companies don’t pursue this most basic activity. Before you launch or re-launch a company, product or service, research the market specifics, size of market, and competition. And then get very clear about what you have to offer that’s different or better.

Tip 2: Clarify Your Messaging. When you don’t clarify and formalize key messages about your company, product, or service, the result is multiple versions of “company speak” from the staff, which prevents a unified brand message from taking hold.

Tip 3: Keep It Simple. These days, people are stressed, rushed, and pre-occupied with a myriad of activities. If they have to work to understand your message, they’ll just tune it out. To cut through the cacophony, be ruthless and stick to three key messages, and keep them very simple and “digestible.”

Tip 4: Build A Strategic, Detailed Marketing Plan. A marketing plan is not helpful if it’s theoretical or too general. A truly useful marketing plan should analyze the situation, identify very specific goals, outline the strategies and tactics that will be used, and provide a specific sequence of how the program will be implemented.

Tip 5: Stick To Your Marketing Plan. If you’ve built a good marketing plan, and the product and business has not changed, then stay the course and implement the marketing plan that’s been designed. It’s not as exciting as running off in a new direction. But companies that stick to their original plan and implement it in an organized fashion always come out ahead of companies that change direction frequently.

Apply these TPS-oriented principles to your marketing endeavors, and you will both save time and money in the long run – and be much more effective in communicating what you have to offer to your target markets.