As customers are making more cautious buying decisions, marketers need to focus their marketing efforts more than ever to effectively reach their customers; which means they need to closely listen to their needs and wants, and position both physically and perceptually their products to meet these needs. Positioning a new brand in customers’ minds or repositioning a current brand requires an open eye on the market – macro economic and environmental changes, and open ears for customers through continuous dialog and interactivity with customers and potential customers. This exercise is even more crucial in today’s economy, to succeed, marketing managers must focus on each of the following points:

• Identify relevant trends in their market by scanning for market reactions of competitive brands serving their target market. This enables them to cut response time to market changes while lowering costs related to these adjustments.
• Poll customers and potential customers for up to date information to determine the new customers’ most preferred combination of determinant attributes.
• Focus exclusively on determinant attributes that define their “product space” which intersect with the ones highly rated by their customers. This helps marketing managers stay focused and make it easier for their customers to choose their brand based on what matters to them as they are more cautious in making their buying decisions.
• Examine the fit (again) between preferences of market segments and current brand position; this becomes more important when market trends shift or customer preferences change due to changes in their buying power or their preferences.
• Write updated positioning statements or value propositions reflecting the changes to guide development and implementation of marketing strategy and cater the customers’ new needs and wants.
• Explore new opportunities – Never underestimate the opportunities that arise from downturn economies, marketing managers should also identify positions where additional new brands might be introduced or current brands can be repositioned to serve a new voids in the market.

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Marketing and sales executives are being asked to do more with less. It’s a demand many have heard in previous hard times, and most managers muddled through then. But the nature of the current downturn — and of the changes the marketing and sales environment has undergone suggests that those who follow the survival techniques of past slowdowns risk betting on the wrong markets, customers, advertising vehicles, or sales approaches. In previous downturns, many marketers doubled down on large, historically profitable customers, geographies, and market segments.

Today, this approach may prove ineffective because the world’s economic woes are affecting customers and markets in unexpected and extremely specific ways. Marketers should therefore toss out those historical expectations and focus on the emerging pockets of customer profitability. Cash-strapped marketers have also typically emphasized traditional media, such as television and newspaper ads, while cutting back on new advertising vehicles. But marketing has evolved rapidly over the past decade, with traditional media declining in importance as the Internet and social networking achieved meaningful scale. Marketing executives trying to rationalize media spending must factor this new balance into their austerity programs.

Apple Tablet will strengthen a new trend in b2b. By design, it will be a sweet news for businesses and will reshape document sharing, meeting presentations, and many other aspects in the corporate environment.
The biggest hit for this device is further unlocking the trend for publishing an media businesses. With the apple tablet, users can easily watch rented movies on the go, go on video conferences, and more. There is even a talk about live tv broadcasting on the device.
What I will be logging more about is the marketing aspect of this evolution. Apple tablet and others that will soon follow will boost mobile business, wireless business referred to as unwired business, as well as mobile advertising on the “big screen” compared to the iPhone.
Feel free to share your thoughts and comments.

The six steps of the marketing research process sound straight forward and simple, yet things can go wrong if managers are not cautious in every step resulting in higher research cost, time, and lower reliability.

1. Identify managerial problem and establish research objectives – managers need to take time and think about the problem that they need to solve and come out with clear objectives for the research.
   What frequently goes wrong? Management identifies no clear objective, no decision to be made based on the proposed research.
2. Determine data sources – (primary or secondary) and types of data and research approaches (qualitative or quantitative) required.
   What frequently goes wrong? Primary data are collected when cheaper and faster secondary data will do. Quantitative data are collected without first collecting qualitative data.
3. Design research – type of study, data collection approach, sample, etc.
   What frequently goes wrong? These are technical issues best managed by skilled practitioners. Doing these steps poorly can generate misleading or incorrect results.
4. Collect data – data collection needs to be carried out objectively by trained people.
   What frequently goes wrong? Collector bias: hearing what you want to hear.
5. Analyze data – take the time to analyze data in light of the problem and established objectives.
   What frequently goes wrong? Tabulation errors or incorrect use or interpretation of statistical procedures may mislead the user.
6. Report results to the decision maker – report objectively on the data collected based on the hard findings, not on initial presumptions
   What frequently goes wrong? Some users do not really want objective information—they want to prove what they already believe to be true.

Marketing Power is doing a free virtual conference about Social Media. This is a good intro for professionals who want to learn more about this tend and how to take advantage of social media.

You do not want to miss AMA’s Free Virtual Event – Social Media: Cracking the Code for Business Marketers on February 25, 2010 (9am – 5:15pm CST). Register now, there is no need to travel or leave your desk.