What is Customer Lifetime Value in Marketing?

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is total worth of a customer to the business over the entire lifecycle (full duration of the relationship) of the customer with the company. Putting it a little differently, Customer lifetime value (CLV) is the total value (revenue) a customer contributes to your business over his/her lifetime – which starts with a new customer’s first purchase or and ends with the last purchase i.e. moment of churn.

CLV is one of the key stats in marketing and helps businesses budget/allocate funds for customer acquisition and retention programs. For example, a customer spends Rs 20,000 per year and average life of all the customers in your business is 5 years, the CLV here would be Rs 100,000 minus the money you spent in acquiring the customer. Say, you spent Rs 10,000 in acquiring a customer. Your CLV in this case would be Rs 90,000.

If I put this in form of a formula, it will be:

CLV = average value of a purchase X number of times the customer buys each year X average length of the customer loyalty (in years)

OR

Annual revenue per year x number of years the customers stays with you – the customer acquisition cost.

If your net margin is 25% of the sales price, it would be Rs 25,000 minus the customer acquisition cost (which is Rs 10,000 in this case) i.e. you make Rs 15000 from each customer from the entire life-cycle of the customer.

Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is a very important parameter in sales & marketing and we should always look for a healthy ratio of CLV:CAC. If the CLV is less the CAC must be capped but if the CLV is high you can afford to spend more in CAC.

CLV can be historic or predictive depending on the data used to calculate:

Historic CLV is sum total of the revenue from all the past purchases in a specific period. Say one year or more. This method uses past transaction data for the calculation.

Predictive CLV is the total projected revenue a customer will generate for your business over the time period he/she is going to stay as a customer. This uses past transaction data and buying behavior of the customer.  

Now there are two ways of increasing the CLV here:

  A)   Increase the number of customers for which you will have to spend money in customer acquisition. Customer acquisition in the above case is Rs 10,000. However this can backfire in case your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is more than the Customer Lifetime Value.

  B)   Increase the average duration for which the customer stays with you i.e. increase the Lifetime. The duration in the above case is 5 years, if you can take this to 6 years your revenue from the same customer becomes Rs 120,000. i.e. the CLV goes up from Rs 90,000 to Rs 110,000.

When you know your customer lifetime value you can improve it. Of course, only working on retention may not be the best strategy instead the successful businesses balance their focus on new customer acquisition and old customer retention both. Calculating CLV will be easier if your business model runs on membership or subscription model as compared to customer’s need based approach. In subscription you can lock the customer with you but in random purchase like we buy from a mall shop or an ecommerce website it will highly vary.

In all the surveys and research it has been established as fact that the new customer acquisition cost is always higher than retaining an old one. Hence it’s imperative that we get to know about some tactics to retain our customers for longer time with us. But it all starts with knowing CLV. In fact, knowing CLV in your Business can help you in many ways, including the below:

            a) Reduce customer acquisition cost by investing adequate budgets on right sales & marketing activities.

          b) Improve customer retention by walking all the needed extra miles to please your customers.  

       c) Encourage existing customers to spend more on your products

       d)   Knowing your most important customers who help you make more money. This can also help you in knowing your least preferred customers and you can even decide to fire a few. Yes, it sound bizarre but it makes complete sense when your service cost to some customers is way higher than the amount you make from him/her through all purchases.  

Here are 6 easy ways to increase the CLV:

    1)   Stay in touch with the customer through emails, SMSes & calls. Keep them reminding that you exist and offer a variety of services. Your goal here is to be on top of the mind of your customer so that whenever she or her contact sphere needs anything you sell – they must contact you.

    2)   Be grateful and show it. Gratitude goes a long way. Send thank you emails just after the customer buys something from you. Be specific and let the customer know you appreciate the patronage. Did I tell you that people love free gifts. Offer something physical or at least a coupon code for their next purchase.

   3)   Build new products that complement the existing products. Say you sell shoes, how about selling socks, shoe polish and polish brush as well and letting the customers know about these. And always upsell e.g. in Domino’s, the man on the cash counter always asks for a cold drinks and cup cake with the pizza and not only he/she asks to if you would like to order some cold drink or cup cake but they also tell you about the offers available on buying those extra things and most of the time end up selling more.  

   4)   Offer a loyalty program to all the customers i.e. give incentives/discounts on repeat purchases.

   

   5)   Fire the bottom customers with whom you make the least profits, say bottom 10 to 20% customers and try to acquire only high CLV clients. If the CLV is high you can afford personalized attention to all the customers thus improving retention i.e. longevity of the customer.

    6)   Reduce the Customer Acquisition Cost: Remember a penny saved is a penny earned. CLV is total revenue from the customer minus the Customer Acquisition Cost. If the CAC reduces, CLV will increase. And yes, reducing CAC is possible provided you use some smart marketing and sales ways.

4 Easy & Inexpensive Ways for Startup Branding

Startups – Bootstrapped or Funded! Nearly none has enough funds they need to grow to the level of entrepreneurs' dreams. The branding activities may come last in the train of tasks to be done. I know what you are thinking! Yes, this article is written for you.

Brand building or a bit of (read it as massive if your dreams are big) marketing is must for any kind of start up. No matter how awesome the product or service is – it will not reach to enough number of people and the sales numbers will be poor which ultimately impacts your top and bottom lines both.

In a Nielsen Survey 59% of the customers prefer to buy new product from a brand familiar to them. In a start up you can’t really compete against big brands with huge marketing budgets.

Oh yes, brand building is expensive & tough – that is the reason there is just one Nike or one McDonald’s or Pepsi & Coca-Cola just two drinks, Toastmasters – just one platform in the world if you want to be a better public speaker, BNI – just one networking organization if you are looking for a support group of entrepreneurs. How many LED Bulb brands can you recall – maybe 2 or 3. Oh you know a lot - maximum five LED Bulb brands! Let me say – there are many thousands of them out there. And we can’t really recall about them because they never invested in brand building. You may not have a dream of being world’s biggest brand in your field. But you must cut across the clutter and start doing a bit of branding to increase the probability of getting in front of the eyes of prospective buyer or influencer.

But when paying the bills is struggle who can afford to spend so much on branding? Well, the mantra is:

• Start wherever you are
• Do whatever you can
• But start now & don’t stop

If you are there with a long term vision, don’t ignore marketing. Here is a list of 12 things which you can do to make your product or service known in the world around you at literally no or very low cost:

  1)   Get on social media platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn or YouTube and start posting. Let the world (no matter how small is your world there) know that you exist and kicking. It’s FREE. You don’t need to hire a marketing agency for this. Just get started yourself or seek help from someone in your friends, family, office or office. The world is there, the internet literally has unlimited potential.

  

  2)   Attend networking events. Maybe you can join some associations, forums or visit few as a guest. Trust me, the best and biggest of the business deals are made through interactions with people. Go to trade exhibitions and meet with people. First you will have to be visible in the world before you ask for a sale. For startups – this one is the best advice and gets highest ROI if you are looking for some good clients and to serve with a long term relationship mindset.  

  3)   Use marketing collaterals and logo merchandise. Get a cool looking visiting card, wear your logo printed Tshirt or a head cap, have a name badge with company or product logo, what about diary & pen with your business branding printed or engraved on those. Do you have your company logo printed mugs in your office and at the homes of your customers? Have got a one way vision board for the rear windshield of your car? Outdoor media is super expensive but that space of your own car has always been free and available – utilize it. I know of an entrepreneur – wherever he went for a sales meeting, he left a logo and company name printed ball pen at the main gate of the premises and then another at the reception. People just love getting freebies – use this absolute universal truth. If you are a B2B player or a manufacturer who has large clients, think about giving them desktop gift items. Just imagine – putting your logo printed good quality desktop item on the desk of your client is just like putting hoarding of your business there which the client will not remove for many months – ah this you don’t pay any rent for this hoarding of course. Once we got wall clocks made with our company logo and details on what we do and gave those free in salons. Lots of salon owners asked for their other branches as well and those are still there after 2 years. Just imagine how many customers have viewed these so far! Unimaginable. I can go on and on for this particular point of branding through novelty items.   

  4)   Make a google page, create your company location pin, upload some photos of your product or the factory and yes start asking people to rate and review your product/service. Google reviews can boost the credibility of your business without spending any money. Ah yes, google reviews are super helpful in SEO ranking – but that’s too technical as of now. Even if we discount talking about the impact of google reviews on SEO ranking – these still offer a lot to the businesses. If you are selling on e-commerce websites like Amazon – you must make an attempt to get genuine reviews about your product there. Potential buyers rely on these reviews to make up their mind for any purchase. Yet another and a good benefit of google reviews is – you get FREE customer feedback which you can use in improving your product or service.

Last but not the least, please understand brand building doesn’t happen over-night. It takes years of consistent communication and excellent service to build a brand. But once you get started the universe will help you. If your product or service is good people will spread word of mouth and word of mouse too.

Of course, you would end up spending money, time and energy in doing all this and even more to build your brand. Trust me, this can be awesome investment – you will start getting – more projects, more word of mouth referrals, increased sales and customer loyalty for your products and services.   

Remember, ‘Your brand can be your biggest asset’ in long run.

The Ansoff Matrix - Tool for Growth Strategy

The Ansoff Matrix was developed by H Igor Ansoff and was first published in Harvard Business Review in 1957 with the title, “Strategies for Diversification”. Since then it is one of the key tools used by companies to analyze and plan their strategies for growth. This matrix is also called product – market expansion matrix. When any company wants to grow revenue that can either be done by developing new products for the existing markets or to go to new markets with the existing products. Keeping products and markets on one axis each gives us a 2x2 matrix. By using this tool we can analyze the four available options to grow sales, do the risk assessment of all the four options and then choose one or more.

Here are the initiatives you can go for and adopt the different strategies:

  >> Market Penetration (existing market with existing products): Increase the store opening hours, start free home delivery, reduce order processing time, showcase the entire product portfolio, acquiring a competitor in the same market, offering limited time discounts to attract more sales. This strategy is least risky as this utilizes the existing resources and capabilities and doesn’t require any major capital expenditures.

  >> Market Development (new markets with existing products): Open new stores in new areas, start serving to new and more pin codes with your delivery services, tie up and collaborate with other players in the same field or different field to share the resources. This indeed has relatively more risk than the Market Penetration Strategy. It can be domestic expansion as well international expansion.

  >>Product Development/Enhancement/Upgradation (existing market with new products): Reduce cost, improve quality, modify packaging, launch new version, make combos with other products. This needs considerable effort and investments and is definitely more risky than the earlier two i.e. Market Penetration and Market Development.

  >>Diversification (new market with new products):  Into related products or new products, upstream integration with suppliers or downstream integration with the intermediaries. This strategy is the most risky as going for this means new products and new markets. This choice may become a hit or this can also be a very dangerous step.  

In today’s fast changing business scenario the leaders can’t afford to stick to the business as usual instead it’s imperative for companies to look for new ways to increase sales and grow the top line as well as bottom line in the balance sheet. To do the same Ansoff Matrix analysis at least once in a year and see how can the expansion be embraced?

BCG Matrix is One of the Most Important Marketing Models

When it comes to consulting in corporate world - Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is one of the top companies globally they developed a 2x2 matrix to do the analysis of product portfolio of any company in 1970s which is widely taught in B Schools and used in corporate extensively. This matrix is also called BCG Analysis or Growth – Share Matrix or Product Portfolio Matrix or Boston Box. BCG Matrix has Relative Market Share [Your Firm’s Market Share divided by Your Largest Competitor’s Market Share] on one axis and Growth Rate on the other. By knowing the values of these two parameters for all the products of a company, the organizations can plan their investments at company level.

The matrix has four quadrants named as below:

  1)   Dogs: Products/Services which have small growth rate and small market shares. These are the products which are at the end of the product life cycle, these have tough completion and low margins. These products can also be called ‘me too’ category products. If the resources are limited, ideally these products / services should be removed from the portfolio.

  2)   Cash Cows: Products/Services with low growth rates but high market shares. Most of these products are the ones which have been in the market for some time and are in the maturity stage of the product life cycle. Focus in this quadrant is called milking strategy which is also referred as “milk these products as much as possible without killing the cow”.

  3)   Stars: Products/Services with high growth rate and high market shares. These are generally at the start of the product life cycle and the products in this quadrant generate highest ROI. To have many stars in the company regularly – it’s essential that the company must invest time and money in research and product development. 

  

  4)   Question Marks: Products/Services with high growth markets but low market share. These are also known as problem children. These are the products for which the future is not clear, they have high growth but low market share. The organizations must make the choice of investing resources and try to make them stars or let them become dogs which ultimately may die. These can either move to stars or drop to dogs. The future of the products from this category depends on the direction by the management as well as the potential of the product/service in the market.

Originally this matrix was developed to analyze the product portfolio but can be applied to your machines if you have many in the manufacturing unit or to your customers.

The customers from where you earn good margin and lot of growth the expected become STARS in your customer portfolio.

The customers who give you lot of revenue but low margins and have less scope for growth become your CASH COWS.

The customers who can potentially generate lot of revenue but a very less margin is expected become your QUESTION MARKS.

The customers who take lots of time to serve, we need to spend energy and resources to fulfill their orders but very little is earned and this is not expected to grow as well become your DOGS.

The DOGS category customers can be fired and the saved resources can be utilized in serving the STARS, milking the COWS or perhaps in the process to develop some more STARS in near future.

This is a pretty useful analysis to keep only the performing products or customers and filtering the loss making ones. However the businesses must understand this is a consistent endeavor and not a onetime activity to do and forget.  This must be repeated on regular intervals where the interval can be maximum a year.

What is The Most Unique Selling Proposition of Your Business?

The unique selling proposition or unique selling point is a marketing concept first proposed as a theory to explain a pattern in successful advertising campaigns of the early 1940s. The USP theory states that such campaigns made unique propositions to customers that convinced them to switch brands.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP) tells about the unique benefits of any product or service or even a company which helps not only in acquiring new customers but also motivates consumers to switch from competitor brands.

Products or services without clear differentiation are always at risk of being seen as a commodity and thus lower the price potential.

USP is the reason, most of the times the consumer chooses the brand. Let me give you some examples to clarify:

1)Domino’s Pizza: You get fresh & hot pizza delivered to your door step in 30 minutes or it’s free. Domino’s came up with this USP when either competitors were not delivering at all or they used to take lot of time. Domino’s committed freshness as well as within time delivery. THIRTY MINUTES OR FREE became it’s USP. Please pay attention Café Coffee Day’s “A LOT CAN HAPPEN OVER COFFEE” is mere a slogan but not USP.

2)Southwest Airlines: WE ARE THE LOW COST AIRLINE. Their USP was not business class travel or not the food they provide in the flight. In fact they in a way sent a clear message that don’t expect excellent service in this low cost and then anything they did in service became a wow from the passengers as they originally had not expected anything.

3)Head & Shoulders: Clinically proven to reduce dandruff.

Unless you can pinpoint what makes your business unique in a world of homogeneous competitors, you cannot target your sales efforts successfully. Finding your USP is indeed lots of soul searching but it pays to get clarity here. One easy approach can be to ask your customers on why they should buy from you and not anybody else. Find the real reason and let everyone out there know about this.

If you know your differentiation and don’t communicate the same to the market through all the marketing collateral, it won’t make a difference. So, once you know what differentiates your product or service from the competition, you need to focus on Marketing Communication.

Here are three secrets of identifying and leveraging an awesome USP of your product or service:

1) Focus on what your customers really value. USP is all about what they want and not what you as a business person want to deliver.  

2) Go Beyond Slogan: It’s really great if we can communicate the USP via a slogan but is much more than just a slogan. You should be able to live what you commit.

3) It should be assertive and not offensive. Talk about your product/service and don’t compare.

Successful business is not only about having a unique product or service, it's also about making your product stand out - even in a market filled with similar items.

Right STP is the Right Start to Your Growth Story!

This is where all the marketing begins. Before starting the work on any strategy and allocating budget to different ways and means of marketing your product we must divide the entire market into segments.

Choose the segment which suits you the most, which then becomes your target market.

Now you need to think on how best can you market your product to target the most specific customers in the chosen segment.

STP is one of the most popular models and it’s a must understand model before you draft any communication or plan advertising for the product. Your marketing tactics will be much more efficient and fruitful if you follow the STP Model.

In marketing, if you want to get high value for every rupee spent its imperative that you get specific. “SPECIFIC IS TERRIFIC” seems extra right when it comes to advertising and marketing. When I started my business in Tshirts Printing, Awards & Corporate gifting; we made a mistake of thinking that everyone needs Tshirts & gifts and hence all the people are or can be our customers. 

Result:

Ø  We choose too wide filters in Facebook advertising. The budgets were gone too fast and we didn’t get enough business from there. Our customer acquisition costs overshoot and went beyond the revenues, forget the profits.

Ø  We started accepting all size of orders and spreading ourselves too thin. Our hands got full with pea nuts and had no space for almonds.

Two years later when we made a conscious decision of targeting only the corporates and saying no to everything else – our revenues really grew.  

Another mistake which we made was – wrong positioning. Incidentally my company got positioned as retail personalized gift store. We realized that serving all is serving none. We must be specific and do the home work with STP.

STP focuses on commercial effectiveness, selecting the most valuable segments for a business and then developing a marketing mix and product positioning strategy for each segment.

Through segmentation, you can identify niches with specific needs, mature markets to find new customers, deliver more focused and effective marketing messages. You can use any of the below criteria for segmenting your market:

1.   Demographics – Age, Gender, Income, Education, Marital Status, Language they speak, having kids, no kids etc. This explains WHO the customer is.

2.   Psychographics – Here it’s all about emotions, behaviors and personality of the prospective buyers which becomes the basis for the segmentation. This explains why the customer buys your product. Gathering the psychographic data is much more difficult than the demographic data.

3.   Lifestyle – This refers to hobbies, interests, vacations, entertainment & other recreational activities liked by people. E.g.  home gym equipment sellers will target gym lovers.

4.   Beliefs and values – These maybe religious, political, economic or socio-cultural etc.

5.   Life Stages- this may also be a part of demographic but for some businesses this becomes very important and they may segment solely on the basis of life stage. I know a lady entrepreneur in tour & travel in Delhi and she focuses focuses on travel of people who are more than 50 years of age.  

6.   Geography – This can be filtered by country, state, city, village, area or even climate.

There can be few more bases on which you can segment the market but Demographic, Psychographic, Geographic and Behavioral are the four most commonly used parameters.

Of course the segment which you decide must be of good size. E.g. there is no point in selling something super specific only to the people of age 100 years or more. You can even go for multiple segments but the offering for them will be different.

Positioning map comes the last in the process. It needs two variables to position your product or service. By following the STP to the core, you can grow your business at a fast pace as the speed of customer acquisition becomes faster as you reach to the right customers with right messages. In Positioning we mainly focus on sales channels and product presentation. 

What are Push and Pull Strategies for Amazing Success?

All the companies (B2C & B2B) engage in a range of strategies to get their messages & products across to the customers. One of the many ways to categorize these strategies is Push & Pull or Outbound & Inbound Strategies.

Simply put, push means pushing your product to the customer whereas pull means pulling the customer to your product. Push mostly happens via sales channels by giving incentives to the sellers whereas pull mostly happens by attracting the customers through heavy advertising. In pull consumers actively seek out the brand/product because of high top of the mind recall value and reputation. E.g. Apple iPhones doesn’t need to push the product to the customers. It’s always pull on apple products. Push gives quick results in terms of sales whereas pull is slow but establishes strong brand recognition in the market.

Examples of Push Marketing:

-        -> Face to Face Sales in showrooms

-        -> Point of Sales Promotion to attract the customer for purchase

-        -> Trade show promotion

-        ->  Offering free rides, free samples, free demos

-        -> Cold emails with call to action buttons offering heavy discounts etc

-        -> Affiliate Marketing  

Examples of Pull Marketing:

-        -> Advertising & mass media promotions

-        -> Word of mouth referrals

-        -> Social Media Marketing

-        -> Search Engine Optimization

Like any other marketing strategy – Push & Pull also require planning and consideration of the audience and marketplace. Each tactic must be monitored, reviewed and revised on regular basis. To decide which method best fits your business, think about how you want to approach consumers and what is your objective. If your objective is to quickly clear the inventories or improve the sales – push is the way; if you want to build brand and are ready to wait for the customers to become aware of your brand and come to the point of sales asking for your product – pull is the way. Mostly pull is best fit for the products which sale around the year whereas push the best fit for seasonal products like products related to rains. It’s just because of the slow nature of the pull and the seasons are short.  

You can even use push and pull together. In fact, most companies apply a balance of both the strategies. They advertise heavily talking about the benefits of their products and give incentives to the distributors or retailers (including discounts or even credit) for buying more in expectation of high sales due to massive advertising in print and multi-media.

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What is the AIDA Model in Marketing and Why It Is So Important?

In 1898 Mr Lewis wrote a beautiful definition of good advertisement, “The mission of an advertisement is to attract a reader, so that he will look at the advertisement and start to read it; then to interest him, so that he will continue to read it; then to convince him, so that when he has read it he will believe it. If an advertisement contains these three qualities of success, it is a successful advertisement.”

In other words, copy is only good if it attracts attention, generates interest, and creates conviction, in that order.

This became popular as AIDA model and has shaped the views on marketing and sales strategies for over 100 years. I believe it’s a very practical thing which can help you define the goals of your marketing campaigns and pull or push customers to purchase action or to put differently – it’s a proven model to convert strangers into customers.

AIDA is an acronym which stands for Awareness, Interest, Desire & Action. This is a logical sequence for making any marketing or sales strategy work by making the customer traverse the journey from being aware of your product to actually buying it.

Awareness: How do you make the prospective customers aware of your product or service? Personalization and guerrilla marketing are two perfect ways to master this step of capturing the attention or making the customer aware of your product/service.

Interest: How do you gain their interest in your product or service? 

Desire: What makes your product or service desirable? It can be cognitive (giving features, results or any other information which customers want) or affective (feeling) but the customer should feel intensely about the product. It takes the purchase away from the need towards the want. 

Action: What are the calls to actions? Finally what makes the customer shell out the money and carry your product or service home?  Good advertising should elicit a sense of urgency that motivates consumers to take action immediately. One commonly used method for achieving this goal is making limited time offers (such as free shipping) or discount to first n orders etc.

A major deficiency of the AIDA model and other hierarchical models is the absence of post-purchase effects such as satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), consumption, repeat patronage behavior and other post-purchase behavioral intentions such as referrals/recommendations or participating in the preparation of online product reviews. Just to cover this, post purchase behavior of the buyer, a letter R for ‘Retention’ has been added and you may as well hear the model being called as AIDAR Model.

  

What Is Marketing Mix and Why It Is Important for Growth?

A marketing expert named E. Jerome McCarthy created the Marketing Mix /4Ps in the 1960s. This is a basic thing for marketing professionals in theory but many entrepreneurs get it wrong on the ground while executing the plan and face failure. This article will help you understand the basics of the Marketing Mix. If understood and executed well, you can deliver what your customers want, when and where they want and at what price do they want. Bingo … that’s the recipe for success in business. Let’s get started.

The marketing mix is a foundation marketing model for businesses. Broadly it refers to the set of actions or tactics that a company uses to promote its brand or product in the identified market. The 4Ps – Product, Price, Place & Promotion, make up a typical marketing mix.

Product: refers to the item actually being sold or service being rendered. The product or service must deliver a minimum level of performance; otherwise even the best work on the other elements of the marketing mix won't do any good. The product can be intangible or tangible as it can be in the form of services or goods.

Price: refers to the value that is put for a product or service. It depends on costs of production, targeted segment, ability of the market to pay, supply - demand and a host of other direct and indirect factors. There can be several types of pricing strategies, each tied in with an overall business plan. Pricing can also be used as a demarcation, to differentiate and enhance the image of a product or service. Generally adding elements of service to the base product is a great way to charge some premium or differentiate your product. E.g. FREE installation with the geyser or AC will definitely attract more customers. Even the assurance of quality in terms of guarantee can help you charge more.

Place: refers to the point of sale. In every industry, catching the eye of the consumer and making it easy for her to buy it is the main aim of a good distribution or 'place' strategy. Retailers pay a premium for the right location. In fact, the mantra of a successful retail business is 'location, location, location'.

Promotion: this refers to all the activities undertaken to make the product or service known to the user and trade. This can include advertising, word of mouth, press reports, incentives, commissions and awards to the traders. It can also include consumer schemes, direct marketing, contests and prizes. Promotion boosts brand recognition and hence sales. Promotion compromises of – Sales Organization, Sales Promotion, Advertising & Public Relations.  

All the elements of the marketing mix influence each other. They make up the business plan for a company and handled right, can give it great success. But handled wrong and the business could take years to recover. The marketing mix needs a lot of understanding, market research and consultation with several people, from users to trade to manufacturing and several others.

Later on with the advent of Services Marketing as a subject 3 more Ps – Physical Evidence, Process & People.

With everything available at just the click of a mouse, today’s consumers are more empowered than ever, with greater expectations for brands to meet their requirements with relevant, easy-to-use content, and to provide a product offering that meets expectations.

Marketing is must to sell your products or services and succeed in this competitive era. In the quest to grow, all entrepreneurs do something or the other to spread the word. Figuring out the right marketing mix before you get started on marketing can help you save efforts, time and money.

The marketing mix breaks down what’s needed to make a business work, but success isn’t attributed only to modeling theory templates like Marketing Mix. It’s attributed to the depth of insights used to develop each stage and the excellence of execution.

Businesses that can deliver on what their consumers truly want, and showcase how their brand will enrich their lives, will see the best results.

Top reasons of why most of the startups fail?

Start ups are exciting. More start ups mean an economy which is fertile for growth and a land full of dreamers. 137,000 Companies get started everyday in the world of which 90% i.e. 123,300 companies get shut down in the very first year. In India alone, 107 million people try to establish 85 million businesses every year. How many of these entrepreneurs really succeed? Very few! 

Most of the start ups fail to make a mark and die even before they pick up and start walking - you are right - I am pointing to first year death of start ups. In my opinion there can only be one of the two reasons behind this pre-mature death of any start up:

ONE - Product is not good.

TWO – Marketing is not good.

If the product is not appropriate – I can’t help. I think no one can help here. You, as an entrepreneur need to conceive and give birth to your baby called product. No matter how difficult or complex the process is; you need to take the pain yourself. You are the mom and dad both to your product.

But if the marketing has not been done properly; nothing to worry. It’s not rocket science. You just need to sing the song more melodiously and louder. Raise the voice, shout, cry, make some noise and get heard. If you feel you are already shouting on top of your voice and there is no scope for raising the volume – shout more often and shout at more places. If it’s still not enough get others along who can shout for you.  

Ah yes, knowing some tips and tricks before beginning can definitely help you in saving your hard earned (or your investor’s hard earned) money. Having some experienced & knowledgeable minds contribute to your Marketing Strategy can significantly shorten your learning curve and speed fast your growth curve.