Marketing

Your Pain

Owner-directors often feel that their marketing plan just isn’t working like it used to. Despite your best efforts, marketing activity gets progressively less effective and does not effect business growth.

At first glance, the reasons are not complicated:

• More (global) competition driving down prices
• Web-savvy price sensitive customers
• So much marketing noise
• Tougher to stand out amid the noise.

Marketing is a back-to-basics activity. It doesn’t have to be complicated but we do have to be good at it.

Can you honestly answer the questions:

• “Why should people buy from you when they can buy from the competition?”
• “What makes you different from the rest?”

How We Can Help

Marketing consulting at The Directors’ Centre will follow our familiar three-step process, to understand you strategy:

• ‘Where are you now?’
• ‘Where are you going?’
• ‘How are you going to get there?’

As a business consultant, we use a combination of our own tools for strategic planning and those of the best marketers around. Our approach is to combine:

Intellectual Rigour

• What do your customers think?
• What are your competitors doing?
• What makes you different?
• Who are your target customers?
• Which segments are the most profitable?
• Why do they buy from you?
• What’s your quantifiable value proposition?
• How can you reach your targets?

Gut feel and instinct

Experience
Clients that have used our process, systems include:

Who This Worked For

Hobbs House Bakery had a superb reputation locally, especially for bread, and its shops were high street landmarks, but they were seen as ‘a bit too traditional’. They needed to sharpen up the business strategy and image of their shops, and really use their bread expertise for business development and to extend their range.
We needed to ask ourselves a few strategic planning questions:

• Is heritage enough?
• Is there room for a five generation regional bakery business in the 21st century?
• Should a bakery just bake bread, cakes etc – or should it also have its own retail outlets?
• Just because you are a good baker, doesn’t mean that you are a good retailer too.

We recommended that they opened a new shop with a heritage theme, but with 21st century cappuccinos, to go as a blueprint for more shops. We then suggested investing in producing a range of award-winning breads, and gain a nationwide reputation as a first step to selling online and opening shops outside their ‘home territory’.
The new shop has proved a great success. Meanwhile, the bakery team have won two nationwide awards, begun to build their online business, and the Fabulous Baker Brothers are now stars of their own TV series.