Four Growth Strategies
Are You A Cultivator, Inventor, Explorer, or Trailblazer?
When planning the growth of your business and revenue, you have four basic marketing strategies to consider and pursue. Sometimes, the choice is relatively clear or dictated by marketing conditions; though there are times when all four approaches must be carefully weighed before the course is chartered.
- Cultivator: The Cultivator seeks to increase market share within the target market the company is already serving. The strategy is to offer the same products or services currently being offered. Often, this strategy requires accelerated activity and expenditures in current promotional efforts, as well as possibly incorporating new ones.
- Inventor: Similar to the Cultivator, the Inventor continues to service the market segment(s) currently being serviced, but the Inventor goes to market with new offerings. The new offerings can be extensions of current products or they can be completely new. This approach requires the development (or acquisition) of products or lines of service, and therefore may represent a higher level of risk to the company and often additional investment.
- Explorer: If you decide to take your current offerings and make them available to a new market, you are an Explorer. One challenge of this strategy is the unfamiliar buyers. As a company, you may not have the necessary knowledge and useful experience with these new buyers, and they might not know your company or brand – As an Explorer you are likely to exert quite an effort to educate them. New competition is another challenge that comes with this approach – You will often have to compete with offerings and companies you have never had to outsmart before.
- Trailblazer: The riskiest of all four strategies is the Trailblazer. Offering new products or services to new buyers is the closest thing to launching a new company. Also, all of the challenges and risks mentioned regarding the other three strategies come into play here.
The above descriptions and explanations are just summaries. Deciding when to pursue what strategy is not always easy. Many variables must be carefully considered, including (but not limited to) market conditions, market size, customer needs, competition, market saturation, and resources requirements (people, knowhow, time, and money) and their availability.
If you are interested in an outside perspective and help deciding and pursuing your growth strategy, Fractional CMO & Marketing will be happy to work with you to make your vision a success.
Duke Merhavy, MBA, Ph.D.
President & Chief Marketing Officer
What Is Fractional CMO & Marketing?
Fractional CMO & Marketing is ‘Your Outsourced Marketing Department’ when you need expert marketing leadership and marketing services to accelerate growth and improve profitability, but you’re not quite ready to hire a full-time Chief Marketing Officer or your own marketing department.
Our unique arrangement is the most efficient, innovative, and cost-effective formula for you. Click on the image to the left to watch a short video.
We Help When You Need To:
- Generate more of the right kind of leads
- Close more sales faster
- Get repeat sales
- Formulate a more effective message
- Produce powerful sales tools
- Establish brand awareness, recognition, and preference
- Differentiate your brand from the competition
- Improve customer satisfaction and loyalty
- Develop lasting relationships with customers
- Introduce new products
Who Was the First Celebrity in a Super Bowl Ad?
By Ginger Mace, Editor and Producer
It seems like famous faces have been in ads during “The Big Game” forever. With all the hype and anticipation leading up to game day, and in recent years, leaks and previews of our favorite movie and TV stars hawking products, we got to thinking – who started this phenomenon and when?
In 1973’s Super Bowl VII, the Washington Redskins took on the Miami Dolphins, and although not favored to win, Florida’s home team under Don Shula’s reign took the victory with a final score of 14 to 7. We’d argue that another winner that night was Farrah Fawcett, being the very first TV or movie celebrity to be in a commercial during football’s iconic yearly ritual. She starred with “Broadway” Joe Namath, who although a player with the New York Jets in 1973, he was not playing nearly as much as years prior, due to various injuries. Back then, a 30-second spot cost advertisers $42,000 (plus, of course, the cost of talent, which we aren’t privy to) – a far cry from the over $5 million price tag for an ad of the same length today.
The stunning Farrah Fawcett was no stranger to being in advertisements for products, as well as being featured in articles, before 1973’s game between the AFC and NFC champion teams. It’s not a stretch to say she was an ideal that many women wanted to live up to, and many men wanted to live next to, which made her the perfect person to represent products marketed to both sexes.
Her catch phrase of “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” certainly applied to herself, as you couldn’t turn on a TV or walk by a magazine rack in the 1970s without seeing her beautiful and healthy face and body on display. Some of her more well-known inclusions and endorsements include Cosmopolitan magazine (both on the cover and featured in articles and “Top 10 Lists”), Dubonnet (a wine brand that skyrocketed in popularity after she endorsed it with Tom Selleck in 1972), the sexy and rather suggestive ad for Noxzema Shaving Cream that we highlighted in this article, the 1975 Mercury Cougar, Lady Schick’s Speed Styler hair dryer, Wella Balsam hair products, Ultra Brite toothpaste, and her own brand of beauty and hair products through Fabergé.
Joe Namath could’ve competed with Farrah Fawcett for the number of products he did ads for during the same decade and well beyond. Some of his most memorable – and quite literally, just naming a few from a very long list – include Brut 33 men’s personal care, Hamilton Beach’s Double Mac (think George Foreman grill with indentations for burgers), Olivetti typewriters, Nike Zoom Air (sneakers that he tried to convince his wife would make it so his double knee replacements wouldn’t exclude him from a football comeback), Ovaltine, Hanes Beautymist pantyhose (which he unforgettably donned in the commercial), and Flexall 454 (probably the most believable, since it’s a topical product for relieving pain and stiffness).
Marketing Lingo: Brand Personality
Brand personality is a set of human characteristics and traits that are attributed to, and associated with, a brand.
Organizations strive to have a brand personality the target market relates to, favorably. Since effectively projected brand personality boosts the brand’s commercial success and adds to the brand’s equity (commercial value), marketers employ various efforts to shape the way people feel about their brand.
Brand personality is a framework of qualitative value-add elements that provokes emotional and logical responses by the target market, with the intention of causing positive actions that benefit the firm.
Over the years, sets of ‘predetermined’ trait categories like the “Five Dimensions of Brand Personality” (Excitement, Sincerity, Ruggedness, Competence, and Sophistication) and mapping techniques have emerged, but we find them all rather restricting and detrimental to the creative process. Instead, we prefer to define the brand personality freely.
For more information about Brand Personality or to help you determine and leverage your brand personality, contact us today!
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